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 fantasy—Greta Garbo as a Soviet virago, titillatingly mannish yet secretly craving French perfume and Melvyn Douglas. Such, at least, was popular mythology—women, even in their supposed emancipation, have often been, as it were, prisoners of the male imagination. Always there was the secret, insistent vibration of sex: rebellion ends when Rhett Butler kicks down the door.
Sex emphatically remains, but something complex and important has occurred in the relationship between American men and women. Another New Woman has emerged, but she is, perhaps for the first time on a massive scale, very much the creation of her own, and not a masculine imagination—an act of intellectual parthenogenesis. The New Feminism cannot be measured entirely by the membership lists of the National Organization for Women and other liberation groups. It is a much broader state of mind that has raised serious questions about the way people live—about their families, home, child rearing, jobs, governments and the nature of the sexes themselves.
Or so it seems now. Some of those who have weathered the torrential fads of the last decade wonder if the New Woman's movement may not be merely another sociological entertainment that will subside presently, like student riots, leaving Mother, if not Gloria Steinem, home to stir the pudding on the stove while Norman Mailer rushes off to cover the next moon shot.
Certainly the movement itself has invited the ironist's eye. Foreigners have traditionally regarded American women with a sort of wary bemusement; they seemed a race of cool, assertive, pampered and sometimes savagely domineering women. In 1898, the Scots traveler James F. Muirhead observed, with what was surely a chauvinist's exaggeration: "Man meekly submits to be the hewer of wood, the drawer of water, and the beast of burden for the superior sex." Yet now the New Feminists assert—an irony that does not invalidate the argument—that it is they who are dominated.