The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film

During the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a range of iconic female forms emerged to dominate the global pictorial landscape. Female athletes and adventurers, chorine stars, flappers, garconnes, Modern Girls, neue Frauen, suffragettes, and trampky were all facets of the dazzling and urbane New Woman who came to epitomize modern femininity in photographs and on film. This construct existed as a set of abstract ideals, even as it varied when translated across national contexts and through a range of key historical moments including First Wave feminism, colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, political revolutions, and the rise of modernism. This panel, moderated by art historian Linda Nochlin, examines the nuances of visual representations of this transgressive and border-crossing figure from her inception in the later nineteenth century to her full development in the interwar period and beyond. Panelists include Elizabeth Otto, Clare Rogan, Vanessa Rocco, and Kristine Harris.