The Modern Woman: Fashion and Global Modernities since 1780 - HOA00126M

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Module summary

The term ‘new woman’ was widely used during the decades from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s. Fashion – as an idea, a global system and a physical practice - was central to this experience of modernity. This module explores fashion as a communal aspiration of these aims ‘to be modern’. It does this through the critical analysis of narratives of modernity in fashion history and in related fields of study - and through the hands-on study of historical artifacts in the classroom.

Module will run

Occurrence	Teaching period
A	Semester 2 2025-26

Module aims

The term ‘new woman’ describes a generation of women at the hinge point of the 20th century, who engaged in sports and increasingly enjoyed financial success - even independence - through joining the growing army of single white-collar workers in the clerical industry. These women had a heightened awareness of being purposefully dressed and accessorised for work and pastimes. They were more likely to smoke and be fashionably tanned. They were the new readers of fashion and make-up manuals and as such became a dominant part of the consumer market for the ever-burgeoning choice of products for women’s health, beauty, and fashion on both sides of the Atlantic. Modernity was not an experience of white women only, but a global phenomenon encompassing many different ways of being modern. By engaging with selected case studies, we will closely examine what it meant to be a modern woman: experientially, sensorially, emotionally. This module is suitable for everyone with an interest in the interdisciplinary and object-focused study of the dressed body in general and fashion’s central role within histories of urban modernities in particular. Research interests in ‘early modern’ fashion can be developed in this module as well, because teaching will touch upon the mid-16th century cultural shifts in clothing communities that historians associate with ideas of modernity.

Seminars will unthread the experience of the new woman in relation to different sources; 1. popular imagery - namely commercial and private photographs, fashion plates, advertisements and postcards; 2. clothes and 3. dress accessories – among the latter will be such things as powder compacts, dress canes and chatelaines. This workshop is designed to make available the first-hand experience of these objects through the actual handling and understanding of them as material artefacts. How did such popular products provide a specific sensory experience of fashion and its associated values of modernity? How did clothing and dress accessories act upon the body by engineering movement, gesture and the spatial and visual orientation of the modern woman in public space? How did technical innovations in fabrics and novel materials such as early synthetics and plastic come to epitomize modernity for this new generation of women?

These experiences will equip students to an access point for a broader analysis of fashion’s relation to the complex temporalities of modernity. Modernity is not only now-time or the new, but also found in the past. The ‘new woman’ is invoked as much through 18th-century fashion as the subsequent 20th-century machine-age aesthetic. Fashion as a global system and corporal practice was instrumental in homogenising, accelerating and intermittently arresting time at both, industrial and intimately personal levels. How can the study of fashion foster an in-depth critique of the economic, political and gender imperatives that underpin these temporalities? By putting these histories into conversation with our own present culture students will not only become aware of how much we are marked by history, but we might also make the past familiar and the present strange.

Module learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• an advanced understanding of interpreting the media-specific subjectivity of images, texts and objects relating to women, fashion and modernity with recourse to key approaches and methodologies
• a sophisticated ability to critique ideas and concepts about time in fashion histories and narratives of modernity
• a heightened sensitivity to non-Western, global fashion communities in modernity and corresponding theoretical frameworks
• a budding expertise in handling and identifying image technologies and the materiality of sartorial artefacts as relevant to the topic of the module

Indicative assessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Special assessment rules

None

Indicative reassessment

Task	% of module mark
Essay/coursework	100

Module feedback

You will receive feedback on assessed work within the timeframes set out by the University - please check the Guide to Assessment, Standards, Marking and Feedback for more information.

The purpose of feedback is to help you to improve your future work. If you do not understand your feedback or want to talk about your ideas further, you are warmly encouraged to meet your Supervisor during their Office Hours.

Indicative reading

• Beerbohm, Max. “The Pervasion of Rouge.” In The Rise of Fashion. A Reader, edited by Daniel Leonhard Purdy, 226-32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
• Belfanti, C. M. “Was Fashion a European Invention?” Journal of Global History 3, no. 3 (2008): 419-43.
• Evans, Caroline, The Mechanical Smile: Modernism and the First Fashion Shows in France and America, 1900-1929. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013.
• Keller, Susan. “Compact Resistance: Public Powdering and Flanerie in the Modern City.” Women's Studies 40, no. 3 (2011): 299-335.
• Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Maynard, Margaret. Dressed in Time: A World View. London: Bloomsbury, 2022.
• Ogle, Vanessa. The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015.
• Patterson, Martha H. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.
• Sachsenmaier, Dominic, Jens Riedel, and Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, eds. Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese and Other Interpretations. Leiden: Brill, 2002.
• Wilk, Christopher. “The Healthy Body Culture.” In Modernism: Designing a New World, edited by Christopher Wilk, 249-97. London: V&A, 2006.