Recent critical reevaluations of fin de siècle England have catalogued the contradictory attitudes held by and about New Women: 1 they were over-sexed or asexual, championed free love or advocated stricter standards of purity, embraced eugenic attitudes toward motherhood or threatened the future of the race by rejecting maternity outright, eschewed the private sphere's domestic duties to fight public battles for improved educational and professional opportunities or flaunted their self-absorption by exhaustively anatomizing their emotional and psychological states. Even such a brief overview shows the absurdity of attempting to draw up a coherent, ideologically consistent list of the attributes and aims of the New Woman, but it is possible to identify the cluster of related concerns her advent sparked. The debates that raged around this figure in the 1890s repeatedly return to questions of female sexual desire, maternal identity, and women's representations of women.
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Nicole Fluhr (2001) studied this question.
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