Virginia Woolf and December 1910

It being International Women's Day, I wanted to draw attention to an influential statement made by one of the greatest of modernist novelists, Virginia Woolf, whom we will study later in the course. Woolf's searching inquiry into the social and moral condition of the female writer in the twentieth century is recorded in her long essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. The statement I wanted to flag here, though, is her remark in a 1924 essay that "on or about December 1910, human character changed." This is how Woolf marked a moment of transition from the old order to a new one. Why December 1910? Most people think Woolf is referring to the death of King Edward VII and the coronation of George V--in her essay she uses the terms Edwardian and Georgian to distinguish between backward-looking and progressive novelists--but also to a controversial exhibition of modernist painting, the Post-Impressionist Exhibition curated by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in London.

However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that among the many gigantic social shifts that reached critical mass between 1900 and 1914 was the movement for female suffrage and the rights of women more generally, and that, in fact, the first International Women's Day was celebrated on March 19, 1911. So, although this does not coincide precisely with the date singled out by Woolf--December 1910--you might easily argue that one of the ways in which human character changed around this time was the increasing militancy of the female suffrage movement and the gradual ceding of new rights and freedoms to women in European societies. (Women were not given the vote until 1918 in Britain, and not until 1928 did they achieve equal electoral status with men in that nation.)

The Modernist Journals Project has taken Woolf's statement as the inspiration for an online exhibit of magazines from 1910. The idea is that periodicals give us a window into the culture of the time: what were people thinking, reading, buying, in December 1910, the date when, according to Woolf, the modern era began? One thing they were buying was Coke, as the above Cosmopolitan advertisement shows.

They were also buying large, armadillo-shaped hats, as we can see in the ad from the Ladies' Home Journal below.

I encourage you to check out the link: you can flip through page images from dozens of magazines, including some, like Cosmo, that still exist.


These ads give us a glimpse of the consumer culture of the time, not so different from our own, propagated by colourful advertisements in magazines, on billboards, and in shop windows. These signs of mass produced commodities remind us of the world Murphy et al are getting at in Ballet mécanique, with its motifs of repetition, of identical machined objects: saucepans, jelly moulds, and so on. They might also be a useful context for Stein's portraits Bon marché weather and Flirting at the Bon marché, whose titles refer to a Paris department store, and which seem to mock the way in which speech can itself become a sort of mass produced item, the same phrases repeated mechanically on everyone's lips.