Picking Fruit: Mary Cassatt's "Modern Woman" and the Woman's Building of 1893

Author(s): John Hutton

Source: Feminist Studies , Summer, 1994, Vol. 20, No. 2, Women's Agency:
Empowerment and the Limits of Resistance (Summer, 1994), pp. 318-348
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178155

REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178155?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Feminist Studies

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 4t

Fig. 1. Mary Cassatt, central panel ot Modern Woman, 48 x 12 teet, 1893. Present locatilon unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 PICKING FRUIT:
MARY CASSATT'S MODERN WOMAN
AND THE WOMAN'S BUILDING OF 1893

JOHN HUTTON

If... we accept the Darwinian theory, that the race has been a
gradual growth from a lower to a higher form of life, and that the
story of the fall is a myth, we can exonerate the snake, emancipate
the woman, and reconstruct a more rational religion for the nine-
teenth century.

-Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman's Bible, 1898

A visitor to the Woman's Building of the Chicago World's Columbian

Exposition in 1893 would have entered through entrances at the east or
west into a large Gallery of Honor. Prominently displayed at south and
north ends of the gallery were large murals intended to illustrate the pro-
gress made by women over history: Mary Cassatt's Modern Woman (the
central section of which is reproduced as fig. 1) and Mary MacMonnies's
Primitive Woman (fig. 2). Although the MacMonnies mural was showered
with praise, Cassatt's depiction of women of the modern world came
under savage attack. Critics denounced the colors ("garish," "crude
greens and blues," "impudent greens and brutal blues"); they attacked
the subject ("cynical," "trivial"), its style ("primitive," "frankly realistic,"
even "Japanese"), and Cassatt herself ("too aggressive").1
The criticisms of Cassatt's Modern Woman do not cohere; each critic
found in the mural whatever she or he detested. Nonetheless, they help
to delineate Cassatt's transgressions-the ways in which her work broke
through the boundaries of accepted imagery for women in the latter
nineteenth century.
Of particular interest here is the manner in which Cassatt reversed the
traditional icon of Eve picking the Forbidden Fruit. The Cassatt mural
has come under increasing attention in recent years; Griselda Pollock has

Feminist Studies 20, no. 2 (summner 1994). C 1994 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
319

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Fig. 2. Mary MacMonnies, Primitive Woman, 48 x 12 feet, 1893. Present location unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 321

noted that Cassatt's invocation of Eve and Eden "questioned, trans-

formed, and subverted" dominant images of Eve and woman. There has
been no detailed attempt, however, to place the Cassatt mural within
contemporary debates on the significance of the Genesis account, both
between feminists and their opponents, and within the feminist camp.2
That debate had an explicit tie to the Woman's Building. Its guide-
book proclaimed "Woman the acknowledged equal of man; his true
helpmate, honored and beloved," announcing to all: "We have eaten of
the fruit of the tree of knowledge and the Eden of idleness is hateful to
us. We ... are become workers, not cumberers of the earth."3
Twentieth-century feminist scholars have examined the Genesis ac-
count extensively as part of an effort to resolve whether the Bible as a
text is recuperative for women or is so thoroughly embedded within a
patriarchal and misogynist discourse that it cannot be so employed.4 The
issue here is related but distinct, semiotic rather than theological: the de-
gree to which a dominant icon can be reworked to revise (or even re-
verse) its conventional significance.
Signs in art and literature are not fixed but floating: Guy Debord and
Gil J. Wolman have stressed: "Any sign is susceptible to conversion into
something else, even its opposite."5 But although signs can float, in prac-
tice a dominant social order seeks to bind the sign, to repress its (poten-
tially) polysemous character, so as to anchor the sign by denying its insta-
bility. This anchorage is obtained through an interacting net of external
codings which not only act cumulatively to deny alternative readings but
also to make that denial seem inevitable, simple common sense. At the
same time, sectors of society which have been marginalized seek to in-
vest commlon signs with their own meanings, to convert them into to-
kens (or promises) of social transformation.6 Cassatt's Modern Woman, to-
gether with easel paintings of women and children picking fruit, repre-
sent noteworthy attempts to construct visual images expressing an alter-
native reading of a familiar social icon which had become a major prop
for the social and legal subordination of women.
The mnanner in which Cassatt sought to overturn that icon cannot, in
turn, be isolated from the forms of her expression. Criticism of Modern
Woman in 1893 centered on its style and coloring (and on its alleged in-
coherence) far more often than it did on the overt message.7 The allegor-
ical elements Cassatt employed seemed to look backward to Cassatt's ear-
ly academic training or forward to Symbolism-to anywhere but to the
"spontaneity" or "naturalism" comlllonly identified with Impressionism.
The notion of Impressionisml as a unified, coherent movement has

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
322 John Hutton

been abandoned in recent literature, however, in favor of a recognition

of the contradictions and disjunctions within Impressionist circles. In
particular, Impressionist women produced a body of images which can
only partly be subsumed within conventional assumptions about Impres-
sionist techniques or subject matter.8 There are as well, precedents with-
in the art of Impressionist women for a kind of naturalist allegory as a
means of asserting the creativity and potential of women.

ADAM, EVE, THE FALL, AND

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FEMINISM

The biblical account of the Fall has been employed since t

buttress claims that women were naturally subordinate to
women (through Eve) were responsible for humanity's ex
adise.9 In the United States, the story of Adam, Eve, and
together with Paul's comments on the story from his epi
through public debate on the "proper" role of women.1l W
Grimke spoke out against slavery in 1836, Congregational
nounced her for violating "the appropriate duties and influe
en" as defined in those texts.ll
Regardless of their own views on religion or the Bible,
century feminists also had to confront these biblical texts. S
responses emerged: the most conservative was to admit Eve's
argue that the life of Mary balanced the equation.12 More m
cates of women's rights drew upon Enlightenment critiqu
to attack the entire Genesis account as absurd. For Mary Wol
the Genesis account demonstrated only the long history
tempts to dominate and control women.13
More common than either-especially in England and
States-was the argument that Paul's epistles had misinterpre
happened in Genesis. The goal was to reshape Eve into a p
of female independence: thus, for the English religious
Sharples, Eve embodied "Sweet and Fair Liberty." In Char
Shirley (1849), the protagonist confronts a male antagonist o
explicitly seeking to rehabilitate Eve.14
The most sustained attempt to recover the Bible as a poten
nist document was The Woman's Bible, a series of comme
by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published between 1895 and
riving from public discussions beginning in the mid-1880
gued that a feminist rethinking of the Bible was a key elem

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 323

en's emancipation, because biblical accounts were central to the effort by

church and state to insist that "woman was made after man, of man, and
for man, an inferior being. . ."15
Several essays in the Womanl's Bible touched directly on the story of
Adam and Eve. Lillie Devereaux Blake argued that Adam was a whiner
and complainer but Eve represented "Life, the eternal mother, the first
representative of the more valuable and important half of the human
race." Lucinda Chandler wrote that Eve had led the human race "out of
the innocence of ignorance into the truth." Stanton herself stressed that
"the unprejudiced reader must be impressed by the courage, the dignity,
and lofty ambition of the woman." Satan
did not try to tempt her from the path of duty by brilliant jewels, rich dresses, worldly
luxuries or pleasures, but with the promise of knowledge .... [H]e roused in the
woman that intense thirst for knowledge that the simple pleasures of picking flowers
and talking with Adam did not satisf'.

Neither Stanton nor her collaborators believed literally in the Genesis

account. Stanton sought to utilize a feminist critique of the story as a
weapon to combat enforced female passivity. Reversed, the idea of Eve's
action as positive, even emancipatory, could serve. as an assertion of the
propriety of women acting independently of man or male demands: "So
long as woman accepts the position [religion] assigns her," Stanton con-
cluded, "her emancipation is impossible."'6 Women had to appropriate
for themselves qualities deemed exclusively "masculine," including initia-
tive, daring, and physical strength. In 1860, Stanton had proclaimed:
The women who are called masculine, who are brave, courageous, self-reliant and in-
dependent are they who in the face of adverse winds have kept one steady course up-
ward and onward ... they who have taken the gauge of womanhood from their own
strength and dignity-they who have learnled for tlhemselves the will of God concerning
them. 17

THE WOMAN'S BUILDING, ALLEGORIES,

AND THE ROLE OF WOMEN

The Columbian Exposition was not the first to have a

ing. At the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876 a Wom
Committee organized a Woman's Pavilion, although
poorly received.18 The Woman's Building of the 1893
and confidence lacking from the earlier project; in 1876
been designed by a male architect, but the 1893 building w
of a national competition among women in the fiel

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
324 John Hutton

Sophia Hayden, was a mechanical drawing instructor with a degree in

architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.19
The Woman's Building quickly became enmeshed in contemporary
debates on the nature and status of women. From its inception, the
Woman's Building was involved in nonstop debate. Should there be a
separate building for women, or should women demand inclusion in the
national and thematic pavilions? Should the building include "high" art,
crafts, or both? Should the exhibits celebrate the progress of modern
women or focus on the ongoing oppression women continued to face?
Behind these discussions were deeper differences over the proper role of
women. Should the building demonstrate that women and men were
both capable of skilled, creative work? Or should the emphasis be on the
celebration of essential differences between the two (with a focus on tra-
ditional "feminine virtues" and crafts)?
Statements in the discussion often oscillated between contending
stances. The decision to include both "high" art and crafts could be pre-
sented, for example, as a rejection of male-defined limitations on what
constituted "art" in favor of a broad focus on women as producers. Can-
dace Wheeler, director of the planning committee's Bureau of Applied
Arts, presented the inclusion of crafts as an insurgent gesture. She noted
that a decision to include only the "best" of women's work sparked
a great and bitter cry, ... which seemed to say: We are of those who had no share in
the past, and are only beginning to live in the present; we are the toilers who are
building up industries for our sisters; we are busy with agriculture, manufactures, and
commerce, with trades and professions, and must we be shut out from the palace of
women because beauty has small part in our lives!

The answer was "all the industries woman has created, shared in, or mo-
nopolized" were to be represented. The result would be a token of a "sis-
terhood of effort," a "reaching out of invisible hands to clasp other invisi-
ble hands," from American Indian women to women of the Orient.20
From another angle, however, that decision could-and did-serve to re-
inforce attitudes about the "proper," traditional feminine sphere. Wheel-
er's critique did not dispute traditional notions of the beaux-arts; it simply
conceded that women had often not been allowed to share in that tradi-
tion-and that, in consequence, the Woman's Building should also exhibit
humbler crafts. The argument also contained a clear colonialist undercur-
rent, in which white middle-class women of North America and West-
ern Europe were the ideal of what women should be, as they summoned
their "savage" counterparts from Africa and Asia "out into the sunlight,
beckoned by the hand of a woman who stands for all that belongs to the

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 325

best estate of women on this most fortunate and prosperous day... "21 A
similar orientation underlay the failure of the building's planners to meet
the demands of African American women for recognition.22
An analogous ambivalence surrounded the issue of gender equality.
Articles praising the Woman's Building exhibited contradictory attitudes
as to the "proper" virtues, rights, and duties of women and men. For the
architect Minerva Parker Nichols the building was proof that talent was
gender-free:
Let the conditions and restrictions be exactly the same as those under which men
work. ... so that the restriction shall be one of ability, and not sex. We do not need
women as architects, we do not need men, but we do need brains....23

Contrast that with the official guidebook:

Nothing is more significant . . . than the fact that none of the eniinent writers who
have commented upon Miss Hayden's work . . . [praised] it by saying that it looks like a
man's work. . . . [Once] the highest praise that could be given of any woman's work
was that it was so good that it might easily be nmistaken for a man's. To-day we recog-
nize that the more womanly a woman's work is the stronger it is. ... If sweetness and
light were ever expressed in architecture, we find them in Miss Hayden's building....24

Conservative critics were quick to attack this ambivalent set of stances

as hypocrisy. One denounced the building as not only a "mortifying and
humiliating display" but a deceitful one as well: while the "New Woman"
insisted on equality, she also insisted upon essential difference, exemplified
by the "Woman's Building" and women's editions of newspapers.25
Yet in practice, contradictory stance(s) embodied in the Woman's Build-
ing were inevitable. The building was both a protest against the oppression
of women and a celebration of women's achievements produced through
existing governments in which women had no voice and which denied
women in many cases the most basic rights. Those who inspired and
shaped the Woman's Building sought to utilize the voice of contemporary
liberal theory to advance the status of women. But liberal theory-already
fragmented in the United States along class and racial lines-incorporated
as a central component a Rousseauesque notion of separate realms for
women and men, reinforced in the United States by traditional religious
emphasis on distinct roles and duties for the two sexes. In this light, insis-
tence on the right of women to participate in public life was inevitably in-
terpreted as the right to act like men. Conversely, women's emphasis on
their accomplishments could be used to reify the idea that women were
naturally good at certain "feminine" tasks. The response was to attempt a
complex maneuver, to uphold both the reality of women's contributions
to society and the necessity for egalitarian changes.26

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
326 John Hutton

That delicate balancing act was epitomized by the speech delivered at

the opening of the building by Bertha Palmer, chair of the building's
Board of Lady Managers.27 Palmer began by attacking the injustice of
the modern industrial world, in which many lived and worked "under
conditions so uninviting and discouraging that it scarcely seems worth
living." Women faced particularly dismal conditions-not only the grim
realities of the industrial world but also prejudice against working outside
the home at all. Palmer criticized the idea of innate spheres for women
and men; its effect was merely to ensure that women had to work harder
to get less. The true heroines of life, she insisted, were those whose work
was exhibited in the Woman's Building "because it has been produced
. . . under the most adverse conditions and with the most sublime pa-
tience and endurance."

Here, however, the argument suddenly switches direction. Palmer in-

sisted that she and her colleagues on the board believed that "every wom-
an who is presiding over a happy home is fufilling her highest and truest
function, and could not be lured from it by temptation offered by factories
or studies." Outside jobs were necessary for those without a happy
home-the wives of "drunkards and criminals" or widows with children.
Palmer spoke for a limited and constricted "equality." Husband and
wife were to serve as complements: "They should stand side by side, the
fine qualities of each supplementing and assisting those of the other."
Each sex had quite distinct and complementary contributions to make;
the goal was a world in which individuals of either sex could "find hap-
piness in the full and healthy exercise of the gifts bestowed by a generous
nature," but, again, those gifts were quite distinct. A woman needed an
education to prepare her for the factory or for the professions and the
arts-but, "more important than all else, to prepare her for presiding over
the home."98
In a study of the imagery generated by the debate over women's suf-
frage in Britain, Lisa Tickner has identified stock types which dominated
the visual debate. One of these-the "womanly woman"-was contested
by both camps, as each sought to ground its claims in a vision of the
"natural order." Regarding the "womanly woman," Tickner notes that
"'womanliness' was a complex construct, full of contradictions and capa-
ble of being exploited to surprisingly diverse ends." Although the con-
cept served as a constraining device, regulating women's sphere of ac-
tion, it also provided women with a sense of identity, "restored to them
socially valued responsibilities, and gave them the moral authority to
pursue an actively regenerative role."29

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 327

Palmer was careful to keep a distance between the Woman's Building

and the movement for woman suffrage.3 Yet Tickner's remarks apply
here all the more: the imagery of the Woman's Building drew heavily on
the idea of "womanliness" as a means of asserting women's status and ac-
complishments in a manner grounded in traditional (and reassuring)
forms and motifs.

WOMEN, CLASSICAL ALLEGORY, AND THE

ICONOGRAPHY OF POWER

The art commissioned for the Woman's Building exempl

asserting the dignity of women in a form derived fro
iconography. These official paintings and sculptures d
upon the allegorical traditions which dominated art in
Exposition as a whole.
It was commonplace in the nineteenth century to rep
virtues as female. It was as natural for women to pick up t
figures. As Tickner stresses, allegorical types "answered the
tify a common category of womanliness across all othe
ences, and to find a means of giving it visual form." She
stock types provided a "rallying point" dependent upo
"idealized womanhood"-a rallying point often ill-suited for
cal critique of femininity.31
To convey an image of woman as worthy of respect, the
Woman's Building drew upon a pictorial tradition they
comprehensible to a broad viewing audience. By incorpo
legorical figures in large-scale paintings, they further asse
and a talent which surrounding society still largely denied
were accepted primarily as amateurs, working on mode
cluding still life, domestic scenes, and portraits.32 To attem
scenes on a grand scale was itself a challenge, in an era i
could routinely deny the right and ability of women to pai
Nonetheless, the employment of traditional allegorical fig
posed costs. Marina Warner has argued that there is an i
ship between the actual empowerment of women and th
of images of women to suggest political or social ideals. The
der comes to depend on this dichotomy, on "the unlikel
practicing the concepts they represent."34
The artworks commissioned for the Woman's Building
group an unstable ground. By their very size and scale

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
328 John Hutton

dominant ideas about the propriety of women's art. Simultaneously, they

utilized artistic conventions and motifs which were in part designed to
preclude the very sort of women's activity which the Woman's Building
represented. They sought to turn a dominant convention against itself.35
We can see the effort in the sculptures which topped the building.
Alice Rideout, a California art student, surrounded winged figures near-
ly twelve feet tall with the seated figures of young women. Here, the al-
legorical female literally brushes against the woman of the nineteenth
century. But the fusion is incomplete. Action and authority are limited
to the Nike figures; the images of modern women sit quietly below
them, reading, sewing, and nurturing children. The contemporary im-
ages act only within the confines of a traditionally defined woman's
sphere; the winged women exist outside of lived experience. In only one
of the sculptural groups is there a form of interaction, but it is limited to
a gestural touch here and there: the scholar (in mortarboard) looks up at
the Nike; her companion reaches out but without touching.
The tension between allegorical image and the women to which it al-
legedly referred was repeated throughout the Woman's Building. We see
it, for example, in Dora Wheeler Keith's ceiling for the library, which
depicted Science (a male) enthroned alongside Literature (a female),
with Imagination (also female) between them as mediating figure.36 The
allegorical images correspond in part to traditional role models: the male
embodies reason/science and the female is equated with the arts. The
balance is shifted toward the female, if only numerically. But if the equa-
tion male=science carried with it not only an allegorical charge but the
weight of dominant ideology, the two female figures represented an ef-
fort to assert for women a place dominant society was far less ready to
grant them. The issue, again, was how to bind that allegorical depiction
of feminine power to the lives of actual women. In the library, that was
asserted by juxtaposing to this mural a display of busts of prominent
women, portraits of women authors, and a case of autographs of notable
women. The allegorical figures hover over the busts and portraits like a
huge canopy, reinforcing the assertions of feminine creativity as they
stare down at them from above. Yet the allegorical image of woman as
creator and producer is still only linked to the activities of historical and
living women by proximity.
Other works in the Woman's Building were less assertive. The image
of women they presented was often compartmentalized and more thor-
oughly acquiescent to dominant cliches. Two anonymous panels in the
French exhibit illustrate the point. The Influence of Woman in the Arts is

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 329

subtitled "She Weeps with the Poet, Consoles and Glorifies Him." In-
stead of balancing the equation, the pendant-The Art of Woman-echoes
the first panel, as its subtitle ("to Love, to Please, and Devote Herself')
indicates. In neither is woman depicted as artist.
In the Gallery of Honor, four panels occupied prominent places on
the east and west walls (between the MacMonnies and Cassatt murals).
The two on the east wall illustrated woman's past: Amanda Brewster
Sewell's Woman in Arcadia (fig. 3) and Lucia Fairchild's The Women of Ply-
mouthl (fig. 4). The panels on the west wall dealt (as did Cassatt's mural)
with women of the modern world: Lydia Emmet's Art, Science, and Liter-
atture (fig. 5), and The Republic's Welcome to Her Daughters (fig. 6), by her
sister, Rosina Emmet Sherwood.37
Woman in Arcadia is an academic pastoral, with women in classical
garb (one seminude) lolling about in a timeless age d'or which conserva-
tives located in the distant past and reformers in the equally distant fu-
ture.38 Critics routinely commented on the stark contrast between this
summer pastoral and Fairchild's depiction of Puritan women engaged in
domestic labor. Fairchild's women wash dishes, hold infants, spin cloth,
sew, and teach. The official guidebook walks a careful line here: after
praising women for their toil, it adds that "unless the higher education
now open to our sex makes women better and wiser wives and mothers
it is a failure."39

Sewell's work depicts (as it romanticizes) what the official guidebook

termed the "Eden of idleness"; Fairchild's painting, in a building theoret-
ically dedicated to the toils of women, is one of the few to show any di-
rect labor. The Emmet and Sherwood panels, by contrast, attempted to
fuse allegory and contemporary life to explore the lives of modern
American women. They share a balance and format: in Emmet's, a
young woman plays the violin; a second thinks; a third arranges flowers;
a fourth sculpts; while another sketches at an easel. Behind them, as
promise of victory, stands a miniature Nike of Samothrace. In her sister's
panel, the Republic (an allegorical female) holds aloft a laurel victory
wreath (with a reserve wreath in her other hand). Women surround her:
one holds a diploma, another a statuette; one plays the guitar, another
tends a small child.

Praise for the Emmet and Sherwood panels tended to be perfunctory

and polite.40 The two are static assemblages, passive even where they
sought to display activity. They registered and categorized feminine
achievement, without asserting it. They hint at public accomplishment
but contextualize the images so as to suggest continued domesticity.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
330 John Hutton

Fig. 3. Amanda Brewster Sewell, Woman in Arcadia, 1893. Dimensions, present

location unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 331

:X

;-MJ

Fig. 4. Lucia Fairchild, The Women of Plymouth, 1893. Dimensions, present location
unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
332 John Hutton

Fig. 5. Lydia Emmet, Art, Science, and Literature, 1893. Dimensions, present location
unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 333

Fig. 6. Rosina Emmet Sherwood, The Republic's Welcome to Her daughters, 1893.
Dimensions, present location unknown.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
334 John Hutton

CASSATT'S MODERN WOMAN

Mary Cassatt was not the first choice by the Woman's Bui
ers; her work was still little known in the United States.
1892, Bertha Palmer had approached Elizabeth Gardner, a s
French academic painter William Bouguereau, to do one of
Gardner rejected the offer in March, on the ground that she
to the physical tasks. Mary MacMonnies was then selected
(at least in part because she had access to a large work
through her husband, who was designing a fountain for th
Cassatt (whom Palmer had met in 1889) was offered the ot
May; Palmer's assistant, Sara Hallowell, had championed C
finest American woman painter.41
Cassatt sought a balance in Modern Woman directly anal
suggested by Palmer's speech. In a letter to Palmer, Cassat
the importance of a public space for women's art, then defin
space (and women's role in it) in traditional terms: "An Am
asked me in a rather huffy tone . .. 'Then this is woman ap
relations to man?' I told him it was." Cassatt continued,
Men, I have no doubt, are painted in all their vigour on the walls of o
to us, the sweetness of childhood, the charms of womanhood. If I hav
some sense of that charm, in one word if I have not been absolutely f
have failed.42

The terms are those in which the Woman's Building itself

tently portrayed. Cassatt's Modern Woman shares with its cou
goal of capturing the accomplishments of women in term
least in part from dominant icons.
The hostility evoked by the mural is thus all the more strik
who hated the building cited the work as a prime reason;
defenders often damned Cassatt's work with faint praise. Elle
asserted that the mural was "cynical," "the one note of di
harmony of color."43 Henrotin questioned both style and con
tended to attack one or the other. The temperance lea
Willard was appalled by the subject matter (what fruit we
ing?), by the absence of men, even by the preference for
tired" women. For Willard, the painting was trivial and "b
nity of a great occasion." Florence Fenwick Miller, writin
Journal, called the mural formally inept and thematically
work "whose garish and primitive character" could not be
those who had not seen it, a sort of ghastly joke in the worst
reviewer in the Mormon Wonman's Exponent, Cassatt's mu

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 335

crude greens and blues," was disharmonious and sarcastic.44

Henry Fuller, writing for the Chicago Record, fleshed out the generic
charge that Modern WoJman was cynical or mocking. After praising the
gentleness of the MacMonnies mural, he attacked Cassatt's: "Miss Cassatt
does not address the eye at all-she assaults it." He continued: "the impu-
dent greens and brutal blues of Miss Cassatt seem to indicate an aggres-
sive personality with which compron-ise and cooperation would be im-
possible. Indeed, Miss Cassatt has a repttation for being strong and daring; size
works witlh men in Paris on their own grolnd. "4 Clearly far more is going on
here than a mere disagreement over colors.
Cassatt sought colors which would recall those of "admirable old ta-
pestries, brilliant yet soft," to create an effect as "bright, as gay, as amus-
ing as possible."46 The critics found the colors (and their application)
thoroughly objectionable: for Fuller, they were too brutal, for Willard,
too vivid, for a critic in the Cliicago Tribulne too "dark and heavy," for
Miller too "garish," for an anonymous writer in the Illustrated American
"a 'greenery-yallery' effort that is not impressive."47 Frances Willard
found the composition inept and possibly un-American-it was not in
accord with "the canons of art as accepted in America," while the mural
as a whole was "pronouncedly Japanese" in its flatness. By contrast, a
critic in Art Amatelr thought Cassatt's panel failed to harmonize with
the gallery's other paintings because of its bright colors and "the frankly
realistic character of the design."48
For all the seeming incoherence of the attacks there are certain clear
points of intersection in the diverse charges. Although Cassatt's mural
was set up in clearly allegorical form, her critics found no allegory in it;
it was meaningless, derisive (perhaps a parody of allegory), or-oddest of
all-too "realistic." Cassatt described her mural to Palmer as bright and
amusing; her opponents saw ugliness or (again) mocking parody. Few
saw "sweetness" and "charm"; seeking to praise some aspect of the mur-
al, Maude Howe Elliott could cite only the painted border, in which
putti-like infants held fruit.49
By contrast, Mary MacMonnies's Primitive Woman was widely praised.
The official guidebook dismissed Cassatt's mural in a curt paragraph, but
the MacMonnies mural was hailed as "a composition which commends
itself to all those who understand and honor the idea for which our
building stands." Henry Fuller saw the MacMonnies painting as the em-
bodiment of gentleness and beauty; the repeated claim was that only the
MacMonnies work was in "the true spirit of mural decoration." 0
Unlike Cassatt's Modern Woman, MacMonnies's mural shows women

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
336 John Hutton

and men interacting. It reaffirms a traditional division of labor: a male

hunter returns with his kill, while women carry off his game and prepare
a cup to quench his thirst. Women plow, carry jars of water, and tend to
their children.
MacMonnies's colors were as cool and soft (light blues and silvers) as
Cassatt's were bright. MacMonnies wrote that a mural should be "a supe-
rior sort of wall-paper, which gives first and above all a charming and agreeable ef-
fect as a whole, but does not strike the eye or disturb the attention. .. ."51 Nor
did her subject irritate, apart from a dispute with Bertha Palmer over the
propriety of certain seminude figures. If the roles depicted were antique,
they were ar least familiar. Although one woman praised the mural as a
prophecy of "the Coming Woman," MacMonnies's women showed no
obvious desire to go anywhere, being (in the artist's words) "without
ambition, content with their lot."52 It is not so much that her images rei-
fied female subordination as that they left open an interpretation in
which that subordination could be seen as transhistorical and "natural."
The terms in which the mural was praised reinforced that reading; re-
peated references to the Pre-Raphaelites and Puvis de Chavannes (Mac-
Monnies's teacher) linked the mural with art which consciously rein-
forced retrograde notions of natural female/male spheres and roles.
Why did contemporary critics find it so difficult to fit Cassatt's mural
into such a tradition of pastoral allegory? Her painting was not the only
one in which females alone were depicted, nor the only one in which
the figures wore modern dress. The attacks on Cassatt's mural stem, at
least in part, both from a distinct notion of what constitutes a symbolic
representation and from the nature of the symbolism itself.

IMPRESSIONIST ALLEGORY?

It might seem odd that an Impressionist artist would produce

ical work at all. Impressionism was routinely attacked and
the manner in which it broke down conventional techniqu
matter. Emile Zola's L'Oeuvre (1886) praised the destructio
dreary imagery of "mythology and Catholicism, the lege
faith, the legends without life," as the most lasting accom
the Impressionist project. The Cuban revolutionary Jose M
"natural" subject matter of the Impressionists as the product
an "epoch without altars," who had replaced outmoded pi
"virile and enriching love for mankind." For Marti, the Im
painted reality in an unmediated manner, without traditio

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 337

and superstitions. Zola described the Impressionist works as "piercing

the wall itself, open[ing] a window upon the world outside." Leon
Bazalgette praised Monet's paintings of Rouen Cathedral for operating
"entirely free from remembrance, from any cult or religious tradition."53
The women who affiliated with the Impressionist circle were, as a
group, attracted to it precisely because of its rejection of academic sub-
jects, techniques, and institutions. Marie Bracquemond wrote that "Im-
pressionism had produced . . . not only a new, but a very useful way of
looking at things," as though "all at once a window opens and the sun
and air enter your house in torrents." Cassatt was attracted by the Im-
pressionists' lack of hierarchy and the freedom of their shows; when De-
gas invited her to participate, she wrote: "I accepted with joy. At last I
could work with complete independence without concerning myself
with the eventual judgment of a jury ... I hated conventional art. I be-
gan to live."54
The idea of Impressionism as a "spontaneous" art, untouched by sym-
bol or allegory, is largely an artifact of early Impressionism-a way of
structuring a theoretical claim for the group while simultaneously assert-
ing the ability to paint nature directly, witlhout any constraining theory at
all. A particular type of allegorical reference can certainly be found in
the works of Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, and Mary Cassatt.
All three had classical training; all three had undergone teaching which
denied to women the right to handle any works on a grand scale, in-
cluding allegory. (Bracquemond, who studied with Ingres, remembered
later that the artist allowed female students the painting only of "fruits, of
still lifes, portraits, and genre scenes.")55 All three developed-apparently
independently-a means to appropriate traditional allegorical representa-
tions of women and transform them, making them into studies of con-
temporary women. In these works, the three sought to break down the
barrier between "timeless" allegory and the living world of contempo-
rary women. In that manner, the female allegory (whose identity as a
pure idea depended on the isolation of the figure from worldly realities)
could be fused with apparently realistic imagery in a synergistic manner:
the allegory took on life because of its association with daily life, while
modern women were linked to the power and authority of the allegori-
cal figure.56
Berthe Morisot's Psyche (1876) provides an example of such a project.
Its appearance is that of a common moment in the life of a young,
middle-class woman of the era: a reflective look in a mlirror as she dresses.
Even that "realist" level reverses the stock cliche of a woman gazing in a

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
338 John Hutton

mirror as the embodiment of vanity; her young woman is not admiring

herself but is pensive, thoughtful. The title Psyche adds other layers: a
"psyche" was a type of large mirror; at the same time, Morisot refers to
the myth of Psyche and Eros.57 Morisot shapes an image which oscillates
between a seemingly naturalist depiction of an observed scene and an
exploration of dominant motifs in themes of the painting of her day.58
A similar layering seems to have baffled viewers of Cassatt's mural.
Traditional allegorical figures were marginalized where not eliminated;
the central segment focused on modern women, engaged in labor. Nor
could the bright colors and bold figures fit comfortably into academic
traditions.
To the extent that Cassatt's figures could be read, they sparked indigna-
tion. Intended (unlike Morisot's Psyche) for a public setting, her mural
not only restated an allegorical theme in modern garb, it also adopted a
deliberately transgressive stance. The repeated claim that the work was
"cynical" is grounded in the mural itself. Other works in the building af-
firmed the dignity of women within a largely traditional sphere; Cassatt
inverts that imagery to suggest something new.
Ernest Bloch has noted that dominant ideologies typically crystallize a
certain "concentration, perfection, and meaning in the status quo." The
goal is to embellish what is, to cover existing injustices with a veneer of
idealism. But that veneer has cracks; the exaggeration of existing social
relations cannot take place without drawing upon a dream (however dis-
torted) of how things should be. Ideology, by drawing upon idealized
images of the past, opens the possibility of realizing those ideals in a new
way, "since they are the expression of what has still not happened. It
makes them useful for sunrise."59 Cassatt appropriated a common myth
and turned it upside down to affirm the possibility of a new beginning
for women, in which Eve's act becomes a process in which adult women
reach for the fruits of knowledge, passing those fruits down to their
young daughters and even to their infant children.60
A comparison of the center panel of Modern Woman with Sherwood's
panel (fig. 6) demonstrates this facet of the Cassatt mural. Her Modern
Woman differs from its counterparts in the boldness of its palette,61 but
also in the valorization of the right of woman to act-apart from men, in
a symbolic grasping of knowledge. An extant study for the mural (fig. 7)
provides some sense of the original, now lost, with its boldness of stance
and expression. Her women do not just embody virtue; they act.
Cassatt's painting differs from its counterparts as well in its relative
starkness and austerity, without the clutter of iconic tokens and virtues-a

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 339

#a ' ' . F - I'M

.... ; ..i . .;.: . ?* . . . . i.... :

,84^/
il, ., .|?i:..
- ..' :*? ;::-
Fi . *
....- '' . . ^,, g- t w
, i-iI. wo

Fig. 7. Mary Cassatt, Woman Picking

1892. Oil on canvas. DesMoines, Co

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
340 John Hutton

ARTf AND H1

Fig. 8. Cover illustration, Art and Handicraft in the Woman's Columbian Exposition,
Chicago, 1893: Oficial Edition (Paris and New York: Goupil & Co., 1893).

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 341

t - J

i
A <

: ' *v

#g -A

AV:

Fig. 9. Mary Cassatt, Women Picking Fruit, 132 x 91.5 cm, 1893. Oil on canvas.
Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art (Patrons Art Fund), Pittsburgh.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
342 John Hutton

.1

.4

..

Fig. 10. Mary Cassatt, Baby Reachingfor an Apple, 100.3 x 65.4 cm,
canvas. Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 343

clutter typified by the cover illustration for the official guidebook (fig. 8):
a young woman stands in front of the building, brushes and palette in
hand. She is surrounded additionally by a loom, books, handwritten
manuscripts, a vase, paintings, and a statuette. She leans back slightly, star-
ing not at the art but at the viewer. She is isolated from these creative to-
kens; she works at none of them.
The persistent charge that Cassatt's women are malproportioned is sig-
nificant here. The contrast between the silhouettes of her adult women
and those of the women in the Emmet and Sherwood paintings (or the
woman on the guidebook cover) is obvious. The others reflect the wasp-
waisted outline of a tightly corsetted woman of fashion. Cassatt's women
wear fuller garments; the outlines are looser and more rounded. Their
clothes are neither the diaphanous tunics of Arcadian pastorals nor the
"proper" garb of bourgeois women; they are contemporary clothing, re-
vised to allow for greater freedom of movement.62
The issues of dress, class, and politics are complicated for this era. Per-
haps Cassatt's sturdy laboring women were read as working, rather than
middle, class. A reading of their freer garb in terms of radical dress re-
form could also have provoked hostility to the mural.63
Cassatt frequently depicted the transmission of skills from mother to
daughter, sister to sister, woman to child. Skills usually treated merely as
colorful depictions of an essential "femininity" were transformed by Cas-
satt into serious endeavors, requiring concentration and practice, from
sewing to driving a cab or playing a banjo.
In Modern Wonman, this theme is repeated: the twelve figures of the
center panel are divided into four groups of three; in each, an older
woman assists a teenager and a young girl in picking the fruit of knowl-
edge, passing it to the infants of the painted border. The issue is thus the
acquisition of knowledge itself and its transmission from woman to child.
Cassatt returned repeatedly in the 1890s to this focus on picking fruit
as a symbol for the transmission of knowledge. Woman Picking Fruit (fig.
9) predates the Woman's Building mural by a year: here, the transmission
is from the standing woman to the seated woman in the foreground,
who holds an apple her friend has already picked. She is posed so that
her flowing skirt bridges the gap between apple and viewer. In the 1893
Baby Reachingfor an Apple (fig. 10), the child reaches out to grasp an ap-
ple, while the mother pulls the branch lower to place the fruit in the
child's reach.64

In the Woman's Building, the goal of giving concrete form to a vision

of women's achievements inevitably incorporated many of the contra-

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
344 John Hutton

dictions embedded in the late-nineteenth-century ideas about women.

The official art of the building, in its use of an allegorical tradition for
purposes which ran counter to many inherent assumptions of that tradi-
tion, found it difficult to fuse traditional icons with concrete depictions
of women as producers and creators in their daily lives. By contrast, Cas-
satt's mural-for all the norms and assumptions it shared with its counter-
parts-broke with conventions of mural painting precisely at the points
where it ruptured conventional assumptions about women. Rather than
an insertion of woman as skilled producer into a conventional iconogra-
phy, Cassatt's work embodied an assertion of the propriety of an active
role for women in society. In rejecting the muted quality of the sur-
rounding murals with her bright colors and bold forms, Cassatt, by an
extension her critics found natural (if deplorable), rejected as well as-
sumptions about the passive, "decorative" qualities ascribed to women as
well. Above all, the work rejected an entire corpus of myths and atten-
dant images from which the surrounding works were derived-focusing
instead on overturning an account used to deny women the right to
speak and act. In Bloch's terms, Cassatt's mural broke through attempts
to utilize (quasi-) utopian imagery to embellish the present, by hinting at
least of a contrasting set of norms and relations. For Cassatt, as for Stan-
ton and her colleagues, Eve's act in picking the forbidden fruit becomes
an essential component of the evolution of humanity toward a new
Eden, an alternative, more egalitarian social order.

NOTES

Thanks to Paula Cooey, Wanda Corn, Paula Hutton, Andrew Parker, Lisa Reitzes, an
Ellen Ross for their assistance and encouragement.

1. Mary Cassatt to Bertha Palmer, 11 Oct. 1892; reprinted in Cassatt and Her Circle: Sele
ters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 237-38.
The Cassatt, MacMonnies, Sewell, Fairchild, Emmet, and Sherwood paintings were all
for and paid for by the Woman's Building. When the fair ended, no effort was made to
most of the arts and crafts displayed. No location is known for these works; they are
lost.

2. Compare John D. Kysela, "Mary Cassatt's Mystery Mural and the World Fair of 1
Quarterly 29 (1986): 129-45; Sally Webster, "Mary Cassatt's Allegory of Modern Woman
con 9 (fall-winter 1979): 39-47; Griselda Pollock, Mary Cassatt (New York: Harpe
1980), 26-27; Ruth Iskin, "Mary Cassatt's Mural of Modern Woman" (paper present
College Art Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., 23-25 Jan. 1975). The m
tailed analysis of the mural, especially in terms of the criticisms of its style and color, is in
Corn, "Style as Politics: Mary Cassatt's Mural of the 1893 World's Fair" (paper presente

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 345

College Art Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, Calif, 14-16 Feb. 1985).
3. Maude Howe Elliott, "The Building and Its l)ecorations," in Art and Handicraft inl tlhe Il o,lln's
Columbianl Exposition, Cllicaco, 1893: Official Edition, (Paris anld New York: GCoupil and Co..
1893), 23.
4. For anl overview of this debate, see Pamela J. Milne, "The Patriarchal Stamp of Scripture: The
Imnplications of Structuralist Analyses for Femlinlist Hermeneutics," Journal ofFem'inist Studices iln Rc-
ligion 5 (spring 1989): 17-34.
5. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman. "Modes of D&tournement." in Sitbuationtist lntcrnational An-
tliology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), 13.
6. Coimpare Elizabeth Cowsie, "Women, Representation, and the Image," Senrc', Education 23
(autumln 1977): 18-19; also, Raymond Williamls, Mlarxlism 1id Literature (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sits Press, 1977), 108-14, 116-17: Timothy J. Clark, "Preliminaries to a Possible Treatmlent of
'Olylnpia' in 1865," Screen 21 (spring 198(): 40.
7. On this, comlpare Corn; see also the discussioin in Jeanne Madeline Weimian, Iihc Falir Ilbfnl-
enl: The Story of- thle [floman 's Biuildin,g, I 'rld's Collumilfia Expositiont, Clhica,to, 1893 (Chicago:
Acadeimy Chicago, 1981), 313-22.
8. See Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flnie,csc: Womeni and the Literature of Modernitx," 7h1cory,
Clultulre, and Society 2 (autunin 1985): 37-46; Tanlar Garb, 14 'omrc Imp-prcssionists (New York: Riz-
zoli, 1986); Griselda Pollock, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity," in her I'isioii rid D!ififr-
cuc,' (London: Routledge, 1987), 5()-90; Linda Nochlin, "Morisot's l't N.\urse: The Conistruction
of Work and Leistire in Iimpressionist Painting," in her II'mcnll, Art, trand Pouclr and Othelr Essays
(Ness York: Harper & Ros, 1988), 37-56; Suzann e C. Lindsay, "Berthe Morisot and the Poets:
The Visual Language of Womien," Heliconr 9 (sullmmer 1988): 8-17; and especially Annle
Higonnet, Bertic .Xlorisot's Illmates itf Iio,lmen (Caimbridge: Harvard University Press, 199))2). For a
dissent tronio Wolff and Pollock, see Elizabeth Wilson, "The Invisible FlRneur." .\Y', Left Rl,'ic'l,,
no. 191 (Januarv/February 1992): 90()-1 1 ).
9. Compare the apocryphal Book of Adaml and Eve (5:5); repriinted ill 71e Lost Books olfttlhe Bihle
and the Forqottenr Books of Eden (New York: World Publishing, 1963); also the apocryphal Book of
Sirach (25:24); also Johnl A. Phillips, E,c: Tlhic Histor), of anl Idea (San Francisco: Harper & I,Row.
1984), 38-51.
10. Bestsellers in the United States included the Rev. John S. Abbott, Tlhe ,otllicr at Homl; or, tihe
Principles of N.aternal Dut), (Boston: Crocker, 1833); John Todd, I om, m's Ri(lits (Boston: Lee and
Shepard, 1867); and Horace Bushnell, Tine Reform agaitnst Na.tulre (News York: ScribneL- & Co..
1869). All derived their basic position froin Paul's first epistle to Timiiothy: "Suffer not a swoiman
to teach, nor to usurp authority over illan.... For . . . the womnian being deceived swas in the
transgression."
11. Elealnor Flexner, Cientury), f Strtugle: Tile 1 'onmanl's R(iQilts IMo,cmeint ill the U['tied States (Forge
Village, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1968), 46-48; also Donna A. Behnke, Rcligioius Isstes in .iinctccntlh-
Century, Feminiiisiim (Troy, N.Y.: Whitson Press, 1'982), 19-39.
12. The roots of this argumllent go deep: see Christine de Pisan, Lc Lilere dc lI Cite des dilames
(1405), I. 9.3. By the eighteenth century, this stance had spuIn off a ilore radical variant amiong
imembers of politicoreligious imilliennialist cults, in which -oilen prophets asserted that they had
coIme to undo Eve's sin. See Clarke Garrett, Respectable Foll': .mlillclarianis ansdi tlh' Frenchl Re,olultionl
inl Francte anid Enigland (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 90(), 219-20.
13. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vi'ndication o tlhe Rilgits of II'tonian, ed. Miriamll Brodv (London: Pen-
guin, 1985), 10)9. See also Mary Daly: "Exorcising Evil fromii Eve: The Fall into Freedomll," in her
Beyoind God the Fatlier: Tou,ards a Phlilosoph),l f HI,omenm's Lilberationl (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973),
44-68. Like Wollstonecraft (although from a sharply contrasting political and theological stance),
Daly argues that the Genesis text was intended froml the ouLtset as a mechanism for repressing
wolmen.
14. Eliza Sharples, froim The Isis, 7 Apr. 1832: quoted in Barbara Taylor, Eec alnd t1he \Yeus,
Jeruisalemil: Socialisi and F eminism in tIe Ni:ietee('itll Cenltur), (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 146;
Charlotte Bront', Slirle,y (London: Everynman's Library, 1983), 252-53, 259-61. For a less ssweep-

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
346 John Hutton

ing American entry along the same lines, see Judith Sargent Murray, "On the Equality of the
Sexes," The Massacllhsetts Magazine, March 1790, 32-36; April 1790, 223-26; reprinted in The
Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauwoir, ed. Alice S. Rossi (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1973), 18-24; the quotation is from p. 23.
15. Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., Tle Woman's Bible, 2 vols. (1895, 1898; reprint, 2 vols. in 1,
New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1: 7-8.
16. Stanton et al., 1: 26-27; 2 (1989): 165-66; 1: 24-25, 13.
17. Stanton, in Susan B. Anthony, Mathilda Joslyn Gage, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, eds. Histo-
r)y of Woman S!ffrage, 2 vols. (1881; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1969), 1: 684-85; emphasis
added. For further discussion on this speech, see Mary Loefferholz, "Posing the Woman Citizen:
The Contradictions of Stanton's Feminism," Genders 7 (spring 1990): 87-98.
18. Judith Paine, "The Wooman's Pavilion of 1876," Feninist Art Jounial 4 (winter 1975-76);
Weimann, 1-4. Ridicule centered on a statue of Iolanthe carved from butter.
19. For the competition, see Judith Paine, "Sophia Hayden and the Woman's Building," Helicon 9
(fall/winter 1979): 28-37; Weimann, 141-80. See also Elizabeth G. Grossman and Lisa B. Reitzes,
"Caught in the Crossfire: Women and Architectural Education, 1880-1910," in Arcliitecture: A
Place for Women, ed. Ellen Perry Berkeley (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press
1989), 27-39, for the impact of "professionalization" of architecture on the careers of women in
the field.

20. Candace Wheeler, "A Dream City," Harper's Malazine 86 (May 1893): 838.
21. Ibid., 838; see also Weimann, 393-425. A good example of the attitude noted here can be
found in the official guide and handbook-Elliott, 44-45.
22. For the protests against the exclusion of women of color from the national and state boards
and fromi the exhibits, see Weimann, 103-24. (In fairness, the entire exposition suffered from
the same problem.) Stanton herself-and several other suffragists, including Susan B. Anthony-
engaged in several (transitory) alliances with racists in this period. See Angela Davis, Womnen,'
Race, and Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1981), 70-86. For the manner in which the exposi-
tion as a whole dealt with non-Western cultures, see Curtis M. Hinsley, "The World as Market-
place: Comnmodification of the Exotic at the World's Coluimbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893," in
Exliiliting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of .lAllselum Display, ed. Ivan Karp an Steven ID. Levine
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), 344-65.
23. Minerva Parker Nichols, "A Woman on the Woman's Building," American Architect and
Buildi1ng N'les 38 (1892): 169; quoted in Grossman and Reitzes, 32.
24. Elliott, 28.
25. Margaret I)eland, "The Change in the Feiniine Ideal," The Atlantic Monthllly 105 (1910):
298. Defenders of the building sometimes sought to bridge the contradiction identified by De-
land by presenting the Woman's Building as a necessary project-but one not to be repeated. See
Alice Freeman Palmer, a member of the Massachusetts Fair Board (and former president of
Wellesley), "Some Lasting Results of the World's Fair," The Fornu 16 (1893): 517-23.
26. See the discussion in Loefferholz, especially 95-96.
27. The speech by Bertha Palmer is reprinted in Benjamin C. Truman, History of the World's Fair
(Philadelphia, 1893), 175-83.
28. For a similar balancing act to Palmer's, from the same period, see Cora Maynard, "The
Woman's Part," The Arena 7 (1893): 478-86.
29. Lisa Tickner, Tlie Spectacle of Women: Inlagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-1914 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1988), 172-226; the quotation is from p. 216.
3(). See the discussion in Weimann, 492-96, 517-19.
31. Tickner, 22(; compare the development of the ideal of "feminine art" in France: Tamar
Garb, "'L'Art feminin': The Formation of a Critical Category in Late Nineteenth-Century
France," Art Histor) 12 (March 1989): 39-65.
32. The critic Paul Mantz, for example, had damned Berthe Morisot with faint praise in 1865,
asserting that because they required no long training to depict, women succeed quite well at
paintinig domestic objects, such as "a copper pot, a candlestick, and a bunch of radishes. ."

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 of:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
John Hutton 347

Quoted in Garb, Women, Impressionists, 6. In France, the annual exhibitions of the Union des
femmes peintres routinely evoked such critiques, across the political spectruiim. See Charles Bon-
heur, "Art: La Huitieme exposition de l'Union des femmes peintres at sculpteurs," Clirontique mio-
dertie, 15 Mar. 1889, 25-28; Eugene Demolder, "Chronique artistique." La Ssci[t't nom,elle (1888):
482; Saint-Remly, "Causerie," L'Art danls lhs dewii monde(s, 28 Feb. 1891. 166.
33. Compare Bonheur, 25.
34. Marina Warner, .lonuiments anid lMaidens: Tlhe Aleqor), of' the Femal' Forsmni (New York: Wei-
dentfeld and Nicholson, 1985), xx; she also adds, however, that "a svlnbolized feIimale presence
both gives and takes value and Imeaning in relation to actual women, and contaiins the potential
for affirmation....."

35. Aspects of this struggle are discussed in Pollock. I isi,mn atnd Ditflrcfrnce, 1(.
36. Wheeler, 838.
37. The Emmet sisters and Dora Wheeler Keith all studied at the Acad&nie Julien in Paris and
with William Merritt Chase in the United States. Emmet studied as well with Bouguereau in
Paris, as well as with MacMonnies's husband, Frederick. See Weiiimann, 31()-11.
38. This sort of pastoral often bore a reactionarn ideological charge: see Claudine Mitchell,
"Time and the Idea of Patriarchy in the I'astorals of PLuvis de Chavannes," A.t Histor), 1() (June
1987): 188-202.
39. Elliott, 33. The labors of colonial wonien could also challelnge dominialnt iimagery: the
Methodist minister Anna Howard Shaw denounced the popular painting Tlhe Landing sf tile Pil-
grim Fathers in 1893 for the way in which it denied a contribution bv women:1; see Weimlann, 539.
4(). See, for example, Elliott, 33.
41. Weimann, 181-95. For a rather different account, see also Nancy Hale, .Ifar1 Cassatt (Read-
ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 159-63; Hale omits any imention of Sara Hallowell's role.
42. Cassatt, in Selected Letters, 238.
43. Ellen Henrotin, "An Outsider's View of the Woman's Exhibit," Thle Cossmopolitan 15 (Sep-
tenmber 1893): 561.
44. Florence Fenwick Miller, quoted in Weiimann, 314-18. Edahoo, "Personal Imlpressions of
Art at the Columbian Exhibition," t4ISnitan's E.xponstent. 15 Mar. 1894, 7()(). (Thanks to Lisa
Reiztes for this citation.)
45. Henry Fuller, The Chicago Record's History ofthle 1%'irld's Falir (Chicago: Chicago l)ail- News,
1893), 106 (emphasis added). The miiural did have somle stupporters: see Wheeler, 842.
46. Cassatt, in Selected Le'tters, 238.
47. "Woimen at the Fair," The Illuistrated Amlericali, 1 July 1893, 76(3; Weimannl, 314-1 8.
48. Weimann, 314, 317.
49. Elliott, 32; see also Edahoo, 7()(), who praises only the infints: "The border is beautifollv
painted, the children charminig."
5(0. Elliott, 31-32; Weimlann. 316, 318; also see Edahoo, 7()(1.
51. Burnham Archives, Reyerson Librars, Art Iinstitute of Chicago; see also Weimann, 2()(-7
(emphasis added).
52. See the letter of MacMonnies to Bertha Paliner in Weiinann, 211)-I 1. MacMonnies (p. 21 1)
did make a conscious attack on the notion that mien alone could paint large allegorical scenes.
53. Emile Zola, L'Oenivre (Paris: Charpentier, 1886), 399; Jose Marti, "Nueva Exhabicion de los
pintores inmpresionistas," in his Obras completas (La Habana: Editorial Nacional de Cuba, 1964).
305; Leon Bazalgette, L'Esprit noivileacx- danis la iic artistique, sociale, et rchlimicusc (Paris, 1898). 376.
See also Robert L. Herbert, "The Decorative and the Natural in Monet's Cathedrals." in .4Asp('ts
of Monet, ed. John Rewald and Frances Weitzenhoffer (Nexx York: Abramlls, 1984), 162-79.
54. Quotations are froln Garb, Wotnenl Inmpressionists, 9; Pollock, .lar), Cassa.tt, 9. Morisot's attrl-c-
tion to Impressionism as a "liberating" mIovemnent is imore probleimatic; for contrasting vievw-s. see
Anne Higonnet, Berthie Alorisot (New York: Harper & Row, 199)1), 94-1I)4: Kathltell Adler- and
Taimar Garb, Berthe .VIorisot (London: Phaidon, 1987), 1()2.
55. Marie Bracquemond, quoted in Garb, `'(dmmienm Ishnprcssimolnists, 6.
56. For the manner in which a woman artist cotuld identifs herself wvith man .ltcllcoilcal ftclilc mim-

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
348 John Hutton

age, see Mary D. Garrard, "Artemisia Gentileschi: Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting," Art
Bulletin 62 (March 1980): 97-112; revised and expanded as a chapter of her Artenisia Gentilescl
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 337-7).
57. See Adler and Garb, 93-97. They see the picture, however, as "entirely in keeping with the
prescriptions for women of her time." For a rather different critique, see Pollock, Vision and Dif-
tirence, 81; also, Whitney Chadwick, /Womecn, Art, and Society (London: Thames & Hudson
1990), 221.
58. Marie Bracquemlond's Three Graces (1880), a study for all unfinished major work, attempts an
analogous layering of allegory and modern life for women, seeking to bridge the gap between fe-
male images which signified power and/or prestige and living women, who had neither. See
Garb, 11omen Inprcssionists, 34.
59. Ernest Bloch, "Art and Utopia," in his Utopian Flunction of Art and Literature: Selected Essays,
ed. and trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 110-26.
6(). The thick, painted borders between the three segments of the mural feature tondi in which
babies catch or hold fruit.
61. On this, see Corn.
62. See Hale, 164.
63. On this, see Katrina Rolley, "Fashion, Femnininity, and the Fight for the Vote," Art History
13 (March 1990): 47-71. Rolley notes that the British suffragists of the Women's Social and Po-
litical Union were leery of any hint of "radical" ideas on fashion, however unsuitable the garb of
middle-class womien might have been for protesting.
64. In Cassatt's Gatllcring Fruit, a color print from the same year, a woman holds a baby up to-
ward the fruit, while another on a ladder passes the fruit down. The chain is complete: woman as
teacher and gatherer of knowvledge fuses with woman as mother/nurturer.

This content downloaded from

81.252.139.117 on Tue, 20 Oct 2020 12:53:29 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms