Coda: New Womanism in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

“The New Woman was born in the Eighteen Nineties, and she is the mother and grandmother of us all.”¹ So Margaret Drabble declares in her 1991 introduction to the exhibition catalogue Women Writers of the 1890’s. She relays, “All periods of history are transitional, but some are more transitional than others, and for women this decade was both transitional and seminal.”² Ultimately, “we can look back at these extraordinary predecessors, and find in them connections and continuities” to our present day.³ Likewise, Sally Ledger comments, “the concerns of the New Woman have an extraordinary resonance with the concerns of the late twentieth-century women’s movement: employment and education opportunities for women; the competing demands of wage-earning work and motherhood; sexual morality and ‘freedom’; the feminist interrogation of socialism and other political creeds—all these issues speak as loudly to us today […] as they did one hundred years ago.”⁴ In Maternal Modernism I have traced how innovative and radical maternal discourses of the 1880s were expanded and disseminated in modernism’s long twentieth century. At the end of Chap. 7, drawing on Susan Stanford Friedman’s Planetary Modernisms, I offered numerous ways that we could collage Buchi Emecheta’s narratives from the 1970s and early 1980s with Victorian fin-de-siècle New Woman fiction, early twentieth-century periodicals, and interwar women’s political life-writings. Here, I want to gesture to how we can view iterations of New Woman motherhood as circulating across a span of more than a century, from the 1880s to our present in the 2020s, observing how they intersect, differ, and ‘talk’ to each other.