To dip into the scholarship about the New Woman is to be puzzled by the extensive focus on and the strong disagreement about chronology. Why do some scholars offer such a wide range of years for the New Woman, and others such a narrow range? And why do the dates - whatever they may be - diverge so widely? What becomes clear is that date matter not because the New Woman can be easily periodized - after all, there are no legislative or political milestones that mark her entrance or exit from the public stage - but because she herself invoked, and thus still provokes, a polemic about temporality. Indeed, temporality defines the New Woman.