“Gillian Sutherland looks beyond the much-discussed, much-caricatured New Woman of the 1890s – dashing, daring, and scandalously experimental – to the real women of the period, and turns up the truth that most female agents of change then were clerks and especially schoolteachers. Both cultural historians and general readers will be fascinated by the stories told here, and persuaded that the media hype of periods long before our own should also be viewed with skepticism.”
— Rachel M. Brownstein, City University of New York

“The ‘new woman’ was typist, nurse, schoolteacher or actress – beneficiaries of the 1902 Education Act, advocates of social reform, economic independence and political liberty. Gill Sutherland’s fine new book argues that ‘new women’ were the shock troops of change in class and sexual relations and national culture in Britain in the early twentieth century.”
— Sally Alexander, Goldsmiths, University of London

“Gill Sutherland’s book is indispensable. This is the first book to accrue and examine a vast array of historical evidence as to the New Woman’s actual existence. The results, and Sutherland’s astute conclusions, will completely change the way in which we think about women in the nineteenth century.”
— Clare Pettitt, King’s College London

“This lucidly written study blows open the late nineteenth-century journalistic cliché of the New Woman. Consistently alert to subtleties of class, agency, and respectability, Sutherland’s extensive research shows the slow, rather than sensational changes that were taking place, and opens up new doors of inquiry in women’s social and cultural history.”
— Kate Flint, University of Southern California

“The book is well written and cogently argued, employing considerable, even admirable, research. It fits – indeed, leads – in a field that has grown dramatically in historical study, especially because it repeatedly points clearly to areas of study needed to better understand women and women’s work in historical context. An important contribution that should be in all libraries.”
— M. J. Moore, Choice