Blurred lines Two ‘New Women’ as depicted in a satirical 19th-century cartoon. The era witnessed the emergence of new forms of gender identity – for both men and women
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In the 1890s, two new social identities emerged that represented the first widespread challenge to gender stereotypes in Britain. This was the time of the ‘New Woman’, who possessed levels of daring regarded as masculine, and of the effeminate ‘New Man,’ who loved ‘art for art’s sake’. Her determined persistence to go her own way, and his foppish indifference to soldiering and other established notions of ‘manliness’, were both deemed equally appalling to Victorian elders.
Indeed, to some commentators, it seemed as if men and women were losing their distinct characteristics. As a Punch magazine writer noted in a verse titled ‘Sexomania’: