Embodied Histories: New Womanhood in Vienna, 1894-1934

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 dressed in new ways, defied gender conformity, behaved brashly, and expressed themselves freely, overturning assumptions about what it meant to exist as a woman.

Motyl delves into the ways in which these women inhabited and reshaped the urban landscape of Vienna, an increasingly modern, cosmopolitan city. Specifically, she focuses on how easily overlooked quotidian practices such as loitering outside caf廥 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.