Bitch lurked in the English language for centuries, but then it emerged as an everyday word. Why? Bitch changed along with the changing social roles of women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the mid 1900s, the use of bitch had exploded; its meteoric rise was a backlash against feminism. In response it was reclaimed by feminists – to some extent, that is. In modern times, bitch is still an insult for a woman who is considered to be unpleasant, disagreeable, or malicious. But in the word’s evolution it has also come to mean a woman who is revered (or reviled) as tough, strong, and assertive. For better or for worse, bitch is interwoven with the history of feminism. It is a word that represents both feminism and anti-feminism at the same time.

The American New Woman is an archetype for the generations of women who, in the early twentieth century, were engaged in defining new forms of femininity and forging new public identities, through work, leisure, art, education, and politics. The New Woman also signaled a complex, and sometimes contradictory, modernizing of embodied femininity. Beginning with the New Woman as a sociopolitical individual, mobilized in feminist discourse and suffrage politics, this chapter goes on to explore Greenwich Village women, Black women’s responses to the New Woman, fashions for bobbed hair, and the bodies and performances of different kinds of women dancer (Isadora Duncan, Josephine Baker, Irene Castle). The chapter concludes with Djuna Barnes’ ambivalent encounters with the fashionable New Woman in her work, and Gertrude Stein’s engagement with the legacy of Susan B. Anthony, a crucial pioneer for the women’s suffrage movement and modern feminism, in her final opera The Mother of Us All (1947).