Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man
As the Victorian age neared its end, a vibrant cultural movement emerged that flipped conventional notions of femininity and masculinity on their head. Jad Adams reveals how a new generation challenged stereotypical gender identities
In the 1890s, two new social identities emerged that represented the first widespread challenge to gender stereotypes in Britain. This was the time of the ‘New Woman’, who possessed levels of daring regarded as masculine, and of the effeminate ‘New Man,’ who loved ‘art for art’s sake’.
Her determined persistence to go her own way, and his foppish indifference to soldiering and other established notions of ‘manliness’, were both deemed equally appalling to Victorian elders. Indeed, to some commentators, it seemed as if men and women were losing their distinct characteristics.
As a Punch magazine writer noted in a verse titled ‘Sexomania’:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
No one need ask which was the man.
Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,
All wonder now “Which is the woman?”
But a new fear my bosom vexes;
To-morrow there may be no sexes!
Unless, as end to all the pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other.
This was a seismic shift, and one partly driven by changes in the UK population. By the 1890s, women outnumbered men by around a million, and by the 1901 census, the gap had grown to 1.25 million. There were not enough husbands to go around due to the higher death rate of men from their more dangerous jobs, their tendency to violence, and because of the number of men who had headed abroad with the armed forces or imperial administration.
In many middle-class families, the lack of men became a significant issue, because daughters were traditionally provided for by their fathers until their husbands ‘took over’. If they did not end up marrying and their parents died, they then became the responsibility of their elder brothers – leading in some cases to family tensions.
Yet this demographic shift also coincided with a high point in the social movement of women’s education and independence, which had been under way since the mid-19th century. For the first time, large numbers of women who had received a good or moderate education became more determined to live away from their families and earn their own keep. This blend of factors led to a continuing female advance, and new questions arose regarding women’s roles in the family, the institution of marriage, and the workplace.
The New Woman phenomenon
The idea of the New Woman developed slowly, but became widespread in the 1890s due to the expansion of urban employment opportunities for women caused by the new technologies of typewriting and telephony and the print industry, which needed writers and illustrators. The labour market was quick to recognise that women could do the same office jobs as men, but be paid less. These were young, middle-class women, often with some education. Some worked in accountancy and the law, though they were not permitted to take professional qualifications.
Thus the ‘New Woman’ was born. With her bicycle, cigarette, necktie, and dark jacket that hid the grime of public transport and office life, she looked and behaved markedly differently to women of previous decades.
Not everyone was enamoured of the New Woman, however. The term itself had been popularised by Maria Louise Ramé, an English novelist and French wine merchant’s daughter who went by the name of Ouida. She wrote scathingly of the archetype and her view of its proponents’ “fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weaning estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous”. Another commentator, meanwhile, referred to “a somewhat aggressive air of independence which finds birth in the length of her stride”.
In some cases, the New Woman was almost seen as another form of humanity. The journalist Eliza Lynn Linton characterised her as masculine not just in behaviour, but physique: “The bass voice, flat chest, and lean hips of a woman who has physically failed in her rightful development.”
With her bicycle, cigarette, necktie, and dark jacket that hid the grime of public transport and office life, the New Woman looked and behaved markedly differently to women of previous decades
The newspaper editor Frederick Greenwood also decided to publish his views on the subject, writing in an article entitled ‘Women – Wives or Mothers?’ that the redundant female birth-rate threatened “more revolutions than all the forces of the anarchists in active combination”. Greenwood chose to share his thoughts under the pseudonym ‘A Woman’ – a gender misappropriation partly driven by devilment, and partly to give the piece a sense of authenticity for his readers.
Indeed, while women were taking on postures and pursuits previously regarded as masculine, men were travelling in the other direction. Like Greenwood, the author Arnold Bennett wrote for the magazine Woman (of which he was assistant editor) under the names ‘Gwendolen’ and ‘Barbara’, and reviewed books in Home and Hearth under the name ‘Sarah Volatile’.
William Sharp or Fiona Macleod? Or both?
The Scottish author made a name writing as a woman, but this was no mere pseudonym
William Sharp (1855–1905) was a late Victorian author and mystic who wrote under his own name and as his female alter-ego, Fiona Macleod.
Born in Paisley, Scotland, Sharp moved to London in his early twenties to pursue a career as a poet and art critic, before moving into magazine publishing. In 1892, he edited a oneoff periodical called The Pagan Review, calling for the widespread adoption of neo-paganism, which he believed would abolish inequality between men and women.
The author’s interest in gender fluidity would become more apparent by 1893, however, when he began writing as the Highlander Fiona Macleod, whose lyrical novels contributed to the birth of Britain’s Celtic Revival movement. Inspired by tales from Scottish folklore, Sharp’s work as Macleod was not only better reviewed than his previous output, but more commercially successful, too. In fact, so devoted was Sharp to his alter ego that he would maintain a voluminous correspondence with publishers and fellow authors as Macleod, without revealing his true identity.
Fiona Macleod was not merely a writer’s pseudonym, however. Sharp maintained that she had a separate existence, and as such, she was even given her own entry in Who’s Who. “I am tempted to believe I am half a woman,” Sharp wrote in a letter to his friend Catherine Ann Janvier in 1895. Sharp’s wife, Elizabeth, accepted her husband’s dual nature, calling him Wilfion. After his death, she wrote a biography split into two parts: ‘William Sharp’ and ‘Fiona Macleod’.
Aestheticism and the decadent movement
At around the same time, the advance of aestheticism – an artistic movement prioritising beauty above function – was giving men the opportunity of a ‘feminine’ creative outlet that drove them to create ‘the house beautiful’. As the character Gwendolen Fairfax declares in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, “the home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man”. Wilde had himself come to fame as editor of The Woman’s World and an as aesthete.
As the 1880s turned into the 1890s, however, aestheticism morphed into a new movement: the decadents, who revelled in the artificial to a degree the average Victorian considered abhorrent. The decadents drew inspiration from ancient Rome and from France, which was considered morally suspect by respectable people. While the movement’s theories of art were the preserve of elites in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and the university towns, their influence was widespread on fashion, advertisements and home décor.
A ‘New Man’ who came to prominence around this time was the poet, essayist and critic Richard Le Gallienne, the son of a Birkenhead brewery manager. He moved to London, changed his name (he added the ‘Le’ to imply a French connection) and took to sporting velvet knee breeches and long hair. Yet he was also evidence that the decadent man was not necessarily homosexual. In fact, he was undeniably what was called a ‘ladies’ man’, taking full advantage of his attractiveness to women and the sexual freedom that New Women allowed themselves.
In 1895, Le Gallienne declared that gender was a matter of custom and personal choice, and nothing more. Writing in his essay The Arbitrary Classification of Sex, he explained: “There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace… The essentials of ‘manliness’ and ‘womanliness’ belong to man and woman alike – the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion.”
Richard Le Gallienne was evidence that the decadent man was not necessarily homosexual. In fact, he was undeniably what was called a ‘ladies’ man’, taking full advantage of his attractiveness to women and the sexual freedom that New Women allowed themselves
It was a kind of thinking that upended conventional certainties. “I was bewildered, it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes,” wrote the novelist Henry James in a story for quarterly journal The Yellow Book in 1894. Set within Britain’s hedonistic literary scene, the narrator of the tale, Neil Paraday, is forced to ask whether a fellow author named ‘Miss Forbes’ is a gentleman, upon which he is informed, “it wouldn’t be ‘Miss’ – there’s a wife!”. Dora Forbes, it transpires, is a man with a big red moustache. “In the age we live in, one gets lost amongst the genders and the pronouns,” laments Paraday.
Such lifestyle changes went beyond literary circles, however. In March 1894, the month before the launch of The Yellow Book, the rigid, sanctimonious William Gladstone retired as Britain’s prime minister. He was replaced by Lord Rosebery, whose effortless style both inspired and irritated. Rosebery was a typical example of why respectable Victorians condemned the aristocracy as idle and decadent, with the Tory Lord Curzon criticising what he saw as Rosebery’s “feminine sensitiveness to criticism”.
There had also, in recent years, been numerous scandals touching the ruling class: Prince Albert Victor had been rumoured to visit gay brothels, and there were countless stories about the Prince of Wales’s dissolute lifestyle. Rosebery remained reticent about his private life, but he was widely rumoured to be homosexual – with commentators noting his preference for the company of “smart young men”. One such man was the 26-year-old Viscount Drumlanrig, son of boxing pioneer Lord Queensberry. Enraged by the duo’s close relationship, he followed Rosebery on holiday to Germany and had to be restrained from engaging the then foreign secretary in a fist fight.
Oscar Wilde and the downfall of the decadents
Famously, Queensberry later turned his wrath on Wilde because of his relationship with another of his sons, Lord Alfred Douglas. According to Queensberry, Wilde was a “damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type”. The story of Wilde’s downfall has been much told: he was involved in three scandalous 1895 trials before being convicted of homosexual offences and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.
Notwithstanding sporadic gestures of sympathy, Wilde’s trials crushed the nascent decadent movement in Britain. While there may have been feelings for him from many New Women, the debacle consigned male behaviour regarded as ‘effeminate’ to a cultural underworld.
If the 19th century had seen gains for women and men in a blurring of gender identities, the dawn of the 20th century would see a reassertion of ‘maleness’ in the exercise of that most traditionally masculine pursuit: war. In 1899, shortly after the Wilde trials and the backlash against the decadents, the Second Boer War began. It was a shock to the complacency of empire, and was the harbinger of a decline in the influence of the artistic imagination.
The traditional gender roles that had sustained the British empire – with clearly defined soldiers, housewives and mothers – may have been under attack, but now they fought back. As a 1905 book entitled The Decline and Fall of the British Empire admonished, “the emancipated Englishwoman of the age used her freedom for selfish rather than national ends”.
The Boer War hero Robert Baden Powell was similarly critical, noting that the Roman empire had “[fallen] at last, chiefly because the young Romans gave up soldiering and manliness altogether”. Through the creation of his Scouting Movement, he was going to make sure that the British empire didn’t follow a similar path.
Indeed, from 1899 on, Britain entered a resolutely masculine phase in which the national effort was focused on trying to avoid, recovering from, or preparing for three major conflicts. In the world wars, women took on men’s roles in industry – but after those conflicts, they were expected to return to the domestic sphere. By and large they did, comforted by the peace of domesticity and the desire for family life as a counterpoint to the horrors of conflict.
In the 1920s, some women took advantage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act and went into professions such as law or accountancy – but these were women in a man’s world, and there was no repetition of the erosion of gender stereotypes that had been apparent in the 1890s. It was in the post-1945 period that people born during and after the Second World War again started challenging strict gender classifications.
The era of peace, prosperity and renewal in the west led to a questioning of values in every area, with an explosion of new expressions in politics, music and the arts. Sixty years after the New Man and New Woman, gender again became more mutable, with men wearing their hair long and women wearing trouser suits and jeans. In the 1960s, drag and gender changing became acceptable once more, at first for comedians and then in music where performers wore make up and sometimes, like Mick Jagger in 1969, dresses. Soon unisex fashions became a familiar sight – as they still are today.
This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine