'the new woman' as cult brand & eugenics gambit

Around the same period referred to in the previous post, there arose another response to the challenges of encroaching modernity. The New Woman was on the opposite end of the spectrum from the dissolute depravity of the decadent aesthetes. And she had much to do with the rise of the eugenics movement. This New Woman was a product of the late 19th century, not to be confused with the new New Woman of today... From the back cover copy for The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin de Siècle Feminisms... A cultural icon of the fin de siècle, the New Woman was not one figure, but several. In the guise of a bicycling, cigarette-smoking Amazon, the New Woman romped through the pages of Punch and popular fiction; as a neurasthenic victim of social oppression, she suffered in the pages of New Woman novels such as Sarah Grand's hugely successful The Heavenly Twins. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact marks a radically new departure in 19th century scholarship to explore the polyvocal nature of the late Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism which converged in the name of the New Woman. ...and your little dog, too! Angelique Richardson, one of the editors of the above, also wrote... does the plot not thicken? Atkin, a strategy director for a New York ad agency [and author of The Culting of Brands], believes the process through which consumer brands build customer loyalty is equivalent to the way religious cults recruit members -- and, he says, that's a good thing. To him, cults are little more than well-defined affinity groups engaging in a few activities outsiders find unusual because they believe something different. ~ Publishers Weekly

the new woman in fiction and fact: fin de siècle feminisms

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