Conclusion

Summary

This book has highlighted the essential link between gender and modern technologies as crucial not only to New Woman writing but to early or first-wave British feminism. Locating the New Woman in connection to technologies of the time provides an understanding of how certain technologies come to work as ‘freedom machines’, as visual emblems signifying female emancipation. Throughout the book, the fundamental conflict between technological determinism and feminist criticism has been stressed: the ‘modern’ aspects of late nineteenth-century technologies such as the typewriter, the bicycle and medical technologies entail the ways in which they are taken up as symbols of emancipation and ‘newness’ in literary works, as well as in the medical and periodical press. In addition to analysing specific late nineteenth-century technologies, this book has drawn attention to the technology of language itself: the ways in which literary texts work as social and cultural agents. Material objects and institutional technologies, and technologies of self-formation, come together in these fictions through yet another technology; that of the text itself. In this way, New Woman writing that engages with technology partakes in and shapes late nineteenth-century debates regarding both social and literary issues.

As shown, the entanglement of changing gender relations and modern technologies was a crucial component of British first-wave feminism. However, the technologies used by these late nineteenth-century feminists are present still today: we exist in the aftermath of that ‘founding age of technological media’ described by Kittler (1999: xl). Readers of this book most likely use twentieth-and twenty-first- century variations of late nineteenth-century technologies every day: listening to recorded music on a device stemming from the phonograph, or the radio whose wireless function came about in the late nineteenth century, looking at moving images originally made possible through the cinema and its precursors (such as the zoetrope) and writing on laptops or desktop computers which serve as an extension of the typewriter. Perhaps the reader accesses this very book not in physical form but on a laptop or similar device with its QWERTYUIOP keyboard stemming from early typewriter design, maybe while listening to recorded music or other sounds.