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The New Woman

Poster
1894 (made)
Artist/Maker
David Allen & Sons (printer)
Morrow, Albert (artist)
Place of origin
London (printed)
London (issued)

Colour lithograph poster advertising a performance of 'The New Woman' by Sydney Grundy at the Comedy Theatre, London. A young woman wearing pince-nez and a black dress with white lace trim is shown seated on a stool in room painted cream with an olive wallpaper. On the wall is a framed latchkey to signify the freedom of the New Woman to come and go as she pleases without a chaperone. On the floor, books and papers are strewn, two titles of which can be seen: Naked But Not Ashamed and Man The Betrayer. This disarray is intended to undermine the New Woman, showing her as an isolated figure of intellectual and social chaos. This is in stark constrast to the many depictions of women as mothers in sentimental Victorian paintings, often shown reading one book to her children.
A smoking cigarette is shown smouldering in the bottom left corner but the wrong end is lit, pointing at her freedom to smoke yet transforming it into an act of inexperienced posturing.
The title and playwright's name are on a pale yellow ground above the image. The whole scene is bordered in cream with the text 'From The Comedy Theatre, London' lettered along the bottom.

Object details

Categories
Advertising
Prints
Entertainment & Leisure
Feminism
Posters
Object type
Poster
TitleThe New Woman (assigned by artist)
Materials and techniques
Colour lithograph
Colour Lithography
Brief description
Colour lithograph poster advertising a performance of 'The New Woman' by Sydney Grundy at the Comedy Theatre, London. Designed by Albert George Morrow, London, 1894.
Physical description
Colour lithograph poster advertising a performance of 'The New Woman' by Sydney Grundy at the Comedy Theatre, London. A young woman wearing pince-nez and a black dress with white lace trim is shown seated on a stool in room painted cream with an olive wallpaper. On the wall is a framed latchkey to signify the freedom of the New Woman to come and go as she pleases without a chaperone. On the floor, books and papers are strewn, two titles of which can be seen: Naked But Not Ashamed and Man The Betrayer. This disarray is intended to undermine the New Woman, showing her as an isolated figure of intellectual and social chaos. This is in stark constrast to the many depictions of women as mothers in sentimental Victorian paintings, often shown reading one book to her children.
A smoking cigarette is shown smouldering in the bottom left corner but the wrong end is lit, pointing at her freedom to smoke yet transforming it into an act of inexperienced posturing.
The title and playwright's name are on a pale yellow ground above the image. The whole scene is bordered in cream with the text 'From The Comedy Theatre, London' lettered along the bottom.
Dimensions
  • Size of sheet height: 72.4mm
  • Size of sheet width: 50.8mm
Dimensions taken from Victoria & Albert Museum Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings, Accessions 1962. London: HMSO, 1964.
Marks and inscriptions
  • 'THE / NEW / WOMAN / By Sydney Grundy' (Lettered above the image.)
  • 'From the COMEDY THEATRE LONDON' (Lettered below the image.)
  • 'DAVID ALLEN & SONS. BELFAST. LONDON. MANCHESTER. NEW YORK. (Copyright Resd.)' (Lettered below bottom-right corner of image.)
Object history
'The New Woman' by Sydney Grundy, was first produced at the Comedy Theatre, London, 1 September 1894.
Subjects depicted
Theatre
Woman
Pince-Nez
Books
Stool
Key
Bibliographic references
  • Victoria & Albert Museum Department of Prints and Drawings and Department of Paintings, Accessions 1962. London: HMSO, 1964.
  • Summary Catalogue of British Posters to 1988 in the Victoria & Albert Museum in the Department of Design, Prints & Drawing. Emmett Publishing, 1990. 129 p. ISBN: 1 869934 12 1
  • Malhotra, R. and Thon, C., eds. Das frühe Plakat in Europa und den USA: Ein Bestandskatalog, Band I, Grossbritannien; Vereinigte Staaten von Nordamerika. Berlin. 1973, p.101.
  • The following text is by Katherine Coombs relating to her article ‘Wot’s awl this abaat the noo woman?’, in The Studio, High Art and Low Life: The Studio and the fin de siècle, Studio International special centenary number, volume 201, number 1022/1023: 'Grundy's play is not as one might imagine a parody of Ibsen, whom he loathed. Instead of sensual Ibsenesque wives and mothers engaged in open revolt his three New Women are unmarried theorizing writers. The play is set for the most part in the ostensibly polite world of the drawing room and this is clearly meant to offset what Grundy expects his audience to accept as the gross unsuitability of these women writers conversation. And yet conversation is about as far as these New Women go. Grundy's Woman Doctor claims triumphantly that ‘The [female] novel will sweep everything before it...nothing can stop it’. To which the horrified young man listening quips ‘No it stops at nothing’. But while ‘The Novel’ may stop at nothing, Grundy's novelists are quite tame, their claims for equality ridiculed as pointlessly empty gestures. Victoria Vivash, who smokes on principle because men do, ridiculously lights her cigarette at the wrong end (Morrow even incorporates the offending cigarette into his poster). It is not that the New Woman caricature is just a faint shadow of the New Woman fictional character. She is in many ways a very different creature. The New Woman caricature was the bookish, educated, intellectual woman, The Idler's ‘Advanced Woman’ and not a woman at all but a ‘Man-woman’...To her enemies the New Woman was a perversion in revolt not against society but against biology and her destiny: ‘The bachelor woman has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendant...this is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics'. This is the solitary selfishness displayed by Morrow's ‘New Woman’, who contrasts quite pointedly with those women in numerous Royal Academy pictures who read patiently for the benefit of their children with no more than one or two books approved by time and society neatly stacked to one side. Also implicit in Morrow's poster of the New Woman is her danger to herself. Her many books are not contained in an orderly library but are strewn chaotically at her feet in a state of disorder reflecting not merely her disruptive effect on society but on her own mind. The decay of the body of the intellectual woman had its corollary in the decay of her mind. Thus a doctor could write of a patient ‘… she cannot live like other women, she wants too much, she has too many ideas, she’s too independent, she does not know what correct behaviour is, she is morally insane.’ Such attitudes were commonplace; in 1891 Freud noted of a patient ‘the inborn crookedness of her character manifested itself in her forgetting her immediate duties, her adjustment to her milieu, while she strove to gain interests on a more idealistic level and absorb more exalted intellectual stimuli.’ Thus any misery or real mental distress that educated women experienced was entirely due to their refusal to conform. Ironically this was also the conclusion of most of the novels which charted their heroines descent into madness, suicide or at the very least a breakdown and a collapse back into conformity or as others saw it a return to sanity.'
Other number
27/E1 - V&A microfiche
Collection
Prints, Drawings & Paintings Collection
Accession number
E.2682-1962

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Record createdJune 30, 2009
Record URL
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O699909/the-new-woman-poster-morrow-albert/
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