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’:
When Adam delved and Eve span,
No one need ask which was the man.
Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,
All wonder now “Which is the woman?”
But a new fear my bosom vexes;
To-morrow there may be no sexes!
Unless, as end to all the pother,
Each one in fact becomes the other.
This was a seismic shift, and one partly driven by changes in the UK population. By the 1890s, women outnumbered men by around a million, and by the 1901 census, the gap had grown to 1.25 million. There were not enough husbands to go
