The poem "I, Being born a Woman and Distressed" puts the sonnet form to unconventional use. While the sonnet has traditionally been a favored form for love poetry, Millay instead makes use of it for a kind of anti-love poem, in which love and sex are firmly separated from one another. This deviation from convention is in keeping with the poem's unconventional approach to the theme of sexuality in general, and especially women's sexuality. Written at the start of the 1920s—when gender norms were rapidly changing—the poem offers a fascinating glimpse into the period's sexual politics. Its speaker, who speaks without shame of her sexuality as well as of her uninterest in romance, in many ways echoes and embodies the figure of the "new woman," a sexually, economically, and socially independent icon of the 1920s.
During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the roles of men and women increasingly diverged, at least on the surface. To aid and accompany men's economic advancement in the industrialized world of Anglo-American cities, their wives took on the role of homemaker and mother. This division of labor was aspirational rather than real, available only to wealthier families. For lower-class women and even children, work outside the home was a necessity. Nevertheless, this idealized division of labor was rooted in, and prompted, an idealized moral and emotional divide as well. An ideal of womanhood as a self-sacrificing, morally pure state arose, and with it came a notion of women as chaste and sexually pure. Thus women's sexual lives were highly circumscribed, with harsh condemnation awaiting those who had sex outside of marriage. This is not to say that Victorian and Edwardian women did not have sex outside of marriage—only that doing so was taboo, especially relative to men, and especially for wealthier and higher-status women. Therefore, a binary emerged, in which women were seen as either virtuously inactive or insatiable and immoral.
Women's achievement of the right to vote was the most explicit shift in gender norms during the 1920s, and marked a turn from the previously dominant mores of the Edwardian era. The Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, allowing women to vote after a nearly century-long struggle on the part of suffrage activists—although both legal racial segregation and systemic racial inequality meant that the amendment, in effect, benefitted only white women. Confronted with new political freedoms, women's reactions were split. Women voted in lower numbers than men even after they were legally enfranchised, and were not a united political bloc in any marked way. Younger women were considered especially uninterested in voting and politics. At the same time, some women who appeared uninterested in political activity and feminism were in the process of embracing unprecedented social autonomy, brought on in part by the enormous amounts of death and injuries caused to men during World War I. Many single women in the 1920s left their parents' homes, not to marry, but to move to large cities—especially New York—to pursue the same types of public, market-driven work that their male peers did. These "new women" found both independence and alienation, and were subjects of fascination as well as judgment.
As women found new ways to participate in political and economic life, expectations of women's sexual lives also shifted. The independent "new woman" was an object of interest in large part because of her supposedly relaxed, open attitude towards sexual expression. At the same time, depictions of these women in popular culture and fiction portray them as vulnerable to sexual harassment, their independence rendering them at once empowered and powerless. While Victorian understandings of sexuality generally denied or pathologized women's sexual desires, in the 1920s both men's and women's desire was considered normal. In mainstream society, this change prompted a reconsideration of the role of sex within marriage, making marriage a doubly important site of both social and sexual life. At the same time, this shifting perception of sexuality slightly destigmatized sex outside of marriage for both genders, even while it remained relatively fringe—the province of the urban "new woman" rather than the typical one.
The poem's depiction of an interwar "new woman" helps us understand women's own attitudes about sex and romance during a period when women as a whole were deeply divided regarding how much, and which types, of autonomy to embrace. The work is even more layered, given that Edna St. Vincent Millay was herself considered a prototypical example of this cultural type. Millay lived independently in New York, supported herself economically through the arts, and was known for her open sexual expression in both her writing and her life. Thus, while the poet helped shape this now-famous cultural development, her work now also exists as a record of it.
