The New Woman Research Paper

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In 1916, in a small nightclub named the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, the European Dada movement was born. Founded by Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, the purpose of their nightly shows was to comment on the futility of war while operating as a safe haven away from war. By 1918 Dada had reached Germany, which at the time had just lost the war and was on the verge of an economic upheaval and a social revolution (Hoskins, 11). The Berlin Dadaists, as they came to be known, saw the effects of war, and produced anti- art that was just as meaningless as they saw the war to be. They rebelled against the art of Expressionism by foregoing painting and instead produced art in the form of phonetic poetry and photomontages. Four individuals of the Berlin Dada …show more content…

Women were becoming more autonomous and mass consumer culture began to target them as such with images of more independent women. “The New Woman bore the attributes of both women (she was, after all, anatomically female) and men (she was threateningly independent, sexually in charge, even—perhaps—a lesbian, and so doubly dangerous to the heterosexual masculine matrix of sexual difference)”(Jones, 3). However, the images of the New Woman that appeared in print were contradictory, portraying the woman as both the subject and the object of mass consumer culture. As Maud Lavin notes “Stereotypes of the New Woman generated by the media could be complex and contradictory: messages of female empowerment and liberation were mixed with others of dependence” (Lavin, 2). It is this New Woman that we see Höch focusing on in her photomontage Cut with he Kitchen Knife. Photomontages were the brainchild of the Dadaists, who were the first to practice it as an art form. They saw these displaced images as a way to pictorially represent the phonetic poems that were their staple. “They were the first to use photographic materials to create a new unity that wrenched from that period of war and revolution a vision-reflection that was optically and conceptually new, using structures often eccentric and clashing because of their properties as objects and their different spatial positions” (Cullars & Hausmann,

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