Gender Roles, Sex, and Power.

Throughout the Middle Ages in Europe, the expected roles of women were to be submissive or subservient to their male counterparts. They were seen only as women who should stay in a closed environment, at their homes, raising children and nothing more. However, "despite biblical teachings against them, they became writers, artists, merchants, and nuns, and ran the kingdom when their husbands were away at war" (19, Guerrilla Girls). Women during the middle ages were getting creative, using their skills to embroider their own works of art, write their own creations, and paint their ideas to share with others. Their works illustrated many stories that relate to the way they live their everyday life, often depicted with religious subjects.

Aelfgyva and the Cleric, The Bayeux Tapestry, c. 1086

During the Renaissance, women became even more active, going through "an apprenticeship with another, established artist, then [joining] a guild, a kind of union (later these would become academies), and [setting] up an atelier or workshop of their own" (29, Guerrilla Girls). Most women who worked as artists often worked under artist fathers or other male artists before they could make their own work. Women were beginning to make a steady path, rebelling against their "past roles" of being the subject and object of the male gaze, which definitely shows through the art that they created during the Renaissance. Women artists such as Artemesia Gentileschi painted mythological stories that held many hidden meanings, and possessed the artistic skills to make them powerful and understood.

Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes, c. 1620

By the 19th Century, many women became established and traveling artists, their work becoming well-known and exposed in the western world. They also took advantage of new technology at the time, "like the railroad and steamship--to leave home" (47, Guerrilla Girls). There was also the invention of the camera, and "Photography was great for women artists: because it was brand new, there was no canon for them to be excluded from" (47, Guerrilla Girls). More opportunities for women artists arose, and they jumped at the chance to make themselves successful. Some, like Rosa Bonheur, dressed like males in order to push themselves further in the art world, making their artwork recognized and appreciated, accepted by many.

Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair, 1887

Slowly, but gradually, women's roles shifted from the image of a subservient female to a female who could stand on her own and make a career for herself through art. They possessed the skills and eventually the power to create a rift (no matter how small) in the art world for women to fit in and strive to flourish. No longer are they "women of the house", staying at home, and expected to raise children with no goals in life. No longer do they allow themselves to be depicted only as a subject to men and their perverse ideals of how a women should look in a painting. From the Middle Ages up until the 19th Century, Women have actively changed and rebelled against the "only role" that they were expected to follow.

Works Cited

Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. New York, NY: Thames and Hudson, 2002.

The Guerrilla Girls' Bedside Companion to the History of Western Art. New York: Penguin, 1998. Print.