This is the first literary study on the New Woman's interaction with modern speed culture through use of the typewriter and the bicycle. These technologies of speed are among the earliest to be associated with middle-class women, exposing them to the discipline of mechanized speed while allowing for the construction of a new machine-savvy, sped-up, and energized female subjectivity. Used for women's office work and daily movement, they demand from their women operators a response and adaptation to speed right from the beginning. The ability to catch up with, imitate, adjust to, and finally master this mechanized speed, is the key to the New Woman's enlarged freedom in the modern city. By examining New Woman literature penned by George Gissing, H. G. Wells, Grant Allen, Geraldine Edith Mitton, and Mrs. Edward Kennard, and stories and comments published in popular magazines, this book examines how mechanized speed works on the New Woman typist and cyclist, first as discipline and control (in typewriting), then as commodity and conspicuous display (in cycling), and finally as rejuvenation, stimulation, and active thrill. Being fast, having speed, and adjusting to the shocks, as well as excitement of techno-aided speed, is a crucial part of what makes the New Woman new, as she stakes a claim to modern speed culture.

Louis A. Perez Jr.'s new history of nineteenth-century Cuba chronicles in fascinating detail the emergence of an urban middle class that was imbued with new knowledge and moral systems. Fostering innovative skills and technologies, these Cubans became deeply implicated in an expanding market culture during the boom in sugar production and prior to independence. Contributing to the cultural history of capitalism in Latin America, Perez argues that such creoles were cosmopolitans with powerful transnational affinities and an abiding identification with modernity. This period of Cuban history is usually viewed through a political lens, but Perez, here emphasizing the character of everyday life within the increasingly fraught colonial system, shows how moral, social, and cultural change that resulted from market forces also contributed to conditions leading to the collapse of the Spanish colonial administration. Perez highlights women's centrality in this process, showing how criollas adapted to new modes of self-representation as a means of self-fulfillment. Increasing opportunities for middle-class women's public presence and social participation was both cause and consequence of expanding consumerism and of women's challenges to prevailing gender hierarchies. Seemingly simple actions--riding a bicycle, for example, or deploying the abanico, the fan, in different ways--exposed how traditional systems of power and privilege clashed with norms of modernity and progress.