In the world of art, women have always had to break down the walls of challenges and struggles that men have buried them under for years. They’ve had to overcome the oppression and heinous words, like that of Samuel Butler, who said: “The souls of women are so small, that some believe they have none at all” (Guerrilla Girls, 29). With each time period, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance all the way to the 19th century, women experienced their own challenges through which they worked to claim their place in a male dominated world.
During the time of the Middle Ages, women were actually able to take part in “public life” where they were able to become “writers, artists, merchants, and nuns, and ran the kingdom when their husbands were away at war” (Guerrilla Girls, 19). Women, in this feudalistic society, upheld some rights and economic power and they were able to manage large estates when men were at war or preoccupied with business, and there was a development of the urban working women because of the growing city life during that time (Chadwick, 47). However, most of the time, women joined convents and became a nun due to committing to live a religious life or because there were no more money to marry them off. Nonetheless, the Catholic church allowed women to have the ability to be educated and create influential, meaningful art (Guerrilla Girls). One of these art pieces was the Bayeux Tapestry which is called “the most important monument of secular art of the Middle Ages” (Chadwick, 48). This art piece is made by women and the pictures in the tapestry were subjects of everyday life and not specifically pertaining to religion (Guerrilla Girls). Another artist was Hildegard Von Bingen who created Scivias; this was a book she took 10 years creating and was based on her intense visions that were highly looked upon. Hildegard overcame the doubt and controversial advise that the men in her life gave her, and therefore, led a life that was extremely different from the women of that time. Another artist of that time was Christine de Pizan, who accurately wrote and painted about the difficulties that women face and how they, as well as other men, didn’t take themselves seriously. She cracked the code of how men looked upon women as “monstrosities in nature” and had faith that women were more than what the pubic portrayed them as (Guerrilla Girls).
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| Hildegard Von Bingen, Scivias, 1145 Her fifth vision on women, children and oppression. |
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| Christine De Pizan in Her Study, from The City of Ladies, 1405 This is an image of Pizan writing in her book on her views of men. |
Stepping into the Renaissance, a time of rebirth and a period of enlightenment in the arts mostly for men, women experienced a backwards progression after the Middle Ages ended. Chadwick writes that, "The very developments opening up new possibilities for Renaissance men...adversely affected women by leaving them with less actual power than they had enjoyed under feudalism" (Chadwick, 66). The fact was that women were "barred from participating in the governmental patronage that created the public face of Renaissance Italy, and they played no part in guild commissions” (Chadwick, 67). Women had to figure out a way to establish themselves as "independent artists," because they were prohibited from the places that men were able to go to in order to learn and establish their careers as artists as well as generate a profit from it (Guerrilla Girls). Women were kept from entering into the public space that men could be in, and they were constantly proving themselves that they could be just as good as men. Elisabetta Sirani painted Portia Wounding Her Thigh in order to portray Portia as trying to prove herself as “virtuous and worthy of political trust...that women who prove their virtue through individual acts of bravery can come to be recognized as almost like men”(Chadwick, 101-4).
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| Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, 1664 This image is the depiction of how women wanted to be viewed as equals to their male counterparts. |
Artemisia Gentileschi takes a different approach in her artwork, called Susanna and the Elders, by putting a twist on what was normally painted in the 17th century. She does not center the woman therefore not making her the object to gaze upon and instead gives a “disturbing psychological content” where she is in an awkward position, and the gazer is not just focusing on her but the painting as a whole. Therefore, she deflects the male gaze and allows the woman in the painting to be seen as something other than an object.
In the 19th century, after the Industrial Revolution, there were economical and social changes that affected women. Women were put into working conditions that were “overworked and underpaid female labor” (Chadwick, 188). The artist, Anna Blunden, painted The Seamstress in 1854 to show the unfair conditions that women were expected to perform in (Chadwick, 188). Chadwick writes, “The painting was executed in the context of an investigation into the working conditions of women in the clothing trades and the system of outworking” (Chadwick, 188). During this time period, women artists also had to work harder to prove themselves because of the control men had over their bodies as well as the fact that male painters were obsessed with the “naked female body” (Guerrilla Girls, 47). Men were painting prostitutes and mistresses and very few women who were actually taking action and make changes to the view of the female body and the role of women in the 19th century. Therefore, women like Rosa Boneur stepped out and painted images of animals, like The Horse Fair, which was different from art pieces that portrayed women in domestic settings or dressed in fancy gowns. In these images, she depicted the passionate debate of animal rights and abuse, however, the images of these animals reflected how women were powerless in their position in relation to institutions of male power and privilege (Chadwick, 195). Harriet Powers was an African American born into slavery, and, although she could not read or write, she was able to create quilts with stories from the Bible and other current events that she experienced in her life to put on record on her quilts. There were other women artists still, like Mary Cassatt, who depicted women and children through Impressionist style painting. Her challenge was that as a woman, she was not exposed to anything but the basic domestic lifestyle. However, through her paintings, she uses what she knows about women and vanity and, “emphasizes the role of the mirror in inculcating an idea of femininity as something mediated through observation” (Chadwick, 241). This concept can be seen in her Woman in Black at the Opera where Cassatt focuses the image of a young woman observing the opera, but since she is in a public space, “she herself has become part of the spectacle and the object of the gaze of a man in the balcony who turns his glasses on her” (Chadwick, 241). Through her paintings, Cassatt was able to reveal the male gaze and how women have to be conscious of how they view themselves and how they are viewed in public.
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| Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera, 1879 This is Cassatt's reveal on the male gaze and female objectivity. |
Works Cited
Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, And Society. Fifth ed., Thames & Hudson, 2012.
Guerilla Girls. The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin Books, 1998.
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