The Roles of Women throughout European History

Tiffany Saxton

Women and Art

3-8-2017

The Roles of Women throughout European History

The woman’s role during the Middle Ages were inferior to their husband and or male figure around the woman and her labor in a patriarchal society.  The woman had to remain domestic due to religious beliefs that the women had to obey her husbands and the church.  Chadwick states, “…a number of power upper-class women at a time when most other women were restricted to the home and economically dependent on fathers, husbands, brothers, or sovereigns” (44).  Women that were considered peasants were not close to being equal with the men; however, the upper-class women had a slight chance of having access to education Bible, something other than the religious teachings.  The Guerilla Girls mentions, “Many of these artists were women, either working in businesses owned by male family members or living as nuns in convents”.  Many women contributed to art; however, their names were not mentioned on major sculptures, paintings etc.  Chadwick mentions, “…for few of them signed their names and the preservation of their individual biographies had no role to play in their productions” (43).  Women were even ignored in scholar book as Guerilla Girls indicates, “One scholarly book on the tapestry goes on and on about its historical and formal sources, but completely ignores the women who executed it” (21).  By highlighting the males, dismisses the women intellectual capabilities and credits men for women work.  Women were encouraged to fight for ownership and rights in the feudal system and the differences were through embroidery while remaining true to the church.  Chadwick writes, “While on the one hand, woman was suspect as sexual threats to male chastity, on the other, spiritual commonality rather than gender differentiation was the ideal of the Benedictine Rule and hence of monasticism” (45).  The church had control teaching men giving them power, but not the same powers were issued to women leaving women wanting more in society and art. 

Female objectification

https://edphoto2.wordpress.com/author/edphoto2/page/2/Men had power over women...seen here in the portrait of male gaze women objectifying themselves in order to please the male spectator.

The roles for women changed throughout the Renaissance and into the 19^th century by being shunned and discredited in Europe, to becoming appreciated and able to make a living in the economic world as well as being domesticated to the household in America.  Chadwick explains, “Women quickly used their skills in needlework to connect the domestic sphere and the public world of collective social action” (207).  Women fought to be respected and became feminists that fought for abolition of slavery, temperance, and universal suffrage in America because doing so Europe was unheard of in the 19^th century.  Inventions of the camera as well as the usage of the railroad system, women lived life on their terms like Rosa Bonheur even cross dressing for success to get ahead in the artistic world.  Guerilla Girls explains, “She made a life of her own, one far more unconventional than those of her contemporaries, the aesthetically-radical-but-socially-bourgeois Impressionists” (48).  Rosa Bonheur encouraged woman to be brave like other artists such as Mary Cassat, which they both were sculptors and amazing painters; their art is in museums in New York and worked alongside the male greats as well.  Chadwick writes, “One of Power’s two well-known quilts (both now in American museum collections) was purchased after its exhibition at a Cotton Fair in 1886 by Jennie Smith …” (210). 

The needle printhttp://needleprint.blogspot.com/2014/04/free-jigsaw-download-harriet-powers.htmlHarrit powers quilts that made it into the museum.

Women were empowered and demand equal rights in America and other women started to demand the same as well through social interactions.  Edmonia Lewis was an African American artist that endured so much in America, due to racism she left to go to Rome later to known for The Death of Cleopatra.  Guerilla Girls states, “In Rome, she learned to work in the then fashionable neoclassical style.  She was taken under the wing of a group of well to do American women artists, writers, and intellectuals many of them lesbians.  Among them were several marble sculptors, including Harriet Hosmer and Anne Whitney, who were very successful.  They were the first all-female art movement a girls’ club” (51). She proved black women had it in them to become a successful artist by taking her artwork back to America to become major in the artistic world of sculpturing.   Death of Cleopatra ...Edmonia Lewis sculpture that made her worthy of a artist in America.  Women were united and became huge names in the artistic world even though historical artists such as most men tried to discredit and or leave them out their work continues to speak for itself in major museums, Centennial Exhibitions, and Smithsonian.  Woman have been continuing to make their way in the artistic world, intellectual world and domestically by proving that you can overcome many obstacles in a patriarchal society.  Making a change through art historically, women accomplished more through feminism of solidarity by never giving up, also by maintaining their faith, women continue to prove that their equal and at times better realistically.