Janel Anicette

Art and Women

10 March 2019

Gender Roles, Subject and Power

Art often reflects the times, tells us stories about the world we live in, hearkens to the past and depicts our hopes for the future. Since its inception, art has been used a tool to awaken the mind, force an ideology or highlight an aspect of culture. Art in a broad sense is a looking glass and the interpretation of the reflection is based on solely on the psyche of the spectator. Historically, the majority of the art was commissioned by males, created by males and meant to be consumed by males which created an audience of almost exclusively male spectators. As a result, our looking glass is distorted by a monolithic paradigm: the male perspective. This fact helped engender debilitating stereotypes about the ability of women and their capability to produce real art. From the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, women artists worked relentlessly to shatter this metaphorical looking glass and here’s how it all began.

Picture feudalistic Europe where serfs worked the land, knights fought for territory and nobles answer to a King. Often individuals of this time were characterized by those who fought, those who prayed and those who work. Medieval art today is defined by  the longstanding castles, stained glass windows, tapestry,  and illuminated writing but it was conceived for more practical reasons. Women contributed to the creation of medieval art via the church and held the most power in religious spaces. Women had access to learning but weren’t allowed to teach and were expected to be domestic, obedient, and chaste because based on the feudal system women were property. Even in the church female nuns were only expected to learn. “Although women shared equally with men in conversion to the faith and the learning accompanied by it, they were barred from the forms of power by which the Church exercise control: preaching, officiating in the church and becoming priests” (Chadwick,47). Female monasteries allowed women a small degree of liberation. Additionally, in feudal society the women were able to not lose their legal rights, status and economic power in totality because they typically maintained these duties when the men went away to war. They held the ability to learn but no power to teach because they were female however at the same time they were essential in maintaining the society when men went away. It beckons the paradoxical ideology that women are totally capable but also inferior.

This idea that women were only capable in the absence of a man was beginning to shift. The downfall of feudalism and economic boom gave way to an time period of increased freedom in the female consciousness. Women were making art on purpose and doing it with a purpose. At this time, some of the today’s most revered women artist where just getting started. ”By the tenth and eleventh centuries the development of feudalism and the effects of the church reform had begun to deprive women of powers they once had in exercised during the earlier middle ages” (Chadwick, 47). However,” by the thirteenth the rapid growth of commerce and city life had produced a new class of urban working women” (Chadwick,47). Mercantilism in some ways revitalized women into the world of art again because women gained some economic freedom. For example, the Abbess of Gandersheim was comparable to a utopia because it was a autonomous principality. Women were able to have their own courts, armies and coinage.Women in the public sphere remained domesticated and could only seek liberation via the church however female empowerment  was in the air and some individuals took their opportunity. Christine de Pizan for example was a female writer and painter and made a living off of her work. Historically, few anomalies existed during this time in which women had the agency and privilege to create art. The idea that a woman couldn’t possess the same level of skill or academic prowess as a man was being challenged during the Middle Ages and this idea would receive severe pushback in the Renaissance period.

Art from the 1300s to the 1600s, was typically characterized as the Renaissance period or the rebirth period. Individuals wanted to do away with medieval times and transition into modern times. This rebirth period revolutionized art, books, economic values and social ideologies. Things were changing but almost exclusively at the hands of white men. This was the ideal renaissance, women where now being expected to be hyperfeminine and almost all of the small strides taken during the middle ages were swept under the rug. Men in power began to foist the ideology that women should be domesticated and sex objects, this is explicitly illustrated in nude paintings of the time but also in literature. Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise On the Family (1435) is a ” renaissance statement on the bourgeois domestication of women” (Chadwick,72). Literature helped shaped the societal depiction of women at the time. “At school age, young girls would be trained for marriage or the “cloister” while boys attended school” (Chadwick 71/22). The women were bred to be used to create a lineage. The renaissance’s view of women was quite dehumanizing. This was the birth of the male gaze where subjects were painted to appeal to the spectator. In most cases, art at the time was created by men, for men and sold to men. Women were sex objects and were portrayed as submissive. The nude portraits were created to inflate the ego of the male viewer and strip women from having sexual desires of their own. Similarly, in the Middle Ages, women were held in this regard. Obediency and domestication were hallmarkers for the ideal woman despite the reality that woman during this period held similar jobs as men.

Lilly Martin Spencer, War Spirit at Home, 1866

A repeating trope is that a woman in the presence of a man is incapable due to her innate qualities. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century when painters like  Lilly Martin Spencer, depicted the antithesis to this ideal and showed that women could be both socially informed and a good caretaker in her painting War Spirit At Home. During the Renaissance period,  there was an ever present vestige of misogyny laced in social attitudes but more women began to actively pursue painting. ”Painting became one of the growing list of activities in which women had intuitive, but not learned, knowledge and to whose laws they remained outsiders” (Chadwick, 74). A new and mathematical approach to painting that allowed for more depth was established. Women remained on the fringe of the new system similarly to how they remained on the fringe of society. Women didn’t get access to the new math techniques to create the newer kind of art. Women artists never got the full package just the short end of the stick.  Essentially, they received access to paint but not the equity they needed to level the playing field. Gendered learning is a repeated theme, information was delegated based off of the composition of one's genitals and not intellect. Male artists couldn’t fathom the idea that women couldn’t operate at the same capacity as men. It was evident that they were too tied to their social ideologies and operated from a place of cognitive dissonance. The proof was there, women possessed the same aptitude and ability to craft fine art and yet so many women remained undervalued and undermined by their male peers because of the engrained ideas regarding the role of the female.

As a result, women during the Renaissance had a rebirthing period of their own, it was  separate from the one that emphasized female inferiority because women wanted to have an identity of their own and that rhetoric is still true today on a global scale. A sect of women artists were born and manifested in the city of Bologna. ” Bologna was unique among Italian cities for having both a university which had educated women since the Middle Ages and a female saint who painted” (Chadwick,87).Women were tired of being passed over in various realms outside of the nunnery. This city produced many outstanding artist and trained women in philosophy and law. A rarity at this time, the sanctity of this renaissance city made renaissance women. Prior, women weren’t heavily involved in humanities and in art but they also didn’t have the agency to do so. Cultivating a space for women to thrive allowed them to do exactly that, a sanctuary of sorts was necessary to provide a welcoming environment where women could unapologetically create art. In Bologna, women had all the power and the artists were phenomenal. Artists such as  ”Sirani and Gentileschi produced numerous paintings on the theme of the heroic women who triumphs by her virtue” (Chadwick, 100). These women painted women in a powerful way that showed strength, fearlessness and intensity. However, people didn’t believe a women could be so talented. For example, Elisabetta Sirani , ”in order to repudiate the all too familiar allegation that her work was not her own, she became accustomed to working in public” ( Chadwick, 104). Women had to constantly prove themselves to men and essentially tried to strip themselves of femininity to be taken more seriously. Women painted women from their lens, which was unique because the male gaze mutated into a new perspective: the female gaze. Artemisia Gentileschi’s rendition of Susanna and the Elders is an unmatched example of how different their views are in terms of women. In the Tintoretto rendition, the subject Susanna has no qualms about being watched while in Gentileschi’s rendition it clearly shows Susanna in distress. Susanna, is depicted incredibly different in Gentileschi’s piece and illustrates the dominating nature of the male.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610

Tinoretto, Susanna and the Elders, 1555

As the newness of the Renaissance faded, the 17th and 18th century was a time period in which the world was shifting anew in terms of territory, ideology and in industry. A booming slave trade, deadly competition for monarchical rule and a series of intellectual movements were hallmarkers of these times. However, despite the shift in paradigms, a woman's place still remained in her home.  Interestingly enough “ depictions of everyday life were valued and naked bodies weren’t “( Guerilla Girls, 39). As a result women were allowed to excel in painting the domestic realm and were excellent in still life and portraiture almost exclusively because men at the time favored to paint subjects of war and the gods. Women like Judith Leyster, Anna Maria Sybilla Merian and Rachel Ruysch became renowned painters with exquisite work.  ”The emergence of professional women painters … during the second half of the century is astonishing given the increasingly rigid construction of sexual difference that circumscribed women’s access to public activity” (Chadwick, 139). Still confined to the space of being in the home women had to once again work with the hand they were dealt. Men had no domain or influence in domestic life and it became an acceptable niche at the time. Back in the middle ages the role of the women artist was to create biblical or historical images and sometimes text for the church, that was the area they were allowed to create. For example, the  Bayeux tapestry which was embroidered by women is one of the surviving pieces of the period. In France, during the Victorian era the majority of power was within the monarchy not the church. Artist like Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, were commissioned as a court painter for the likes of Marie Antoinette. Powerful institutions like the church and monarchies allowed women to create historical pieces of art but in a very confined space. They were also confined in terms of topic and style. The medium of the Bayeux Tapestry was needlework and Vigee-Lebrun’s work portrayed women in home life. Women artist were utilized to create religious art and to portray domestication and not typically war. Despite her great success she and her other respected female contemporaries had to work to be accepted into a man’s world because gender based discrimination subjugated women artist to scrutiny, barred them from immense economic gain and made only certain realms of art accessible.

The nineteenth century ushered in a new wave of feminism, that differed from the 17th and 18th century, women were now ferocious and more confident in their ability to make art. ” Modern feminist campaigns emerged out of the complex of nineteenth century reform movements in Western Europe and America” (Chadwick, 175). Women quilt makers, lace makers, photographers, sculptors were doing things they’ve never done.  Artist like Judith Leyster were depicting middle class women. Women artists come into their own and they gained acclaim in their lifetime which was virtually unheard during this time. Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt are prime examples of talented female impressionist painters who were in the ranks of men. However, ”women were presented morally and spiritually superior to men, and given primary responsibility for managing the home, but their lives were tightly restricted in other ways” ( Chadwick 176). Women at this time were not allowed to be out in the public sphere alone and societal dogmas still subscribed to the notion of female obedience. Mary Cassatt’s painting, A Woman in Black at the Opera, was an empowering image because she depicted a woman who went by herself to the opera to see the show. The woman dressed in black wanted to not be seen but the imagery  illuminated that the male gaze is inescapable. Women artist during this time were subjugated to the piercing eyes of their male counterparts, were confronted with the growing ideology of domesticity and little legal status. Women unapologetically doing art was taboo at the time and a troop of female marble sculptors became known as the white marmorean flock. This band of sculptors was the first of its kind and they couldn’t be ignored. The nineteenth century struggle for women artists  wasn’t for space but it was for recognition. It is evident that the progression of women artists was one that was constricted due to the power of their male counterparts. Sexualized, stifled and separated women were able to defy the odds by continuing to create art.

Mary Cassatt, A Woman in Black at the Opera, 1880

Works Cited

Whitney Chadwick. Women, Art, and Society: Fifth Edition. Thames and Hudson, 2012.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. 1998.