Race, like many themes in utopian New Woman fiction, operate fluidly, subtly, and often without clear intentions in New Woman fiction. Only a few included texts have a particularly clear message regarding race. One, of course, is Coleridge’s “The White Women”, in which the titular Amazons are (as many readers who expect, based on the title) explicitly white women; the text seems to connect their whiteness to their somewhat odd sense of beauty and power, where they are simultaneously ethereally beautiful and surreally powerful. They are deeply strong and other-worldly, which, again, their whiteness helps to produce. Thus, “The White Women”, then, could be called an explicitly racist text, or one that links the elevated status of white women with increased power, suggests feminist progress for only them, and, implicitly, shuts women of color out of the New Woman movement.

The only other text that seems somewhat similarly clear regarding race (although it does operate slightly more subtly) exists on the other end of the spectrum: Hossain’s Sultana’s Dream. The text is the only one included (and perhaps the only example of New Woman utopian fiction) to feature a protagonist who is a woman of color, and it is certainly the only one to address the specific concerns of women of color, reversing the issue of purdah which specifically impacted Indian women. That said, Sultana’s Dream does not seem to suggest an awareness of its racial difference. It is a text by an Indian woman, addressing the concerns of Indian women, but at no point does the text address this uniqueness, or seem aware of how white, English New Woman writers handled issues of gender inequality differently.

Otherwise, most texts handle race rather subtly. Protagonists and most characters seem to nearly always be implicitly white; most authors do not make an outright statement regarding race of any characters, but almost none of them have to conquer any issues of racism, and many of the new societies either ignore or minimize racial progress. Furthermore, many of the texts have rather implicitly racist attitudes. I addressed this idea in both the Nation and Empire and Reproduction and Medicine chapters. Regarding empire, many texts seem to tacitly endorse colonialism as a means to spread feminist ideals; such an idea, of course, often comes at the expense of native peoples. In Reproduction and Medicine, I discuss the New Woman fascination with building an ideal human race, and how it is shrouded in New Woman anxieties regarding motherhood and population control. Many of the instances in that chapter more explicitly focus on a society free from physical and intellectual disabilities and other maladies, but, naturally, much of the eugenics-based language seems implicitly based in racism. The idea of the “pure” race espoused by texts included in this chapter expand beyond medicine, clearly suggesting a sense of white supremacy.

New Woman writers, of course, were largely native to England and even more largely white, so perhaps such an attitude should not be so unexpected. That said, it seems particularly disturbing when considering how New Woman writers were open to various class reforms, even seeing solidarity between their movement and that of workers. Why might New Women have such a different attitude regarding issues of race? Again, some justification may be related to the unusual sort of liberation New Women felt when they posited themselves as gatekeepers of social control through sexual selection. Perhaps New Woman felt like they were exercising power and discretion by choosing white sexual partners and producing white children. Furthermore, it seems that, per Sally Ledger, New Woman writers simply may have not been immune to the larger discourse regarding women and racial purity in Victorian Britain: “The idea of British women as ‘mothers’ of the empire, and as the regenerators of a more specifically white and British ‘race’, was dominant in the imperialist 1890s, and feminists were by no means free of it” (69). Despite their openness to the issues of other groups, race still remained largely problematic in the writings of white New Women, and, perhaps as a means to further their own liberation and popularize it with more readers.