Modernity, Suffrage and the Emancipation of Women

Modernity is universally acknowledged as a time of disruptive change and energies hard to tame. At times overlooked is the central role obsession over women played in the anxieties of the European fin-de-siecle. Almost every breakthrough work of "modern" music, whether Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," or Strauss' "Salome" had at its center a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Out of these anxieties emerged a whole new science of the mind, psychoanalysis that helped frame and develop what had originally been viewed as feminized illness into the generalised state of being modern.