“Why have there been no great women artists?” The question tolls reproachfully in the background of most discussions of the so-called woman problem. Let us, for example, examine the implications of that perennial question (one can, of course, substitute almost any field of human endeavor, with appropriate changes in phrasing): “Well, if women really are equal to men, why have there never been any great women artists (or composers, or mathematicians, or philosophers, or so few of the same)?” Even a simple question like “ Why have there been no great women artists?” can, if answered adequately, create a sort of chain reaction, expanding not merely to encompass the accepted assumptions of the single field, but outward to embrace history and the social sciences, or even psychology and literature, and thereby, from the outset, to challenge the assumption that the traditional divisions of intellectual inquiry are still adequate to deal with the meaningful questions of our time, rather than the merely convenient or self-generated ones. Thus, the so-called woman question, far from being a minor, peripheral and laughably provincial sub-issue grafted on to a serious, established discipline, can become a catalyst, an intellectual instrument, probing basic and “natural” assumptions, providing a paradigm for other kinds of internal questioning, and in turn providing links with paradigms established by radical approaches in other fields. It is the engaged feminist intellect (like John Stuart Mill’s) that can pierce through the cultural-ideological limitations of the time and its specific “professionalism” to reveal biases and inadequacies not merely in the dealing with the question of women, but in the very way of formulating the crucial questions of the discipline as a whole.
Art models female series#
Just as Mill saw male domination as one of a long series of social injustices that had to be overcome if a truly just social order were to be created, so we may see the unstated domination of white male subjectivity as one in a series of intellectual distortions which must be corrected in order to achieve a more adequate and accurate view of historical situations.
At a moment when all disciplines are becoming more self-conscious, more aware of the nature of their presuppositions as exhibited in the very languages and structures of the various fields of scholarship, such uncritical acceptance of “what is” as “natural” may be intellectually fatal. In revealing the failure of much academic art history, and a great deal of history in general, to take account of the unacknowledged value system, the very presence of an intruding subject in historical investigation, the feminist critique at the same time lays bare its conceptual smugness, its meta-historical naïveté. In the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may-and does-prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones. And it is here that the very position of woman as an acknowledged outsider, the maverick “she” instead of the presumably neutral “one”-in reality the white-male-position-accepted-as-natural, or the hidden “he” as the subject of all scholarly predicates-is a decided advantage, rather than merely a hindrance of a subjective distortion. In the former, too, “natural” assumptions must be questioned and the mythic basis of much so-called “fact” brought to light. If, as John Stuart Mill suggested, we tend to accept whatever is as natural, this is just as true in the realm of academic investigation as it is in our social arrangements.
1 Like any revolution, however, the feminist one ultimately must come to grips with the intellectual and ideological basis of the various intellectual or scholarly disciplines-history, philosophy, sociology, psychology, etc.-in the same way that it questions the ideologies of present social institutions. While the recent upsurge of feminist activity in this country has indeed been a liberating one, its force has been chiefly emotional-personal, psychological and subjective-centered, like the other radical movements to which it is related, on the present and its immediate needs, rather than on historical analysis of the basic intellectual issues which the feminist attack on the status quo automatically raises. A version of this story originally appeared in the January 1971 issue of ARTnews.
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