The depictions of women in nineteenth-century domestic fiction lead in remarkably sexual ways to the depictions of an autonomous 'new' woman in early twentieth-century fiction. The domestic heroine began to improvise her life story even as she maintained the image of mother and wife that her culture had written for her. The key element in her successful improvisation and in her advance into the new century as a more independent woman was her moral and physical vision of family planning. In my dissertation I analyze the rhetorical approach of nineteenth-century physicians and social commentators and make the case that birth prevention, while still proscribed and in some forms illegal, was commonly practiced, as abstinence, withdrawal or a remarkably large variety of technologies. To illustrate the firm connection between the advance of birth control and the roles of turn-of-the-century women, I ascribe to female characterization the control and timing of sexual relationships. The metaphoric construction of female roles in both nineteenth and early twentieth-century novels supports the contention that women were authorized to control sexuality and in so doing powerfully authorized their new autonomy, social power and position. The early twentieth-century novels of Henry James and Theodore Dreiser, while poles apart in social, economic and stylistic terms, depict women who assert authority over sexuality and over relationships in spite of their silent or even subservient position. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser has drawn a woman of artistic and practical ability, empowered economically and aesthetically by sexual liaisons unhampered by children. In Jennie Gerhardt, Dreiser first depicts a woman who quietly but overtly demands birth control protection. Ironically, in so doing, she undermines her ability to demand marriage. James has created an environment dense with sexual meaning. The early novel, The Bostonians, first constructs an experimental female culture in the throes of redefining the sexual nature of women. By 1900, Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl reimagine that experiment, but retain the clear female adjudication of sexual issues
