Post 2 : Roles of Women

Karan Patel

Professor Cacoilo

7 March, 2017

Roles of Women in the Middle Ages

Throughout history, women were objectified significantly and treated lesser than men. As a result, women’s roles mirrored this mistreatment, being restricted to roles such as domestication. As Chadwick describes the historical background of the mistreatment of women, “While women’s social roles remained circumscribed by a Christian ethic that stressed obedience and chastity, by the demands of maternal and domestic responsibility... there is evidence that their lives, as those of men, were also shaped by economic and social forces outside ecclesiastic control, at least during the period of the early Middle Ages” (Chadwick 44). Chadwick’s analysis mainly focuses on the roles of women in the middle ages, during the Renaissance women gained slightly more control over their lives. For example, women could escape the role of domesticity in favor for a religious occupation as a nun. However, even though these roles gave women more choice in society, they did not grant women enough freedom to be completely free of their societal restrictions.

Elisabetta Siriani, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, 1664

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1612
Painted to portray the story of Judith slaying a cruel Assyrian general.

These roles greatly influenced women artists and the subjects of their work. Two prime examples of this would be the artist Elisabetta Siriani and her painting “Portia Wounding Her Thigh” and Artemisia Gentileschi with her painting “Judith Slaying Holofernes”. The events of the what goes on in Siriani’s painting is exactly the same as the title, Portia wounding her thigh. However, this isn’t just an ordinary painting of a woman stabbing herself, Portia does this in order to assert that she is not weak as society then portrays women to be, and as a testament to her strength for asking Brutus to confide in her. Similarly, Gentileschi’s painting also shows a great testament to women’s strength. In the painting Judith, decapitates a cruel Assyrian general Holofernes’ head while he lay asleep in order to prevent him from causing further destruction in the city of Bethulia. While many other artists have also painted gruesome the story of Judith slaying the cruel general, most of them portrayed Holofernes’ head as the center of attention in the painting with no blood dripping down from his head, and Judith looking almost scared of what she had done. However, Artemisia Gentileschi, felt this to be unjust treatment to Judith and desired for her to be portrayed in the more heroic light she deserved and as such painted her “doing the deed” of decapitating Holofernes. Although, despite this, women still had to deal with unjust treatment from both society and their male counterparts. As stated in the Guerrilla Girls, “[A woman] could salvage her reputation by marrying any man who raped her” (Guerrilla Girls 32). It should not have to be brought into great detail in order to understand what kind of an injustice that is to women for them to not only to be “soiled” for having been raped, but also to have to marry the one who violated them in the first place. Because of the fact that these were the types of societal political norms in the Renaissance, women were still kept at a much lower standard than men and would remain so for a much longer time.

The Renaissance was not the only time period where women’s roles were changed, in the 19th Century women began getting more and more jobs in various fields such as servants, factory workers, prostitutes, etc. However, this still did not give women the type of equal opportunities as men. They still were not allowed to have higher paying jobs or have more power than men in society. This affected how women were treated in the art world. According to Chadwick, “Needlework and painting were considered appropriate handicrafts for women and during the first half the century women are well represented among American folk artists” (Chadwick 205). Chadwick describes how women were more accepted in America to do handicrafts such as painting and needlework, which gave them more of a foothold in the art world. However, women still had to fight harder in the art world as the Guerilla girls describes, “Male painters began to obsess over and objectify the naked female body as never before… Women who became artists-like Mary Cassatt, Rosa Bonheur and Edmonia Lewis-had to fight to be taken seriously” Guerilla Girls 47). This statement proves true as artists such as Mary Cassatt created artwork in order to fight harder. One of these examples is her painting “Woman in Black at the Opera.” In the painting a woman goes to the opera dressed in black. In the 19th century a woman wearing black in public would indicate that she is a widow and thus is no longer looking for a suitor. However, in the painting, it is visible in the background that a man is watching her instead of the opera. Mary Cassatt purposely did this in order to emphasize the point that in that time period, women could not go anywhere, regardless of even their wardrobe, without being objectified as sex objects. Ultimately, female artists such as Mary Cassatt, Elisabetta Siriani, and Artemisia Gentileschi, challenged the injustices of patriarchy of their time periods with their feminist art work.

Work Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. 4th Edition ed. N.p.: n.p., 2007. Print.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.