Women In Sarah Grand's 'New Woman'

It has become a commonplace today to describe an independent and self-assured woman as a ‘new woman’. The tag ‘new woman’ is essentially used for an educated-modern woman but the fact that every woman who protested against discrimination was a new woman of her time is often overlooked. The term “New Woman” was first used by Sarah Grand, an Irish feminist in her article, “The New Aspect of the Woman Question” in 1894. The ‘new woman’ phenomenon gained a considerable popularity in the nineteenth century and became the thematic interest of novelists and academic focus of scholars. The new woman signified a woman who was critical of gender partiality and imposed regulations. Grand also encouraged women to participate in the nation-building process

Indian English women poetry chronicles the historical and cultural gradations of women’s experiences through time and space and across various discursive spectrums. Over the years, it has evolved into a rich corpus that has increasingly intervened in social debates. In the process of negotiating with the dominant patriarchal discourses on gender, class, religion and literary aesthetics, women poetry displays a divergent movement from domestic to public, taboo to articulation, ideology to identity and national to global. Hence, while responding to the numerous social and political aspects of the system, women’s sensibilities and orientation has undergone a paradigmatic shift. This in turn has lead to a change in the definitional constructs of ‘new

One of the salient attributes of women poetry composed during this time was a vehement uproar against the essentialist notions of womanhood. “On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism”, Jonathan Culler says, “to read as a woman is to avoid reading as a man, to identify the specific defenses and distortions of male readings and provide correctives” (54). The new women poets wrote from a woman’s perspective and were read from the