Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894–1934

About the Book

Explores the emergence of a new womanhood in turn-of-the-century Vienna.

In Embodied Histories, historian Katya Motyl explores the everyday acts of defiance that formed the basis for new, unconventional forms of womanhood in early twentieth-century Vienna. The figures Motyl brings back to life defied gender conformity, dressed in new ways, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman.

Motyl delves into how these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on the ways that easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside cafés and wandering through city streets helped create novel conceptions of gender. Exploring the emergence of a new womanhood, Embodied Histories presents a new account of how gender, the body, and the city merge with and transform each other, showing how our modes of being are radically intertwined with the spaces we inhabit.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: She Stood Outside, Listening to Music
1. New Moves: Flânerie, Urban Space, and Cultures of Walking
2. New Shapes: The Masculine Line, the Starving Body, and the Cult of Slimness
3. New Expressions: Emotion, the “Self,” and the (Kino)Theater
4. New Sensuality: A Sexual Education in Desire and Pleasure
5. New Visions: Reproductive Embodiment and the Medical Gaze
Epilogue: Are There Even Women?

Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author :
Katya Motyl is assistant professor of history, as well as an affiliate faculty of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and the Global Studies Program at Temple University.

Review :
“Motyl’s fascinating study of new womanhood is an extraordinarily important contribution to the recent, revisionist histories of modernist Vienna that reveal the body’s centrality to that city’s culture and society. Employing an impressive array of aural, visual, and written sources, this volume examines how Viennese culture shaped gender from the fin-de-siècle through Austria’s February 1934 Civil War.” “In her superb new study of Viennese women, Motyl explores the real-life practices of a range of ‘new women’ during and after the First World War. Moving beyond approaches that treat the ‘new woman’ as a discursive or political phenomenon, she instead explores women’s everyday life practices. By tracing her subjects’ bodily routines, Motyl’s remarkably original work gives radical new meanings to the concept of a ‘new woman.’” "Here is a book for anyone hoping to learn more about the emergence of female liberation; for any historian anxious to take in another facet of life in one of Europe's most dazzling cities; and for anyone striving to understand the interactions between our bodies and everything else." "No scholar working on gender in central European history can avoid one ubiquitous figure: the 'new woman.'. . . With so much written about this image in its own time as well as in historiography and criticism, what new insights are to be gained from a new book on the subject? . . . In this splendid new treatment, Katya Motyl engages thoroughly with all these discussions, and yet approaches them from a game-changing critical vantage. The 'new woman' as a representation, sexist or emancipatory, is not really her concern. Instead, she considers the ways in which the term signifies an embodied practice that entails female activity within the context of modernity. . . . For a work with such subtle reasoning and deep theoretical implications, it is a refreshingly lucid read, and an illuminating one."