The New Woman Womanhood and literature at the turn of the 19th
century The New Woman | The Victorian Woman | Education & Work |
Marriage & Sexuality | Fiction | Cartoons | Works Cited The New
Woman, Marriage, and Sexuality For the Victorian lady, sexuality
was only a natural part of life under the sanctions of marriage.
A woman's sexuality was not her own, but a sacred virtue which
was the man's to invade upon marriage. In this way, Victorian
women came to be seen as guardians of morality because unlike
men, they were not driven by passions, in fact, they were hardly
believed to have a sex drive at all. The New Woman movement
understood that to remove themselves from male dominance, they
needed to take possession of their own bodies--to change their
position from sexual object to sexual subject; to be an active
participant and agent of their own sexual desires, power, and
pleasure. This new female figure, one who could choose whether
she will allow a man to have her sexually, became feared and
often rejected