Check out this series on upcoming spring 2020 courses! Remember to check in with your adviser for TAP numbers before your registration date.
This spring, Dr. Baldys is teaching a course on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:35-3:50pm about British women writers as they navigated the world of the “New Woman.”
Course Attributes:
- 200-level
- G1 – Arts & Humanities Area
- W – Writing Component
- WSTU – Women’s & Gender Studies Minor
- Counts for British Literature Requirement
- Prerequisites: ENGL 110 or 110H
The “New Women”: British Girls Who Ran the World
In Britain, the decades spanning the late nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries were a pivotal time for women. Technological advances and the relaxation of conventions meant that women saw increased social opportunities: they could ride bicycles, work in department stores, wear bloomers, and even smoke in public! Yet many disapproved of the “New Woman,” and her modern ways gave rise to both caricature and controversy as the nation lurched toward the enactment of women’s suffrage in 1918. This course will explore the broad influence of the “New Woman” controversy as it played out in literature of the era. We’ll read works of poetry, prose, fiction, and drama written by and about “the girl of the period”—works that encouraged readers to re-examine conceptions of marriage, gender, sexuality, and social mobility, even as early feminists struggled to balance their claims against those of other marginalized groups, like the colonized, the lower-class, and the disabled.
Texts studied will include:
- Henry James’s story “Daisy Miller,”
- Virginia Woolf’s feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own,
- novelists Sarah Grand and Mona Caird,
- suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, and
- explorer Mary Kingsley, whose best-selling nonfiction work Travels in West Africa led many of her contemporaries to re-evaluate British imperialism,
- along with the works of lesser-known poets, novelists, and suffragettes.
Please send any questions to Dr. Baldys at emily.baldys@millersville.edu.
