New women, new mothers: The conflict of feminism and motherhood in late-Victorian fiction

New Women, New Mothers contributes to New Woman scholarship by investigating the background, substance, and outcome of the clash between feminism and motherhood, and by arguing that maternity, unlike any other facet of a woman's life, brings to light the weaknesses of the feminist agenda; though it argued for legal, economic, educational, and social reform, the feminist program took little account of motherhood and did not set forth a plan for mothers. For feminists, motherhood had the effect of forcing the issues about which women argued. Though women could claim to be feminists and to want to live free from social constraints, having a child added pressure that often caused women to forgo feminist activism.; Underlying feminist debates was (and is) the intricate question of motherhood: how could a feminist existence be reconciled with a maternal life? This dissertation explores the competing demands of feminism and maternity and the ways in which the reality of motherhood both tests the resolve and commitment of feminists and underscores the great obstacles standing in the way of women's advancement. It discusses New Woman novelists who believed that motherhood serves to hinder feminist goals, as well as those New Woman and anti-New Woman writers who saw motherhood as an important, perhaps the most important, duty of women, thereby shifting the focus from the mother, her sexuality and identity, to the child and to the obligations of a future mother to her future child. The dissertation further explores the ways in which literature contributes to and participates in the troubling science of eugenics. Eugenic writers understood motherhood to be a great responsibility upon which the future genetic health of the nation depended, rather than a form of bondage that would force a woman to compromise her beliefs. Though finally unable to provide an answer to the woman question, particularly as it concerned the complex issues of maternity, New Woman novelists were able to stimulate debate that ultimately led to the wide-ranging social, legal, economic, and educational reform for women and mothers that we enjoy today.