20th Century Women Writers: The Aspects of the Reception of Women's Texts - Essay Example

Roles that were demarcated by the precious societies before 1900 were seriously challenged by the women writers in the twentieth century and were a precursor to a societal climate that was rapidly altering at this time in history. Australia got independence in 1901 and a testament to its commitment to its women was the fact that after only a small matter of 2 years i.e. in 1903, it become the first and at the time the only county whereby Caucasian women were allowed the liberty to vote and stand for a position in the parliament. The written work of female writers in the 20th century saw elements of the suffrage movement, the dilapidating effects of Two crippling World Wars and the effects of the Federation. In addition, the writing was also indicative of the boom of industrialization and the surge in urbanization, women equaling men in terms of participation in the workplace and general division of responsibility and embryonic dissertation of the topics of sexual category and psychology. The new topics were being formulated on the paradigms of sex, origin and nationalism. Even though the movement of women was initiated in the early 1880s and 1890s, the crest of the suffrage took place in between the years of 1906 and 1914. The new found liberation of women was considered a double gilded sword which was largely due to the fact that the effects of this liberation could not be rationalized, gauged and/or demarcated. The Age recently printed an article which was based on the discrimination that women from the new age i.e. the global society after 1900, are in search of independence, individuality and both political and economic independence especially from members of the opposite gender. This also includes the complete freedom in the choice of the mode of occupations and the personal interests that they wish to take part in. This new age women is also of the opinion that all officially authorized and/or traditional road blocks that are usually placed in their path be immediately removed; which are the main reason behind the inability of women to put across their personalities in the same vein that men are able to enjoy and she must also be able to judge on her own accord and based on her own decisions and her own decree as what contributes the real paradigms of sex and what are in actuality pretentious traditional conventions of sex. [1] A large part of this rationale has been attributed to these writers who were behind the massive literary force of the 20th century. On the contrary, the Royal Commission sanctioned in 1903 to determine the major causes of the steadily decreasing rate of infant birth in the world at the time was of the opinion that the lack of selflessness on the part of women in the societal set-up was the major reason behind this transformation in the social setup. Whereas, consistently changing degrees of positivism and apathy were the main reasons behind the transformation of the New Age women. This grew to such an extent that they were thought to sometimes even roll their eyes as a sign of protest and disagreement with any of the many incontrovertible rules that have been set forth by God in an act of complete and blatant disregard of the sanctity of these said rules, it must be given due importance that the construct of the new societal character i.e. the girl has played a pivotal role in the construct of the distinctiveness of nations in the post-Federation world. In a phase of transition, this character was neither completely in the realms of a girl nor completely in the domain of a complete and mature women. Hence, this new character was considered as the beacon of light that would lead the entire feminine community in the darkness of the unknown future vis-à-vis the complete independence that she enjoyed and the knowledge that the fate of the future generations of humans will solely rest on her shoulders. Even though, this new character of the women was derived from an expression of the urbanized world, the new character of the girl was basically considered the result of the pragmatic combination of the land and the community. In accordance with this is the opinion of famed author Vivienne Cleven, who was of the distinct opinion that despite what had been written or discussed about the urbanization of the society, the real home of this new character whom was referred to as the girl lies in the land and not in the city amidst the hustle and bustle of people. Her revolutionary legacy has been the major contributor why many consider this new character to be the most complete form of femininity that is present in that world that we exist in. [2] In her role as a trustworthy and venerable cohort, relations between members of different and/or same gender are not threatened by the girl as they are by the activities and proclivities of the new woman i.e. women after 1900. Despite the fact that some the activities undertaken by the girl are mirroring those that are done by the New Women e.g. working on an occupation or mount and travel on a horse but her final destination is the same as the women of yesteryear and in stark contrast to the fate of the New Women i.e. matrimony, physical well being and the importance of family over oneself. Bourgeois domesticity was a reality that was still applicable and very much protected in the society to the extent that it as even established by natural sciences. In this matter, Christina Stead was of the opinion that the new character of the girl is customary in the matters of the body and the mind and hence it was proven that intelligence was neither a pre-requisite nor an expectation from this character. [3] An untechnologized accession towards feminism is the major indictivity of the character of the young woman; being free of the social pathologies that preyed on the New Woman or young women from other countries. She showed neither the degeneracy displayed in the “lifeless English young woman,” nor the square-jawed traits displayed by the “typically assertive American young woman”. [4] Instead she struck a happy eugenic medium. In nationalizing a particular form of graciousness, the Australian young woman at once refined the scope of a nascent sexual identity while, at the same time, opposing the volatile feminism of the New Woman. This creation was definitively somewhat due to the influence of the work of these women writers. The heroine of Catherine Martin’s book, An Australian Girl, completely dissociates herself from the dependence on the world of rulers and colonies despite staying committed to her partner in an unjust marriage with large disparities amongst the male and female in the marriage. In 1902, Louise Mack envisaged a happier romance with An Australian Young woman in London, with her title character finding married love with an English person while remaining ‘true’ to her own country. Other publications like Marie Pitt’s “How Kitty Kept the Camp,” Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood, Keri Hulme’s; The Bone People, Lilian Turner’s An Australian Lassie, and Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong books reinforced the young woman as a free-spirited entity but firmly within the limits of the status quo. [5] From the 1890s onwards, a woman-oriented culture was becoming increasingly visible. The issues of interest to women were being singularly and religiously being following by some journalists in one case in point. Groundbreaking journals like The Dawn (1888-1905 run by Louisa Lawson), Woman’s Voice (1894-1895 run by Mabank Anderson) and Woman’s Voice (specifically devoted to the suffrage movement) Australian Women’s Magazine succeeded Australian Women’s Magazine and more populist journals like Australian Women’s Mirror and New Idea (or Every lady’s Journal, which became public knowledge later). Such journals were important in extending and approving women’s presence beyond the private realm. In the early 1900s, The Woman’s Sphere carried advertisements by women doctors, chemists, and doctors searching for patients. New Idea and this initiate a series on the working professionals who also happen to be women at the same time and New Idea also featured interviews with leading female professionals. Subsequently, articles of the same genre would also find their way in magazines such as the Australian Women’s Mirror. In Disenchanting the Home, Kerreen M. Reiger argues the core ingredients of the dominant family ideology—the home as a sanctuary and as woman’s sphere—rested on assumes the complementarily in marriage of a sexual division of labour. Articles and stories highlighted the importance of clear fixed and gracious spheres. The discussion on ‘woman’s sphere.’ was the major literary argument from the turn of the century till the late 1930s. Magazine culture like The Home that catered chiefly to a female market and had now well-known women writers and artists published in its pages. The contribution of women to the professional world and the glorification that feminists attached to it was witnessed to have encountered an amazingly conservative reaction from the general public. Everylady’s Journal, for instance, promoted the domestic sphere far more heavily in the 1930s than its predecessor, New Idea, and had ever done. [6] The formalization of Women’s networks also took place, with emerging clubs like the Lyceum and the Austral Salon and local reading circles. Nettie Palmer was a founding member of the Ex-Rays, a group of twenty old young women from Presbyterian Women College who met regularly to discuss literature. Running from 1903 to 1944, the Sandringham Women’s Reading Circle attracted both socialist and Labour members who were, no doubt, influential in shaping directing any literary talk. Although starting in the 1890s, the full effect of women’s growing professionalization as writers only began to enjoy in their later years. Renowned scholars such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar debate that the basic cause of the modernism of women kind was a natural response to the larger quantity of women who were entering the critical landscape. “Indeed,” they contend, “it is possible to hypothesize that a reaction-formation against the rise of literary women became not just a theme in modernist writing but a motive for modernism. Following their 1890s predecessors, many women writers of the early twentieth-century combined more “serious” artistic aims with “bread-and-butter” work such as writing for popular journals, book reviews, and children’s literature. This opened the way for the critical devaluation of the work. In After the Great Divide: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Mass Culture, Andreas Huyssen contends that: Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the Modernist project. In the age of nascent socialism and the first major women’s movement in Europe, the masses knocking at the gate were also women, knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture. Indeed, it is striking to note how the political psychological and aesthetic speech around the turn of the century consistently and obsessively genders mass cultures and the masses as warm, while high culture, whether traditional or modern, clearly remains the privileged male. Unfortunately, women writers sometimes internalized these negative opinions. Judith Butler has formulated the phrase “puzzle of subjectivation.” For this phenomenon whereby she offers her opinion saying that the subject in question has the ability to withstand these societal norms meted out to them except in the case where they are the product of these said norms themselves. [7] Therefore, agency is a reiterative or rearticulatory practice that is immanent to power, not a relation of external opposition to that power. Scholars like Zora Cross or Nettie Palmer were of the opinion that authority was represented by the usage of the pen to counter these claims even if all they did as a critic was to agree to or simple refute the previous critical account on this matter. In An Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature, Cross wrote: So far, in Australia, it is in the fiction that women writers have succeeded. In the mass, their efforts are correlated with the output of men. Not so in verse. Though an important number of women persistently sing, the thought and passion and feeling behind the song are not intensive. From the many writers of her time, Mary Gilmore is perhaps the only one that stand miles away from the pack as she stands alone on a precipice largely due to the fact that the burning passion of the real women are way past her level of acceptance. Palmer, too, was dismissive of women’s poetry: In general, one can say the Australian women poets have contributed less than their quota to that stream of work which it is here our purpose to study. Of efficient verse they have made a great deal, far more than it would have been possible to mention here, ere omitting everything else; but romantic associations, spread out over long, shapely verses, do not make poetry. Therefore, we can conclude that the key missing ingredient in this case is the originality of the work or one can even say that the passion or commitment to do work is also a factor that is missing in this case. [8] Palmer’s thinking here is common to modernist critical speech. As Rosalind E Krauss makes out, originality in modernism has most been wrapped in an aesthetic economy with the notion of repetition, whereby a second term must reduce or repress. The position of originators thus goes to men originators while women writers are derivative, offering pale copies or versions of their colleagues’ more “seminal” work. However, to a large extent, the boom in the culture of literary clubs and societies has helped in reinforcing the value attached to the writing done by female scholars. The Literature Society of Melbourne was chiefly a male institution. On the other hand, the birth in 1916 of the Melbourne Literary Club saw scored of men and women alike being attracted to this prestigious gathering of literary and critical scholars’ par excellence. Its members included many of the prominent female writers of the 20th century including ones we have referenced above. The club even had its own magazine, Birth. However, in 1922, the newly formed and short-lived Institute of Arts and Letters overtook the club and the magazine. Then the 1930s saw the theory of the Bread and Cheese Club. Its only male membership reflected a more general to the growing acceptance of women within the professions. The Bread and Cheese Club also published its own magazine named Bohemia based on the literary works of the writers on its board much like the system that was in place at the Melbourne Literary Club. At the time, it is a rather famous anecdote that Ted Turner called upon Marie Pitt and complained to her that the rule regarding the ban of women from these literary circles was brought to the knowledge of the members at the first meeting and adjudicated upon at the same time, all in a bid to keep the literary scene from being “infested” by women. Pitt distanced herself from Turner’s implied mob of female scribblers by responding: I sympathize with your rule ‘no women in the club’—I’ve been of a lone wolf myself—so if I am not eligible because I happen to be nominally warm instead of strong (however comprehensive I happen to be) I obey your decision and withdraw my hankering to belong to something away from the beaten track of the conventional in literary clubs. Later, Pitt pointed out that as she did not feel herself to be a gendered individual, she also did not wish to join any women-only clubs. Mary Gilmore also sympathized with the men’s only rule of the Bread and Cheese Club, but saw it as emerging out of men’s need to bond collectively together. Therefore, we can see that the impact of Women writer’s in the 20th century is so strong in every spectra of the work done that a whole definition on the character of men and women has been determined to have arisen from the work of these writers and these definitions play a pivotal roles in determining the function and responsibility of each individual in this day and age. [9] Bibliography: 1. Dennis Shoesmith, “The new woman: The debate on the ‘new woman’ in Melbourne, 1919,” Politics 8.2 (November 1973): 318. 2. Quoted in “Women’s Suffrage in Victoria,” Refractory Girl (May 1981) at 20. 3. Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom: Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) 12. 4. John Garth, “Our Girl,” Australian Magazine 6.11 (August 1908): 1008. 5. Louise Mack, “An Australian Girl in London” (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902). 6. Rosa Campbell Praed, “My Australian Girlhood” (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902); Lilian 7. Turner, “An Australian Lassie” (London: Ward, Lock, & Co., 1903). 8. Kerreen M. Reiger, “The Disenchantment of the Home”: Modernising the Australian Family, 1880-1940 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985) 40. 9. Eldershaw, M. Bernard (2007) “The Glasshouse” Sir Louis Matheson Library, Clayton campus, Monash University Library. Read More