Breaking Free

              Throughout the existence of human civilization, the male gender has used their inherent and  biological physical dominance to oppress women and deem them the inferior gender. During the middle ages in Europe, men deemed women inferior to them in order to be able to gain control over their lives and turn them into their servants. Men often used their biologically physical dominance as a justification for this notion and also to keep women obedient and under their control. The feudal political system of the societies would also enforce and justify this idea by implicating that women were meant to be mothers and wives and that their lives served no further purpose. The church was a large influence in the political system of this time and would constantly enforce this idea from a hierarchal standpoint. To convey this large factor of women’s oppression, Chadwick states that "The Church’s hierarchical organization reinforced the class distinctions in society; its patriarchal dogma included a full set of theories on the natural inferiority of women which can be traced back to ancient Greece and the Old Testament” (44). Men would then go on to enforce this idea on a micro level through physical dominance. For example, The Guerilla Girls note that women were to "obey their husbands" and that their husbands were allowed to "beat [them] if they didn't" (22). As a group that is just as, if not, superiorly intellectually capable as men, women have been able to make great strides and efforts to reform the norms of the society around them. Some women of this time chose to empower themselves by becoming nuns and joining convents, who were respected and granted similar rights as men, such as that of education. Their devotion to god and church allowed them to escape the oppressive reality of societal expectations. Other women gained power due to inherent wealth from their family, but still, both of these individuals still had restricted access to true freedom. Chadwick states that women within convents could teach, but not learn on page fourty-five. It states that "[w]ithin the Convent women had access to learning even though they were prohibited from teaching by St.Paul's caution that a woman must be a learner, listening quietly and with due submission". Being born in the middle ages as a female is equivalent to being born right now in prison.  

            Transitioning into the Renaissance period, these ideas were still dominant, however, women began to speak louder. With the emerging ideas of the renaissance period, such as those based upon logic and science based reasoning rather than religious ones, things began to change over time. With the arrival of the Renaissance era, men were already knowledgeable and skilled through the education system, whereas, women were not. Men were in charge of innovation and working in high skilled areas and this continued to allow men to be the "bread winners". Women were “relegated to areas that required fewer skills or skills of a kind that could be easily transferred to new households upon marriage" (Chadwick 68). Women of this period worked in industries such as the needlework industry, where the skills they utilized were basic. The renaissance period also provided leeway for artists to become successful through the formation of unions and having their own studios. This did not apply to women, however. They were not considered artists, or as talented of artists as their male counterparts even though their artwork reflected self-expression repressed by societal pressures and produce work with more meaning. Still, there weren’t that many opportunities for women to produce art. Usually, the women who produced art had to seek approval from their father or were born into a family dominated with artists. Sofonisba Anuissola of Bologna, Italy was one of the most prolific artists of the Renaissance period and essentially paved the way for more female artists to pursue their passion. Her father was not an artist, however, he believed in the education of women. Sofonisba would go on to paint a powerful portrait that empowered her fellow female artists.

Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola by Sofonisba Anguissola, 1559

In this painting, she paints a portrait of Bernardino Campi painting her. This piece serves “an exemplar of female achievement” where she is being painted by a man and is fully clothed and also, removing the male gaze (Chadwick, 80). As Bernardino paints his painting, he keeps her clothed and is looking back at the viewer of the art, rather than the female herself. She paved a way for future female artists and also empowered them by showing them that she is being painted and honored by a man himself. It showed that it is possible for a female artist to be well recognized, even by men and also that women were not artistically inferior. Here you can take a further look into many more of Sofonisba Anguissola’s portraits and implications: https://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/list.php?m=a&s=tu&aid=5511. Women used art to express themselves in ways that society did not allow them to. It really allowed an individual to understand what words could not explain. Elisabetta Sirani, another rare example of a well-renowned female renaissance artists was able to execute this perfectly. In 1664, she published the painting “Porita Wounding Her Thigh” as can be seen below.

In this piece of artwork, Elisabetta displays the level of frustration between women and men at the time that they could not verbally express. A woman sits in her red gown with her thigh revealed, and is seemingly jabbing her own thigh with a knife. This does not implicate that women were depressed and resorted to self-harm, but it implicates that Elisabetta and many other women like her possessed the strength to inflict serious damage upon themselves in order to be heard out and taken seriously by men. Female artists of the renaissance worked relentlessly in order to gain equality and eliminate the idea that women were not as intelligent, skilled or as capable as men through the medium of art. 

            When the nineteenth century or the Victorian Era came around, many new ideals granting freedom to women came about. For example, Chadwick states “In 1837, married women had few legal rights. The Divorce Act of 1857, which liberalized divorce for women, the publication of Mill and Taylor’s The Subjection of Women, which exposed the legal subordination of one sex to the other as morally wrong, the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which enabled women to retain their own earnings or rent, and the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1884, were milestones on the way to legal protection for women outside marriage” (177). This did not really provide female artists any benefits as these actions focused on marital and romantic aspects of their lives. Soon enough, institutions that geared its opportunities towards women came about and began to dominate many areas of England and the United States as well. Women were finally given a real opportunity to become artists but this opportunity was a difficult one to capitalize on. Emily Mary Osborne, a female artist of this period depicts the hardships of being a female artist in her piece “Nameless and Friendless”  published in 1857, which can be seen below.

In this painting, a female artist brings her art to a shop which is not surprisingly ran by a man. All the men in the room divert their attention to her and the man in deciding whether the art deserves to get displayed strokes his chin as he decides whether the women is deserving. The attention in the room is not diverted to the art, but the female herself, showing that men still were not taking women seriously.  Women have been making and are continuing to make great progress in achieving gender equality and deconstructing societal expectations and norms that force them to behave in a certain way, even if they do not want to. Post eighteenth century, they continued to make amazing progress and we can see an exponential increase in recognized and published female artists. Visit https://nmwa.org/explore/collection-highlights/20th-century#A to see how women kept pushing forth this progress and a large collection of artists important to the movement. This website also serves as a library, displaying all female artists of this period, their biographies, photos and artwork.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. Penguin Books, 2006.

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. Langara College, 2016.