In 1905, W. S. Sparrow, in Women Painters of the World, sought to prove that although male and female "genius" may differ, "there is room in the garden of art for flowers of every kind," and only those who do not think would ask: "Where is there a woman artist equal to any man among the great masters? In 1971, Linda Nochlin posed a similar question in "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" One of her conclusions was that it was not genetics but society itself that prevented "greatness" in women from developing. "Art is not a free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual . . . but rather . . . occur[s] in a social situation, [is an] integral element of this social structure, and [is] mediated and determined by specific and definable social institutions . . ." Thus, she refuted the "golden nugget of genius" and other myths developed around male artists.

Dabbling in the arts has always been an acceptable female pastime. Indeed, in the nineteenth century, when, because of demographic changes, there emerged in the United States and Europe significant numbers of "redundant" women (unmarried, middle-class women needing to support themselves), many turned their feminine artistic "accomplishments" into fee-paying work with little loss of status. They worked as china and pottery painters and illustrated children's books and stories in ladies magazines. They were colorists in graphics studios, copyists at the Louvre, and plan tracers in architectural offices. They began taking private students.

Women's colleges were the first to develop comprehensive art history programs and art museums to prepare their graduates to be consumers, connoisseurs, and volunteers; only recently, however, have they prepared women to be professionals. Many of the women who have become professionals -- on art faculties and in museums -- still are underpaid and outranked. (It was only in the eighties that women have been appointed art department chairs or museum directors.)

While historically a majority of gallery owners have been women -- a phenomenon that can be viewed as an extension of women's traditional role of nurturer -- most galleries are reluctant to house too many women in their stables. Women's art does not sell well, states the myth, and is a bad investment.

Fearful that their criticism would not be taken seriously, many women critics were reluctant in their advocacy of women artists. Higher ranked art historians hesitated in their support of dissertations on women artists and courses on women in art. In recent years, both situations have changed. Respected critics such as Lucy Lippard and Arlene Raven publish feminist criticism in mainstream journals; dissertations on Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Cecilia Beaux, Suzanne Valdon, Miriam Schapiro, and Irene Rice Pereira, among others, have been completed or are in process; courses on women artists, once consigned to interim sessions or off peak hours, are oversubscribed and continue to proliferate in institutions throughout the United States.

Research and Writing

When I went to the card catalogs in the mid-1970s to begin research on Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptorsfrom the Renaissance to the 20th Century, most of the books I found were variations on "how to paint beautiful women" or the " 100 most beautiful women in art." Aside from some artists' memoirs and a few monographs and exhibition catalogs, the bulk of material for Women and Art came from biographies of famous male artists, many of whom were married to or the fathers of talented women.

The new wave of feminism had stimulated many feminist art historians, and the mid-1970s saw the publication of several surveys: Eleanor Tufts's Our Hidden Heritage (1974), Cindy Nemser's Art Talk (1975) (interviews with contemporary women), Karen Petersen's and J. J. Wilson's Women Artists: Recognition and Reappraisal (1976), and Hugo Munsterberg's A History of 'Women Artists (1975). These books were "additive," designed for the most part to supplement the predominantly male-dominated texts used in introductory art history courses. Responding to pressure from (and threats of boycotts by) feminists, the mid-1980s revisions of these introductory texts included token representations of women. Although American feminists pioneered in the extrication of women artists hidden in the history of other countries, it was not until 1982 that a survey of American women artists was published: Charlotte S. Rubinstein's American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present. (Her survey of American women sculptors is forthcoming.)

The first periodical devoted to women in the arts, The Feminist Art Journal, was founded in 1972 and ended with Volume 6, Number 2 in the summer of 1977. New York based, it had as its goals to be the woman artist's voice in the art world, to improve the status of women artists, and to expose sexist exploitation and discrimination. Perhaps its most important legacy was articles on women's traditional art This serious consideration of "crafts" by feminist art historians is also part of current art historical revisionism -- the recognition that artists other than the "masters" can contribute to our understanding of the art of a period; that "bad" art can be as instructive in understanding a period as "good" art, and, indeed, that there is no such thing as "bad" art; and that artisans as well as fine artists are worthy of study.

The Feminist Art Journal also published original research on historical and contemporary women artists, as did Womanart, whose eight issues were published in New York in the late 1970s. Feminist researchers in the 1970s took several directions. Some celebrated vaginal imagery; others looked for commonalties in women's art. Judy Chicago celebrated 39 great women in history with The Dinner Party, which focused on a series of plates and place settings on elaborately embroidered runners that carried her female-form language. Lucy Lippard, in her catalog essay for the 1975 Paris Biennale, "The Women Artists' Movement-- What Next?," suggested that art by women had "a central focus (often 'empty,' often circular or oval), parabolic bag-like forms, obsessive line and detail, veiled strata, tactile or sensuous surfaces and forms, associative fragmentation, autobiographical emphasis." These ideas were eventually refuted, however, as close examination of art by men found that they used similar forms.

There were attempts to define feminist art and feminist contributions to the art of the period. Besides redefining the category "fine" art, feminists began to introduce content and emotion into a Modernism that many viewed as sterile; they contributed to the idea of pluralism in art. Art became political again. Feminism sought to "change the character of art," and was viewed as an "ideology, a value system, a revolutionary strategy, a way of life."

The consensus today is that art by women can sometimes be distinguished from art by men in a given period only by its interpretation of a theme-the female experience of rape, birth, and domesticity does indeed differ from that of the male. But even those attitudes evolve. For example, Carolyn Seifert traced how art reflected the changing attitudes toward household objects and the chores of American women during the last 100 years: the image of the housewife changed from the "epicenter of the home charged with the sacred task of maintaining domestic order," to "frustrated housewife sex-object," to "a feminine power that can transform the reality of the world through fantasy."

Still, the search for a commonality in women's art continues. In a review of the 1985 Reflections: Women in Their Own Image exhibit at Ceres (the feminist cooperative in New York City), where the curators were looking for a mid-1980s feminist art statement, Judith Chiti (1986) did find a commonality-- a preoccupation with group and self-exploration.

Another direction taken by researchers in the mid- 1970s was the examination of art historical "givens," for example, Nornia Broude's 1977 essay "Degas's Misogyny." Because Degas painted women as individualized, sensitive human beings rather than as generalized, voluptuous sex objects with firm, ripe breasts, male art historians have presumed he disdained women. There was also an examination of received images, as in Carol Duncan's 1973 "Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art." Paintings were used to promulgate the new Rousseauian concept that family life was blissful and a woman's role was to stay at home, raise the children, and run an ordered house. These ideas were promoted with a vengeance in the art of Victorian England and elsewhere, and their messages continue to be decoded by con. temporary feminists.

The archaeological and extrication processes begun by American feminist art historians in the 1970s continue. While a few surveys, such as Nancy Heller's Women Artists: An Illustrated History (1987), have been published in the 1980s, they are for the general reader. Scholarly studies on individual artists abound. Frido Kahlo, Remedios Varo, Berthe Morisot, Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, Joan Mitchell, Nancy Graves, Elizabeth Murray, Sofonisba Anguissola, Julia Morgen, and the doyennes Helen Frankenthaler, Georgia O'Keeffe, Lee Krasner, and Mary Cassatt have been the subjects of newly published monographs or book-length catalogs published in conjunction with full-scale retrospectives. Women who were ignored in historical movements are finally getting their due.

The lives and works of many women artists are now being extricated from those of their more famous mates. Recently brought to light in the pages of Woman's Art Journal have been the important oeuvres of Mary Nimmo Moran (wife of Thomas), Mary Fairchild MacMonnies (Frederick), Josephine Nivison Hopper (Edward), Sally Michel Avery (Milton), Dorothy Dehner (David Smith), Elsie Drigges (Lee Gatch), to name just a few of the Americans. Robert Hobbs called the Avery relationship a collaboration -- at times she would follow him, but just as often "their ideas evolved simultaneously." Such could be said of many artist couples. While their mates sought renown in the art world, the women often painted in the privacy of their homes while they managed children, households, and their husbands' careers.

Most of the books and articles cited above are concerned with instating women into the traditional framework. This approach has been attacked in recent years by some feminist art historians. According to Thalia Gouma-Peterson and Patricia Mathews in "Feminist Critique of Art History" (1987), an essay as critical to the late 1980s as Nochlin's was to the 1970s:

Reflecting the spirit of the 1980s, Woman's Art Journal began publishing in Knoxville, Tennessee in the first year of the decade. Whereas previously, women's work and books about, women artists were welcomed uncritically by feminist and feminist journals, the editor offered Woman's Art Journal as a vehicle for honest criticism: "Without a critical voice, women's work will again be perceived with lesser value." Woman's Art Journal "has maintained a reputation for publishing scholarly articles on women artists from all historical periods, with a variety of viewpoints."

The Journal's articles represent the various "feminisms." They are still concerned with rescuing women's work from the basement of art history and with extricating the work of women artists from that of their famous spouses. The articles in Woman's Art Journal also deconstruct received images of women, offer discourses on the ways women negotiate power for themselves, deal with issues of class, race, and sexual preference, psychoanalytic theory, and goddess imagery. That books about women in the arts have become big business is evident in the Journal's review section. Up to 16 books are reviewed in each issue. Men as well as women serve on the editorial board and are published regularly in the periodical

Institutions and Organizations

Feminist pressure for institutional change begun in the mid-1970s has had some effect, but not as much as one would have expected. In 1975, women comprised about 75 percent of the art school undergraduate population and about half the graduate population; at the instructional level, women were gathered in the lower ranks. According to a 1988 Women's Caucus for Art survey, those figures have changed little. But government affirmative action hiring programs have had some effect: whereas in 1975, 21 percent of the art schools surveyed reported no women on their studio faculties, in 1988, none had fewer than 10 percent and 19 percent had female chairs.

In 1972, a national survey showed that only 18 percent of the commercial galleries had women artists in their stables, and of those museums that collected contemporary art, only six to 10 percent of their purchases were from women artists. By 1988, "women artists [were] 38% of all artists ... but only about 10% of [gallery] exhibitions [were] of women artists' work. For prestigious museums, the percentage [was] even lower." In 1985, about 16 percent of the one-person shows in New York City were of women's work.

Tired of exclusion and tokenism, women organized alternative programs and exhibition spaces-in New York at the Women's Interart Center and Soho 20, in Chicago at Artemisia Gallery, and in California in Judy Chicago's and Miriam Schapiro's feminist art programs at Fresno State College and the California Institute of the Arts, respectively.

A women's ad hoc committee was formed in 1970 to protest the low representation of women artists in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annuals. From a low of five percent representation in 1969, women artists were 23 percent of the total in 1973, and 29 percent in 1985. New York's Museum of Modern Art was picketed in 1973; it was picketed again in 1984 to protest the low percentage of women in its reopening show -- 15 out of 166. It was in 1984 that the anonymous activist group, the Guerrilla Girls, emerged. They have become the conscience of the art world, publishing advertisements and posters to show the percentage of women represented in various museums, galleries, and art reviews.

The most effective women artists organization is perhaps the Women's Caucus for Art, founded in 1972 as an arm of the College Art Association (CAA). Now also a grassroots organization with chapters throughout the country, the caucus sponsors feminist panels at the annual CAA meetings and sees that the larger professional organization is responsive to women's needs.

As if in response to the lack of visibility of women artists, the National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA) was founded in Washington, D.C. in 1981 and opened its doors to the public in 1987. With an astonishing 90,000-plus membership, it has as its objective acquisition, research, and exhibition, but its agenda is not feminist. In counterpoise to the new museum's opening exhibition of mostly genteel paintings by American women artists of 1830 to 1930, Washington's Project for the Arts mounted Too Hot to Handle, an exhibit that was "intentionally confrontational, the works display[ing] a consciousness of political, sexual, and social issues conspicuously absent in NMWA."

Whether conservative or radical, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Too Hot to Handle both represent separatist visions-art segregated for no other reason save gender. Some believe that the existence of the National Museum of Women in the Arts leaves establishment museums "off the hook," since now that there is a museum to showcase women's art, they will no longer feel the responsibility to purchase and feature it. But that is not necessarily the case. During NMWA's opening year, Washington's National Gallery of Art featured one-woman shows of works by Georgia O'Keeffe and Berthe Morisot.

The same criticism might be made about Woman's Art Journal, i.e., the existence of a publication devoted exclusively to women's art relieves other arts journals from the responsibility of publishing articles about women. Richard Martin, former editor of Arts Magazine, would disagree. He claims that Woman's Art Journal is a constant reminder -- an irritant, if you will -- for everyone in the art world. Separatist operations need to exist because there is still so much catching up to do; they are also a reminder that full integration is the ultimate goal.