By Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed

http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/tag/feminist-art-program/ by Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.

Feminism in Art and Culture

ART AND FEMINISM

According to Lee Krasner, the art world in New York in the late 1930s was an egalitarian place. Discrimination arrived in the persons of the French Surrealists, renowned misogynists, who considered women to be children or muses. In the 1940s, the few token women in the art world had been either sponsored by or associated with a male in the art world. In the pre-war era, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe were among the most valuable in New York, but she moved to New Mexico and left the scene in the late forties. A new generation of artists, mostly male, displaced the aging coterie of American Modernists led by Alfred Stieglitz who died in 1946. It was only after the Second World War, when New York became the leading capital of art, that women began to be pushed to fringes of the gallery scene. The memory of important women artists, from O’Keeffe to Gertrude Greene to Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White, evaporated and these women vanished from history.

Krasner and Eileen de Kooning were overshadowed by their famous husbands and their art careers were doomed by the prevailing machismo left over from the war. Although she too was married to a well- known artist (Robert Motherwell), Helen Frankenthaler survived the coupling and the divorce because she was sheltered by Clement Greenberg, the most powerful art critic in New York. Both O’Keeffe and Frankenthaler owed their careers to the attentions of amorous and powerful men who were willing to promote them. It is doubtful that either woman could have succeeded without this male support but, to their credit, they rose above their protectors and became significant artists.

With these exceptions in mind, it is fair to say that in the post-war period most women were ignored or belittled as artists and were rarely shown in galleries or taken seriously. The main reason was economic. Given that art was an investment, a mini hedge fund, no collector would pay the same amount of money for a work by a woman as by a man. The work of women, whatever that work was, was universally devalued in comparison to that of men, and it made no economic sense for a gallery owner who was a business person to carry a commodity that did not bring the greatest monetary gains. The other reason for ignoring women who were artists was the universal male practice of dominating women by excluding them from the lucrative spheres reserved for men.

The Personal is Political

In the Sixties, women in the art world existed solely due to the tolerance of men and to their acceptance of the superiority of the male as the norm. Thus in New York City, Carolee Schneemann was a favorite of the male community because she performed in the nude. But by the 1970s, for many women, the Women’s Movement was a revelatory experience and a means of articulating their experiences in a

1 male world. Schneeman shifted her art to feminist issues and her performance,Interior Scroll, is considered a classic example of the reclamation of the female body.

Feminism was unavoidably a political challenge to the status quo of male domination. As the post on the history of feminism suggested, for a woman to claim control over her own destiny was a political act in and of itself: “The Personal is Political.” Over time, Feminism developed its own discourse. The feminists appropriated the Marxist methodology of “consciousness raising” to help women to see the means of their oppression. The prevailing ideology placed the male above the female by claiming that male supremacy was “natural.” Because the secondary status of women was near universal, it took years of hard work on the part of feminists to lift the “veil” of ideology to reveal that male domination was, in fact, cultural and not at all natural.

The term the feminists used was “click”, meaning that something supposedly “natural” “clicked” into place as being part of the culture of male oppression. When the New York art world was introduced to feminist theories, surely one of those moments of raised consciousness had to be the contradiction between the prevailing practice of formalist art criticism which focused on the formal elements of the art work alone and the near complete lack of women and artists of color in the galleries and museums. Clearly, critics and curators were not looking at the work only, as they claimed; they were looking first at the artist and then at the art. The resulting exclusion of women and people of color or gays and lesbians was disastrous for those who were rejected, denying them economic opportunities solely on the basis of gender, race or sexual preference.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of pushback from the gay and lesbian community and from the women in the art world. The American feminist movement was divided into two parts, East Coast and West Coast. Broadly speaking, both feminist movements changed the art world but they did so in different ways. To counteract the male domination in the art world, women in New York challenged the dominate institutions and demanded membership in the boys’ club of the art world. They had to assault the fortresses of the museums and of the established galleries. They had to fight to enter into male dominated fields, such as painting, that had been reified as sites of masculine struggles. They had to confront the entire tradition of humanism in academia, where women were considered problematic students or teachers.

Feminism in New York

Women protested and organized and marched during the Seventies. New York City was a bastion of male power, and museums and art galleries were supported by male curators, male art historians, male dealers, and male critics, and it was these powerful institutions that had to be assaulted. Thanks to the expansion of graduate programs during the Sixties, there were many educated women coming into the art world as art and art history teachers. These women attempted to reform history and criticism by researching about forgotten “women artists” and by writing about contemporary “women artists.” In 1970 Linda Nochlin wrote the now canonical essay, Why Have there been no Great Women Artists? It was a brave question with a social answer: women were excluded, denied opportunity, pushed aside because of their gender and the roles that the culture had devised for women.

2 Nochlin went on to co-curate with Ann Sutherland Harris, Women Artists, 1550-1950,a landmark exhibition of women artists that restored women to the history of art. The exhibition was a direct counter to the traditional art history “survey” texts that routinely and stubbornly refused to include women, even when they were, like Georgia O’Keeffe, historical figures. It was easier for courageous art historians to begin the archaeological re-discovery of women artists—Mary Garrard wrote on Artemisia Gentileschi—than for contemporary women artists to get a gallery in the 1970s.

This recovery and support effort was international, extending to England, where Griselda Pollock joined the efforts of Linda Nochlin and Lucy Lippard and Cindy Nemser, who began to specialize in writing about women in the arts in New York. Lippard, who had been key in writing of Process Art in her The Dematerialization of the Art Object, switched to writing of women and other outsider artists. From the Center was another early work exclusively on women artists and Lippard could make this career move only because she was already established as an art critic. In London, film critic Laura Mulvey used Jacques Lacan’s male-made theories about women in order to demonstrate how men dominated women in Visual and Other Pleasures. Griselda Pollock followed up with Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology in 1980.

Feminism in Los Angeles

The courage of the women art historians and art writers in New York should be noted and applauded. Each took great risks in taking up an unpopular and contentious topic—women artists—and in the process they laid the foundation for a historical discourse on women. If the name of the game in New York was seizing a place in the economic and intellectual terrains, the game in Los Angeles was re- educating women. Women in Los Angeles countered male bias in education by founding separate courses and classes. According to feminist theory, there was an essential “feminine” which would emerge in women’s art if they were allowed to make art freely, taught by women in an all female environment. To those who came later, this discourse would seem “essentialist”, a mere reiteration of Freud’s “anatomy is destiny,” but to the women of the Seventies, it was a necessary concept that enabled them to understand their own art in their own terms.

There were no powerful art institutions in Los Angeles, but those that existed also managed to ignore the presence of women in the art world. Because the art world was less visible and the territories were less guarded and not as well established, the women in Los Angeles had more opportunities to make a difference than those in New York City. The education of women through teachings in the classrooms became one of the main avenues of liberating women. For the first time, women in large numbers were taking up teaching positions as the California system expanded to accommodate the baby boomers and the growing population. Some women, such as Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, were political activists, demonstrating publicly against the treatment of women by law enforcement and the characterization of women by the press In Mourning and in Rage (1977). Many of these early feminist women became important teachers at prestigious institutions, such as Sheila de Bretteville now at the Yale University School of Art.

3 Other women attempted to reform the unequal education of women as artists. Judy Chicago set up women only programs at California State Fresno and one of her pioneering programs in feminist art making and art teaching was the Feminist Art Program with Miriam Schapiro at Cal Arts. Paralleling the co-ops of women artists in New York, the Woman’s Building was founded in Los Angeles in 1973 and all- women classes were taught there as well. The Woman’s Building, like the co-ops in New York, gave artists a place to gather together and exchange ideas, discuss and critique their art, and, most importantly to exhibit their work. In these early years, a key idea was the deliberate separation of women from men, with the assumption that, without men, women could flourish.

The climax of these separatist activities is The Dinner Party, 1979, conceived and designed by Judy Chicago and made by a cooperative workshop of women (and men). An installation exhibition ahead of its time, this work was criticized for its sociological and anthropological bent and for its political- historical subject matter. Encyclopedic in nature, The Dinner Party was an attempt to visualize and celebrate the history of women. For the mainstream art world, the brief vogue of politically aware art was over and the implied critique of all that art theory asserted was irritating to conservative critics.

Aside from celebrating women and their contributions to history, The Dinner Party refuted the notion of the lone artist and refused to accept the distinction between art and craft. The Dinner Party remained in storage for over a decade and was rarely exhibited. Recently, through a generous gift of a woman donor, this large work was donated to the Brooklyn Museum, now its permanent home. In retrospect the best thing about The Dinner Party was and is the delighted reaction of the art audiences which have embraced the complex work.

When Feminism Becomes Art

For women artists, Feminism meant a new designation: “Women” artists became a new category to be not excluded but considered. Previously, “artist” was a word referring to men and women-as-artists had existed as exceptions that proved the rule of male superiority. Feminism brought the problems and concerns of women in the arts to the fore, to the relief of those who hoped for an end to discrimination by museums and galleries and universities and to the irritation of women who merely wanted to be “artists” who made “art.”

Thanks to the G. I. Bill, meant to benefit male soldiers, a university education became common and many women naturally followed their brothers to college. During the Viet Nam War, graduate schools expanded and, for artists, it became more and more common to have an undergraduate and a graduate degree. Thanks to Civil Rights legislation, it was difficult to deny women entrance to higher education. As a result, women, seeing an unprecedented opportunity, poured into colleges and into art schools. By the 1970s, the sheer number of women in the art world made progress inevitable, if slow.

In the early years, many women sought refuge from male-orientated art schools where “toughness,” “hardness,” and “strength” were taught as necessary attributes of art and from the narrowness of art history which considered any work of art by any woman to be “derivative” (of men) by definition. In theory, there was an essential “feminine” which would emerge in women’s art if they were allowed to make art freely, taught by women in an all female environment. Forty years later it is difficult to

4 understand the need to find “essential” female forms but certain landmark exhibitions such as the Womanhouse of 1972 where the intimate relationship between the female and domesticity was explored in a series of themed rooms and provocative performances showed the particularity of a woman’s life.

The first generation of feminist artists, such as Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, were not successful or recognized until old age. Many of the younger women, such as the late Hannah Wilke, would become significant historical figures but not famous artists. But the next generation of women would benefit from the pioneering efforts of their predecessors and Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine learned how to speak “feminism” without saying the word. They would become famous artists, leaving the qualifying adjective “woman” behind in the dust bin of history.

Some women welcomed the new visibility, others feared being ghettoized by the title “woman artist.” Some women felt that women as artists would make very specific forms of art, not just social content, but formal content. Others felt that women were artists, period, and should make whatever kind of art they wished. Although there were women who ultimately disagreed with the aims of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, any woman who choose to do so benefited from the efforts of the pioneering women in New York and Los Angeles who felt that the only way to be equal was to be separate—at least they would be allowed to develop their art without interference.

The exhibition of The Dinner Party would be the high water mark of the Women’s Movement as the now-famous conservative revolution swept the nation in 1980. One could argue that a decade is simply not enough time to change the habits of millennia. In the end, most women preferred to remain attached to the (male) mainstream traditions and inside preexisting (male) institutions, hoping to succeed within the male world and striving to eradicate the term “woman artist.”

The Feminist Art Movement not only opened doors for non-male, non-Caucausian artists, it also opened the doors for new content that was personal, political and expressive, even decorative and figurative art was made newly respectable, thanks to this new impact. The Pattern and Decoration Movement made “mere” decoration acceptable, if a male did the art; and New Figuration brought back representation, as long as it was a male representation. In a larger sense, feminism was part of art world Pluralism in general and part of a new demand for more content orientated subject matter in art. In the cultural and social sense, feminism was part of the Civil Rights Movement that liberated people of color, gays and lesbians, and that biggest group of all—women.

Jun 22, 2012

The Historical Context of Modern Feminism

MODERN FEMINISM

The Historical Context

Modern feminism is essentially a product of the emancipation of women during the Second World War. Women were once again called into the work force but for a longer period of time and over a greater

5 part of the population than during World War One. The experience of being independent and earning a living was transformative to many women. After the war, the women who had worked in factories and businesses keeping the war effort going were summarily fired and sent home with instructions to be housewives and mother. The removal of women from public life to make room for men was the largest transfer of wealth from one group to another in the history of America. Having no choice but to go home, women complied, but, one by one, they returned to the work force. And yet the idea that women were safely stowed in the domestic sphere became enshrined as an ideal of the “traditional family.”

The separation of the spheres of men and women into the public and the private dates back only a few hundred years and yet these gender specific areas of culture are considered “natural” by many people. Feminism asserts that the idea that women are “nature” and men are “culture” is not ordained but is instead a “cultural construct.” Because women are the eternal Other, always outside a male dominated society which has been made by and for the benefits of men, feminism, as a theory, asserts that women are different from men because they are reared differently and thus have a different social experience, a different psychology, and a different history. But “difference” should not mean “unequal.”

In fact, the idea of the 1950s happy suburban family with mom at home and dad at work was more of a myth than a reality. Most families had both parents working outside of the home. A dual income was necessary to pay for the house, to support the children and to buy the consumer goods pouring off the assembly line. The girls coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s had the women of wartime as role models and grew up expecting or hoping to be independent women. But they, like their mothers, were faced with a maze of discriminatory laws that kept women from achieving their full potential in any profession or walk of life.

But then something called “the Sixties” happened, and culture was turned upside down. The Civil Rights Movement refused to accept unconstitutional laws that codified second-class citizenship. The protests against the Viet Nam War were also refusals, refusals of young men to allow old men to send them off to war. Both movements were refutations of traditional authority and not only shook the foundations of American and European culture but also divided the nation in half, between the traditionalists and the revolutionaries.

Women were very impacted by the Civil Rights Movements and by the Anti-War Movement, both of which were change movements—to a point. Women who had marched shoulder-to-shoulder with men in anti-war demonstrations and who had worked for the civil rights of African Americans found themselves to be second class citizens in the so-called “radical” movements of the 1960s, making coffee, serving coffee, and providing their male companions with the benefits of the Sexual Revolution. Women soon found out that the “revolution” was not meant to include them.

The Return of Feminism

Feminism proposed that women were humans and entitled to the full rights routinely given to men. Feminism showed that men have invisible privileges, privilege of which they are often unaware, privileges that are denied to women. Historically women had always been excluded and it one is to

6 include women into full citizenship it cannot be as a subset of the male. Feminism insisted that women should be included in society and in the culture.

In bringing women out of their traditional private sphere into the public sphere, it was assumed, perhaps naïvely, that if women politely reminded men that they had somehow been left out of the equal right equation that this oversight would be rectified. The early Feminist Movement failed to anticipate the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment from both men and women and failed to acknowledge the power of the desire to maintain the status quo of male domination. They question is why?

The Women’s Movement came out of the Civil Rights Movement and the rights of women is a civil rights concern, but the Civil Rights of people of color were not seen as a direct threat to the dominance of the white male. There were, in the 1960s, simply not enough African-Americans, even in the South, to threaten the status quo in any meaningful way. At that time, the Latino population was not on the radar, so it was morally and ethically expedient to grant civil equality to the victims of slavery. The result was that white men “granted” rights to black men—a male to male transfer of symbolic power.

The Women’s Movement also emerged from the anti-war protest movements. Here the quarrel was generational but the leading actors were also male—young and old men. In the end the old men mollified the young men by ending the draft, freeing the young men to live their lives without having to serve their country in the military. Once again, the solution was a male to male transfer of opportunity power. Both social uprisings were masculine in character. The Civil Rights Movement, coming out of the black churches, was very patriarchal; and the Anti-War movement was very macho and masculinized.

Tired of being sidelined by yet another male revolution, women drifted out of these precursor movements and formed the Women’s Movement. These women were inspired by the 1964 book written by Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique, which was a study of the discontent among housewives. Through the efforts of these early pioneers the Civil Rights legislation was written to include women and the word “gender” in anti-discrimination laws. At the urging of Alice Paul, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included the word “sex” and today the categories protected from discrimination include race, color, sex, creed, and age. Coupled with the invention of the Pill, the results of legalized equality for women would be profound.

Women are half the population and including them as equals was a very real economic, political and personal threat to American men. This revolution was a personal one. The war was a guerrilla war, fought from house to house, from bed to bed, from marriage to marriage. The resistance from men was automatic and instinctual and, during these years, many women had to decide between personal relationships and the actualization of their own lives. The results of this subterranean revolution were subtle but continue decades later. Today women are the majority of those receiving college and graduate and professional degrees. Today women outnumber men in the labor force. Today marriage has declined to an all time low and single parent households headed by women are at an all time high.

When social reforms for women were precisely targeted, resistance from men continues to be stiff. Among the most effective law was the famous Title IX, passed in 1972, a year before abortion was made

7 legal. Title IX gave women equal access to athletic facilities, creating a generation of women athletes, much to the surprise of those who claimed that women “didn’t want” to be athletes. The “Title IX Babies” changed the face of women’s athletics. But some conservative men do not accept the law. On May 14, 2012, Sports Illustrated reported the following,

The world-famous U.S. women’s soccer player was in Sacramento on Monday with her Brazilian counterpart Sissi to be honored by the California Assembly as it recognized the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

The occasion prompted Assemblyman Chris Norby to reveal that he wasn’t a fan of the 1972 federal law chiefly known for mandating gender equity in high school and collegiate sports. The Fullerton Republican said he thought Title IX had come at the expense of male athletes, particularly those who depend on sports scholarships.

“We need to be honest about the effects of what I believe are faulty court interpretations or federal enforcement of Title IX, because it has led to the abolition of many male sports across the board in UCs and Cal States,” he said. “And that was never the intention of this, to have numerical equality. It was never the intention to attain equality by reducing opportunities for the men.”

Standing in the back of the chamber, Chastain, who plays with the semi-professional California Storm in Sacramento, visibly bristled at Norby’s remarks and raised her hand to try to interject….

The high point of the Second Wave of Feminism was that key decade of the 1970s, which was followed by a conservative backlash under the administration of Ronald Reagan. The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a rollback of the gains of the Civil Rights movements, of which the Women’s Movement was part. Affirmative Action was challenged by wounded white males who could not comprehend that they had enjoyed thousands of years of preferential treatment, but the genie was out of the bottle. Determined people of color and women pushed forward, demanding equal rights.

The Feminist Movement, before it is anything else, is political. How can such a legalized oppression, a Constitutional denial of equal rights be justified in a democracy? This is the question that political feminism asks. The slogan of Feminism is “The personal is political.” The continued domination of women by men is justified through a network of laws and customs that systematically disenfranchised women and that routinely privileged men. These laws were made by men for men and relegate women to the “personal” or domestic sector while politically empowering men. The years 2011 and 2012 were years marked by the surprising renewal of attempts to take abortion rights away from women, to limit their access to health care, to take away their right to control their own lives and to protect themselves from violence. The old slogan “the personal is political” was forgotten and never uttered because, by this time, “feminism” was a discredited word.

After the successful campaign to wrest the right to vote for women from the American government, Alice Paul wrote and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment. When she died in 1977, the proposed amendment to the Constitution was still pending but the Women’s Movement was fully underway. As political activism, feminism is an extension of humanism and of the ideals of the

8 enlightenment: all humans are created equal and should be granted equal political, economic, and social rights.

To many women, the Equal Rights Amendment was a necessary correction to legalized denial of equal opportunity for women in the public and private spheres. To other women, the Equal Rights Amendment actually took away “rights.” During the eighties, the issue was over what kind of rights women did and did not have, should and should not have. On one hand, the Amendment addressed legal rights with unknown consequences. Once women legally became the equal of men, there would be a shift in access to power, to the economy, to privilege. As with any law, it is impossible to see into the future and imagine the impact.

However, it was this lack of knowledge that fueled the imaginations of the opponents, because, on the other hand, there was the question of social rights or privileges that had been granted to women by virtue of their gender. For example, women had been exempted from military service and/or combat zones. Women who were housewives felt that their life choice was not being protected—would their husbands still be legally compelled to support them? Was their respected status as “wives and mothers” being downgraded by the feminists?

The arguments for and against the ERA were both biased, probably unconsciously, towards the situation of white middle class women. The women who favored the Amendment felt confident in their ability to compete in what had been a man’s world. Their stay-at-home sisters had the luxury of a middle class income to allow them to make a career of being a wife and mother. The majority of American women lacked the education or opportunity to participate equally in the business world and lacked the social and financial support to opt out.

It will never be known how the Equal Rights Amendment might have changed America. Despite the arguments of the Women’s Movement that women should be given equal rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat in 1982, and on June 30, the opponents held a celebration dinner in Washington, D. C.. The original Amendment was proposed in 1923, so according the timetable of women’s history, it should have passed in 1995. But in 1982, for all intents and purposes, the Second Wave of Feminism had done its work and had run its course.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you. [email protected]

According to Lee Krasner, the art world in New York in the late 1930s was an egalitarian place. Discrimination arrived in the persons of the French Surrealists, renowned misogynists, who considered women to be children or muses. In the 1940s, the few token women in the art world had been either sponsored by or associated with a male in the art world. In the pre-war era, the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe were among the most valuable in New York, but she moved to New Mexico and left the scene

9 in the late forties. A new generation of artists, mostly male, displaced the aging coterie of American Modernists led by Alfred Stieglitz who died in 1946. It was only after the Second World War, when New York became the leading capital of art, that women began to be pushed to fringes of the gallery scene. The memory of important women artists, from O’Keeffe to Gertrude Greene to Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White, evaporated and these women vanished from history.

Krasner and Eileen de Kooning were overshadowed by their famous husbands and their art careers were doomed by the prevailing machismo left over from the war. Although she too was married to a well- known artist (Robert Motherwell), Helen Frankenthaler survived the coupling and the divorce because she was sheltered by Clement Greenberg, the most powerful art critic in New York. Both O’Keeffe and Frankenthaler owed their careers to the attentions of amorous and powerful men who were willing to promote them. It is doubtful that either woman could have succeeded without this male support but, to their credit, they rose above their protectors and became significant artists.

With these exceptions in mind, it is fair to say that in the post-war period most women were ignored or belittled as artists and were rarely shown in galleries or taken seriously. The main reason was economic. Given that art was an investment, a mini hedge fund, no collector would pay the same amount of money for a work by a woman as by a man. The work of women, whatever that work was, was universally devalued in comparison to that of men, and it made no economic sense for a gallery owner who was a business person to carry a commodity that did not bring the greatest monetary gains. The other reason for ignoring women who were artists was the universal male practice of dominating women by excluding them from the lucrative spheres reserved for men.

The term the feminists used was “click”, meaning that something supposedly “natural” “clicked” into place as being part of the culture of male oppression. When the New York art world was introduced to feminist theories, surely one of those moments of raised consciousness had to be the contradiction between the prevailing practice of formalist art criticism which focused on the formal elements of the art work alone and the near complete lack of women and artists of color in the galleries and museums. Clearly, critics and curators were not looking at the work only, as they claimed; they were looking first at the artist and then at the art. The resulting exclusion of women and people of color or gays and lesbians was disastrous for those who were rejected, denying them economic opportunities solely on the basis of gender, race or sexual preference.

The late 1960s and early 1970s was a time of pushback from the gay and lesbian community and from the women in the art world. The American feminist movement was divided into two parts, East Coast and West Coast. Broadly speaking, both feminist movements changed the art world but they did so in different ways. To counteract the male domination in the art world, women in New York challenged the dominate institutions and demanded membership in the boys’ club of the art world. They had to assault the fortresses of the museums and of the established galleries. They had to fight to enter into male dominated fields, such as painting, that had been reified as sites of masculine struggles. They had to confront the entire tradition of humanism in academia, where women were considered problematic students or teachers.

10 The courage of the women art historians and art writers in New York should be noted and applauded. Each took great risks in taking up an unpopular and contentious topic—women artists—and in the process they laid the foundation for a historical discourse on women. If the name of the game in New York was seizing a place in the economic and intellectual terrains, the game in Los Angeles was re- educating women. Women in Los Angeles countered male bias in education by founding separate courses and classes. According to feminist theory, there was an essential “feminine” which would emerge in women’s art if they were allowed to make art freely, taught by women in an all female environment. To those who came later, this discourse would seem “essentialist”, a mere reiteration of Freud’s “anatomy is destiny,” but to the women of the Seventies, it was a necessary concept that enabled them to understand their own art in their own terms.

Other women attempted to reform the unequal education of women as artists. Judy Chicago set up women only programs at California State Fresno and one of her pioneering programs in feminist art making and art teaching was the Feminist Art Program with Miriam Schapiro at Cal Arts. Paralleling the co-ops of women artists in New York, the Woman’s Building was founded in Los Angeles in 1973 and all- women classes were taught there as well. The Woman’s Building, like the co-ops in New York, gave artists a place to gather together and exchange ideas, discuss and critique their art, and, most importantly to exhibit their work. In these early years, a key idea was the deliberate separation of women from men, with the assumption that, without men, women could flourish.

For women artists, Feminism meant a new designation: “Women” artists became a new category to be not excluded but considered. Previously, “artist” was a word referring to men and women-as-artists had existed as exceptions that proved the rule of male superiority. Feminism brought the problems and concerns of women in the arts to the fore, to the relief of those who hoped for an end to discrimination by museums and galleries and universities and to the irritation of women who merely wanted to be “artists” who made “art.”

Thanks to the G. I. Bill, meant to benefit male soldiers, a university education became common and many women naturally followed their brothers to college. During the Viet Nam War, graduate schools expanded and, for artists, it became more and more common to have an undergraduate and a graduate degree. Thanks to Civil Rights legislation, it was difficult to deny women entrance to higher education. As a result, women, seeing an unprecedented opportunity, poured into colleges and into art schools. By the 1970s, the sheer number of women in the art world made progress inevitable, if slow.

The first generation of feminist artists, such as Louise Bourgeois and Nancy Spero, were not successful or recognized until old age. Many of the younger women, such as the late Hannah Wilke, would become significant historical figures but not famous artists. But the next generation of women would benefit from the pioneering efforts of their predecessors and Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine learned how to speak “feminism” without saying the word. They would become famous artists, leaving the qualifying adjective “woman” behind in the dust bin of history.

Some women welcomed the new visibility, others feared being ghettoized by the title “woman artist.” Some women felt that women as artists would make very specific forms of art, not just social content,

11 but formal content. Others felt that women were artists, period, and should make whatever kind of art they wished. Although there were women who ultimately disagreed with the aims of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s, any woman who choose to do so benefited from the efforts of the pioneering women in New York and Los Angeles who felt that the only way to be equal was to be separate—at least they would be allowed to develop their art without interference.

The Feminist Art Movement not only opened doors for non-male, non-Caucausian artists, it also opened the doors for new content that was personal, political and expressive, even decorative and figurative art was made newly respectable, thanks to this new impact. The Pattern and Decoration Movement made “mere” decoration acceptable, if a male did the art; and New Figuration brought back representation, as long as it was a male representation. In a larger sense, feminism was part of art world Pluralism in general and part of a new demand for more content orientated subject matter in art. In the cultural and social sense, feminism was part of the Civil Rights Movement that liberated people of color, gays and lesbians, and that biggest group of all—women.

Modern feminism is essentially a product of the emancipation of women during the Second World War. Women were once again called into the work force but for a longer period of time and over a greater part of the population than during World War One. The experience of being independent and earning a living was transformative to many women. After the war, the women who had worked in factories and businesses keeping the war effort going were summarily fired and sent home with instructions to be housewives and mother. The removal of women from public life to make room for men was the largest transfer of wealth from one group to another in the history of America. Having no choice but to go home, women complied, but, one by one, they returned to the work force. And yet the idea that women were safely stowed in the domestic sphere became enshrined as an ideal of the “traditional family.”

The separation of the spheres of men and women into the public and the private dates back only a few hundred years and yet these gender specific areas of culture are considered “natural” by many people. Feminism asserts that the idea that women are “nature” and men are “culture” is not ordained but is instead a “cultural construct.” Because women are the eternal Other, always outside a male dominated society which has been made by and for the benefits of men, feminism, as a theory, asserts that women are different from men because they are reared differently and thus have a different social experience, a different psychology, and a different history. But “difference” should not mean “unequal.”

In fact, the idea of the 1950s happy suburban family with mom at home and dad at work was more of a myth than a reality. Most families had both parents working outside of the home. A dual income was necessary to pay for the house, to support the children and to buy the consumer goods pouring off the assembly line. The girls coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s had the women of wartime as role models and grew up expecting or hoping to be independent women. But they, like their mothers, were faced with a maze of discriminatory laws that kept women from achieving their full potential in any profession or walk of life.

12 But then something called “the Sixties” happened, and culture was turned upside down. The Civil Rights Movement refused to accept unconstitutional laws that codified second-class citizenship. The protests against the Viet Nam War were also refusals, refusals of young men to allow old men to send them off to war. Both movements were refutations of traditional authority and not only shook the foundations of American and European culture but also divided the nation in half, between the traditionalists and the revolutionaries.

Women were very impacted by the Civil Rights Movements and by the Anti-War Movement, both of which were change movements—to a point. Women who had marched shoulder-to-shoulder with men in anti-war demonstrations and who had worked for the civil rights of African Americans found themselves to be second class citizens in the so-called “radical” movements of the 1960s, making coffee, serving coffee, and providing their male companions with the benefits of the Sexual Revolution. Women soon found out that the “revolution” was not meant to include them.

Feminism proposed that women were humans and entitled to the full rights routinely given to men. Feminism showed that men have invisible privileges, privilege of which they are often unaware, privileges that are denied to women. Historically women had always been excluded and it one is to include women into full citizenship it cannot be as a subset of the male. Feminism insisted that women should be included in society and in the culture.

In bringing women out of their traditional private sphere into the public sphere, it was assumed, perhaps naïvely, that if women politely reminded men that they had somehow been left out of the equal right equation that this oversight would be rectified. The early Feminist Movement failed to anticipate the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment from both men and women and failed to acknowledge the power of the desire to maintain the status quo of male domination. They question is why?

The Women’s Movement came out of the Civil Rights Movement and the rights of women is a civil rights concern, but the Civil Rights of people of color were not seen as a direct threat to the dominance of the white male. There were, in the 1960s, simply not enough African-Americans, even in the South, to threaten the status quo in any meaningful way. At that time, the Latino population was not on the radar, so it was morally and ethically expedient to grant civil equality to the victims of slavery. The result was that white men “granted” rights to black men—a male to male transfer of symbolic power.

The Women’s Movement also emerged from the anti-war protest movements. Here the quarrel was generational but the leading actors were also male—young and old men. In the end the old men mollified the young men by ending the draft, freeing the young men to live their lives without having to serve their country in the military. Once again, the solution was a male to male transfer of opportunity power. Both social uprisings were masculine in character. The Civil Rights Movement, coming out of the black churches, was very patriarchal; and the Anti-War movement was very macho and masculinized.

Women are half the population and including them as equals was a very real economic, political and personal threat to American men. This revolution was a personal one. The war was a guerrilla war, fought from house to house, from bed to bed, from marriage to marriage. The resistance from men was

13 automatic and instinctual and, during these years, many women had to decide between personal relationships and the actualization of their own lives. The results of this subterranean revolution were subtle but continue decades later. Today women are the majority of those receiving college and graduate and professional degrees. Today women outnumber men in the labor force. Today marriage has declined to an all time low and single parent households headed by women are at an all time high.

The high point of the Second Wave of Feminism was that key decade of the 1970s, which was followed by a conservative backlash under the administration of Ronald Reagan. The election of Ronald Reagan signaled a rollback of the gains of the Civil Rights movements, of which the Women’s Movement was part. Affirmative Action was challenged by wounded white males who could not comprehend that they had enjoyed thousands of years of preferential treatment, but the genie was out of the bottle. Determined people of color and women pushed forward, demanding equal rights.

The Feminist Movement, before it is anything else, is political. How can such a legalized oppression, a Constitutional denial of equal rights be justified in a democracy? This is the question that political feminism asks. The slogan of Feminism is “The personal is political.” The continued domination of women by men is justified through a network of laws and customs that systematically disenfranchised women and that routinely privileged men. These laws were made by men for men and relegate women to the “personal” or domestic sector while politically empowering men. The years 2011 and 2012 were years marked by the surprising renewal of attempts to take abortion rights away from women, to limit their access to health care, to take away their right to control their own lives and to protect themselves from violence. The old slogan “the personal is political” was forgotten and never uttered because, by this time, “feminism” was a discredited word.

After the successful campaign to wrest the right to vote for women from the American government, Alice Paul wrote and campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment. When she died in 1977, the proposed amendment to the Constitution was still pending but the Women’s Movement was fully underway. As political activism, feminism is an extension of humanism and of the ideals of the enlightenment: all humans are created equal and should be granted equal political, economic, and social rights.

To many women, the Equal Rights Amendment was a necessary correction to legalized denial of equal opportunity for women in the public and private spheres. To other women, the Equal Rights Amendment actually took away “rights.” During the eighties, the issue was over what kind of rights women did and did not have, should and should not have. On one hand, the Amendment addressed legal rights with unknown consequences. Once women legally became the equal of men, there would be a shift in access to power, to the economy, to privilege. As with any law, it is impossible to see into the future and imagine the impact.

The arguments for and against the ERA were both biased, probably unconsciously, towards the situation of white middle class women. The women who favored the Amendment felt confident in their ability to compete in what had been a man’s world. Their stay-at-home sisters had the luxury of a middle class income to allow them to make a career of being a wife and mother. The majority of American women

14 lacked the education or opportunity to participate equally in the business world and lacked the social and financial support to opt out.

It will never be known how the Equal Rights Amendment might have changed America. Despite the arguments of the Women’s Movement that women should be given equal rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, the ERA, went down to defeat in 1982, and on June 30, the opponents held a celebration dinner in Washington, D. C.. The original Amendment was proposed in 1923, so according the timetable of women’s history, it should have passed in 1995. But in 1982, for all intents and purposes, the Second Wave of Feminism had done its work and had run its course.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you. [email protected]

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