The New Woman, 1972

THE "New Woman" has been proclaimed with a certain regularity for a century and more. Ibsen brought Nora Helmer out of her doll's house in 1879. and succeeding generations have invented her anew: in Shaw's drawing-room heroines, Laurentian sensualists, Brett Ashleys, flappers, women who smoked and drank and swore and brushed their teeth with last night's Scotch, got divorced or did not bother to get married at all, wore pants, and perhaps in the mellow suburban '50s, lived to grow old as Auntie Mame.

As often as not, the New Woman was a masculine...

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