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The early work of Griselda Pollock in the context of developing feminist

thinking in art history and criticism.

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Hilary Robinson
The early work of Griselda Pollock in the context of
developing feminist thinking in art history and criticism
Abstract
This paper explores Griselda Pollock’s early work of the 1970s. It traces her
development of feminist critiques of Art History and her paradigmatic shifts in
developing feminist methodologies of writing about art. This is placed within the
context of 1970s UK feminist thinking, e.g., the feminist magazine Spare Rib; the
little-researched Feminist Art History Collective; and the engagement of feminist
thinking about culture with socialist and Marxist thinking, including John Berger,
and labour movements. The paper also differentiates between Pollock’s context and
development and the American feminist art history movement. The paper names a
product of Pollock’s feminist work of the 1970s as an ‘activism of process’ – her
bringing together of feminist methodologies, feminist politics, and academic
practice, and thanks her for her tireless pursuit of this in her life’s work.

Keywords: Griselda Pollock; Feminist Art History; Spare Rib;

Hayward Annual II; Old Mistresses; John Berger; Linda Nochlin

1
 While I would answer in the affirmative to the
question ''Are you a feminist?'', I could not do the same
if asked ''Are you an art historian?'' I am always
tempted to ask, as I did at the Women's Caucus in
1990, ''Can Art History Survive the Impact of
Feminism?'' (Pollock, ''The Politics of Theory:
Generations and Geographies in Feminist Theory and
the Histories of Art Histories'' 18)

It took me two years to summon the courage to ask Professor

Griselda Pollock if she would be my PhD supervisor. At that point, in
the early 1990s, her output was already wide-ranging, challenging,
exhaustive, consistent, tireless, intimidating, even, in its quantity,
which never sacrificed quality. Above all, it was inspirational. Each
page demonstrated the breadth of her knowledge and the depth of her
thinking, and no-one doing feminist work on art could do so without
acknowledging her influence on the field. Three of her books had
already become canonical, starting with the paradigmatic Old
Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology, co-authored with Rozsika
Parker, followed by Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and
Histories of Art, and Differencing the Canon: Feminism and the
Writing of Art's Histories. She was also known for having built up
sustained bodies of work on particular artists, including Mary Kelly
and Lubaina Himid. Above all, she was known for having changed
utterly how feminists can think about visual culture and the
structuring of women's presence within its production and reception.
Since then, her work has only expanded further, with books such as
Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the
Archive, work on artists such Charlotte Salomon and Bracha
Lichtenberg Ettinger, and with her development of particular strands
of thought including on trauma, the maternal, and the virtual feminist
museum.
What is less known about Griselda Pollock's work,
particularly for a new generation of readers, is its genesis within the
UK women's liberation movement, in its early years of activism and
development of feminist theory. It is this early period of Griselda

2
Pollock's work, the 1970s, that I will address, up to and including Old
Mistresses. My aim is to ground consideration of her work in that
political moment of the UK women's liberation movement – a distinct
emergence within the longer movement of feminism, situated in the
broader context of radical and socialist activism in the social history
of the UK. Only with this understanding of the development of
Griselda Pollock's thinking, and of its historical place and formation,
can her full project be understood.

Background

The antecedents to the modern feminist critique of Art History and of

art criticism can be found in the book that was a catalyst to the
women's liberation movement, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex
(published in French 1949 and in English 1953). De Beauvoir's
critique of western (Euro-centric) culture as patriarchal, produced
primarily by men for the benefit of men and masculinity, includes
analysis of mythological representations of women, the contrasting of
binary differentiations such as creation and procreation, and a critique
of gendered language, as well as analysis of reductive thought and of
the economic circumstances perpetuating women's status as the
second sex. Her two most important arguments are first, that
womanliness, or femininity, is socially constructed: book two of The
Second Sex famously begins ''One is not born, but rather becomes, a
woman''; and second, that woman is constructed by patriarchy as
''other'' to man, who is the normative standard. A decade later, Betty
Freidan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) was primarily concerned
with the position of women acculturated as wives, mothers, and
homemakers: while situated as American and at that particular
moment in history, the book is less aware of its class- and race-
specificities (white, Jewish, middle class); and although it focuses
upon the construction of femininity – the ''feminine mystique'' –
through advertising and magazines, it does not pay attention to art,
literature, and language. It took the further development of the
women's liberation movement through the 1960s to deepen and
extend feminist thinking in relation to the arts.1

3
 In 1970, three highly influential books by feminist activists
were published, taking the Anglophone women's liberation movement
of the 1960s to a new level. Of particular note is that each of the
authors was from an art or literature background, reflecting the
engagement of the arts with feminist and counter-culture activism,
and with the critique of patriarchy from that early point in the
development of the movement. American artist and writer Kate
Millett published Sexual Politics, which emerged from her PhD thesis
at Columbia University, New York;2 Canadian artist and activist
Shulamith Firestone, who had recently graduated from the MFA
programme at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, published
The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution3; and
Australian literary academic Germaine Greer, who had been living in
the UK since 1964, published The Female Eunuch. Each author had a
distinct position from which she analysed what Millett now named
sexual politics: Millett herself was a radical feminist; Firestone was a
Marxist feminist; and Greer, the Cambridge scholar who had been
very much involved with the counterculture and the sexual revolution,
and its publications such as Suck and Oz, described herself as an
anarchist communist4. Their agendas for social and political change
were set out first in English to Anglophone, Euro-centric cultures, and
then exported through the many languages into which they were
translated. (Non-anglophone cultures produced other writings – for
example, those of artist Carla Accardi and art critic Carla Lonzi in
Italy, who together founded Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt) and
wrote its manifesto in 1970. It is thus important to recognise that
feminist thinking and activism in art was not exported from the USA
and UK to other contexts and cultures but was occurring in other
languages and countries concurrently. Yet it is also necessary to
acknowledge the influence of the publishing industry, the hegemony
of English-language authors, and the greater willingness to translate
and export from English into other languages, rather than import
thinking from elsewhere into English. Thus, for the purposes of this
text on the context of Griselda Pollock's early writing, I am
necessarily focussing on what was then currently available in
English).

4
1971-1972: Linda Nochlin: ''Why Have There Been No Great
Women Artists?'' and John Berger: Ways of Seeing

It was in 1971 that what we now refer to as feminist art history,

theory and criticism emerged in print in the English language. This
can be seen as the beginning of a sustained analysis and critique
informed by theory developed within the women's liberation
movement, of artworks, the academic discipline Art History, the
canon, and the broader environments of the art world and art
education. Given this context, much art historical writing was first
tested in the classroom. For example, Linda Nochlin's January 1970
class at Vassar College – Art 362A: ''The Image of Woman in the 19th
and 20th Centuries'' – laid down the research and thinking for her
paradigm-shifting article ''Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?'' published a year later – a firecracker made of words thrown
into the centre of the American art world through the pages of
Artnews. Nochlin has elsewhere described her discovery of the
women's liberation movement as ''rather like the conversion of Paul
on the road to Damascus: a conviction that before I had been blind;
now I had seen the light.'' (Nochlin 1994, 130) For her, the discovery
came through reading rather than activism:
This was brilliant, furious, polemical stuff, written from the
guts and the heart, questioning not just the entire position of
women in the contemporary New Left and anti-Vietnam
[War] movements (subordinate, exploited, sexually
objectified) but the position of women within society in
general. And those articles […] were above all striking in their
assertion that the personal was political, and that politics,
where sex roles and gender were concerned began with the
personal. (130)
She could be describing the reaction of many people reading her own
article: she is certainly describing her approach to writing it.
Nochlin's title ''Why Have There Been No Great Women
Artists?'' names the impossible question – impossible, because in
answering it one submits to the premise, definitions, and prejudices of
the question. The first reaction of feminist scholars, says Nochlin, is
to research overlooked women and ''to engage in the normal activity

5
of the specialist scholar who makes a case for the importance of his
[sic] very own neglected or minor master,'' which does ''nothing to
question the assumptions lying behind the question […]. On the
contrary, by attempting to answer it, they tacitly reinforce its negative
implications'' (Nochlin 1971, 147-148). Another response is to argue
for ''a different kind of 'greatness' for women's art […] a distinctive
and recognizable feminine style'' (148) – an approach Nochlin
demolishes by contrasting the ''masculinity'' and ''femininity'' of
various styles and artists, and by naming men who have focused upon
the realm stereotypically deemed to be that of women – home and
children. This argument is based upon ''the naïve idea that art is the
direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a
translation of personal life into visual terms.'' Women, she states, are
''closer to other artists and writers of their own period and outlook
than they are to each other'' (149). Where attention is needed is not in
seeking hidden or lost women artists, nor arguing for different criteria
by which to judge women's work. Instead, we need to question
everything about the institutions and the assumptions that inform the
title's question:
The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual
cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions
and our education – education understood to include
everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this
world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals. (150)
From this point on, Nochlin's essay deconstructs one aspect after
another of art institutions: the concept of ''genius,'' the myth-making
in Art Historical writing, the historical lack of expectations of girls
and the lack of exposure they historically have had to practice art, the
propriety that forbade women from studying from the nude (an
essential requirement for becoming a major artist), the
accomplishments expected of middle-class women versus the
professional ambition expected of their brothers, and the choice (not
required of men) between career and family. She culminates with a
case study of Rosa Bonheur, and her negotiations of both
practicalities (such as wearing trousers in public) and social
expectations – her understanding of her own ''femininity.'' Nochlin's
conclusion is that the institutions and intellectual structures of the art

6
world need to be analysed and critiqued, rather than seen
predominantly in terms of the individual or private circumstances for
any given woman artist; and that contemporary women must face up
to this: ''Disadvantage may indeed be an excuse; it is not, however, an
intellectual position'' (176).
This is the background of feminist thinking that was, in part,
to help form Griselda Pollock's early feminist work. I say ''in part'' as
the context for feminism in the UK was very different from that in the
USA and thus from the experiences of Nochlin, Firestone, and Millet.
For North American white women like them, feminism developed as
a campus movement (the experience for African-American women in
the broader context of the civil rights movement was quite distinct).
In the UK however, the women's movement developed primarily off
campus, and often in the context of trades' union activism, the co-
operative movement, the labour movement (including important
organisations like the Workers' Educational Association or WEA),
and intellectual movements aligned to these such as the ''New Left'',
and debates within Marxist thinking. While people were reading
''Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'' in the USA, two
similar fuses were lit under the UK art and Art History establishment:
the first was by a man, with his male colleagues, using established
means of communication and dissemination of thought: the BBC and
Penguin Books; the second was a classic example of local organising
within the UK women's liberation movement.
Ways of Seeing was first a television series of four 30-minute
episodes written and presented by John Berger, broadcast on 8 th,15th,
22nd, and 29th January 1972; then it was published as a book, with the
same title, later the same year.5 Both series and book were polemical
and rhetorical, and together had a profound effect upon how people
(not just academics) thought Art History could be done.
Acknowledging its indebtedness to the ideas of Walter Benjamin, the
book was a collaboration that included its designer, Richard Hollis
and the TV series was a collaboration that included its director,
Michael Dibb. The interplay between text and image and their
placement on the pages of the book helped construct the arguments
about visuality that were being put forward. The television series used
its medium in a way that had not happened before. It brought

7
awareness of the construction of the presentation by including shots
of the crew, by having Berger speak in front of a blue screen, by
demonstrating the power of background music, and so forth. In both,
representation is not simply the object of study but self-consciously
part of the proposition being made. Ways of Seeing presented fine art
as just one of a number of means of representation, arguing that social
values are maintained through visual representation and that social
change can be achieved through shifts in representation. In this way it
can be seen as a precursor to the field of Visual Culture and work
such as Judith Williamson's Decoding Advertisements (1978), and the
anti-colonialist-, Marxist-, feminist-engaged journal BLOCK which
ran from 1979-1989 and whose editorial board included feminist art
historian Lisa Tickner.
In Ways of Seeing, the second episode of the TV series and the
third chapter in the book focused upon representations of women and
femininity, presenting a continuum of representational tropes between
oil painting, advertising, and pin-ups. Berger juxtaposes Ingres with
glamour photography, and brings the discussion of paintings of the
female nude into their social contexts in the boardroom and other
places of male decision-making. He discusses such images as
buttresses of (hetero-normative) masculinity, and as providers of
reassurance for men. At the start, the representation of women is
described as a social dynamic:
One might simplify this by saying: men act and women
appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being
looked at. This determines not only most relations between
men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.
The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed
female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most
particularly an object of vision: a sight. (Berger 47)
As Berger later said ''Although there were no women on our team, we
were all in sympathy with the feminist struggles of the time. We said
things about the male gaze that just weren't said on the BBC, though I
wouldn't claim we were the first to think of them'' (Abbot, ''How We
Made: John Berger and Michael Dibb on Ways of Seeing''). Ways of
Seeing was a presentation of thinking about art and Art History that
was revelatory and that emerged explicitly from both Marxist and

8
feminist thinking. Berger at the time was the art critic for the left-
wing political and cultural journal The New Statesman, and Ways of
Seeing turned him into what we would now call a public intellectual.
That he incorporated feminist thinking into his work was crucial for
the development of the ''new art history'' in the UK. Not only did it
establish the incorporation of feminist thinking in left critiques of
culture and art history, it was a continuation of the foundation of the
UK women's movement in class politics, unions, and Marxist
thinking.

1973-1975: Women's Art History Collective

The following year, British feminist activism interacted with the art
world in a way that was to have long-lasting impact. From 7th-28th
April 1973, artist Monica Sjöö (born in Sweden, but resident in the
UK) was one of five artists in an exhibition called Women's Art at the
Swiss Cottage Library in London.6 Following complaints from an
evangelical group called The Festival of Light, the police visited the
exhibition to see if the complaints could be upheld under obscenity or
blasphemy legislation. They decided they could not; but Sjöö went
ahead with convening a public meeting on 1st July 1973 with the aim
''to discuss possible action collectively, art and revolutionary action
etc. TO ATTACK THE REACTIONARY MALE ART
ESTABLISHMENTS ETC. TO SIMPLY COME TOGETHER,
SHARE OUR VISION, LOVE, EXPERIENCE'' (Sjöö 188-190). One
of the results of this meeting was the formation of the Women's Art
History Collective. It was a group that met regularly for only two to
three years, but members of it, particularly Anthea Callen, Rozsika
Parker, Griselda Pollock, and Lisa Tickner, went on to develop and
publish feminist thinking about art that was enormously influential,
shaping the way the field developed in the UK and beyond. Set up to
''attempt some analysis of women's position in, and in relation to, the
history of art and representations'', the group had three impulses:
firstly, an identification with the direct relevance of the issue
to ourselves and our work as part of a political movement of
women and secondly a response to the still limited literature
on the subject [… which] highlighted many important

9
 problems but was not on the whole theoretically very rigorous
or helpful. […] A third influence was the attempt made by
certain feminist artists to provide what they termed an
alternative and positive imagery of women which, though
important in terms of the political solidarity it encouraged, in
fact foregrounded the impossibility of challenging existing
imagery without an adequate theory of ideology and
representation. (Pollock, ''What's Wrong with Images of
Women?'' 25)7
The members were Denise Cale, Anthea Callen, Pat Kahn, Tina
Keane, Rozsika Parker, Griselda Pollock, Alene Strausberg, Lisa
Tickner, and Anne de Winter.8 They affiliated the Collective with the
Women's Workshop of the Artist's Union, where Tina Keane, who
focused more on her artwork, was an active member, along with
artists such as Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt, Alexis Hunter and Mary
Kelly. Lisa Tickner went on to produce important work on body
image, sexuality, and difference in artwork by contemporary artists,
as well as on the visual culture of and about the suffragettes, and on
sex, gender, and modernism; Anthea Callen, while practicing as a
painter, also wrote about women artists in the Arts and Crafts
movement, as well as 19th century French artists including the
representation of women in painting, and women as spectators.9
The partnership of Parker and Pollock that developed both
inside and outside the Collective created not only one of the germinal
books for the feminist engagement with art history, plus a second
book that is an important history of the early feminist art movement
in the UK, but also made a significant contribution to the
development of criticism about feminist art in sites like the feminist
journal Spare Rib, as well as numerous smaller projects.10 But to start
with, the Collective ''had to cobble together a resource pack for our
assault on art history. We had Nochlin just, [Jan] Myrdal and Berger''
(Pollock, ''Muscular Defences'' 7).11 Together they developed
theoretical and strategic practices that formed the basis for their
subsequent individual work. Pollock has described the Collective as
''A typically feminist group of that date, an informal auto-didactic
collective'' (Pollock, ''The Politics of Theory: Generations and
Geographies in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories''

10
11), going on to outline how such collectives functioned, ''established
in the radical tradition of workers' self-help groups and feminist
consciousness-raising. We formed reading groups to study Marx,
Lacan and Foucault.'' This led to awareness of ''the cultural
intellectual revolution taking place, particularly in France, under the
impact of structuralism and other changes in western Marxism,'' (17)
which in turn led the Collective to work by art historians like T.J.
Clark. This is a fascinating trail of auto-didactic exploration, from
Berger and the Swedish Maoist analyst of Cambodia by Jan Myrdal,
to foundational texts of Marxism and French structuralism, and back
to the UK through Pollock's doctoral studies at the The Courtauld
Institute of Art in the form of what became known as the Social
History of Art. (It was the concurrent project of Marxist art historian
T.J. Clark to establish this as a discipline; he had graduated from The
Courtauld with a PhD in 1973 [Pollock was there for her MA 1970-
72], and went on to establish the Social History of Art MA
programme at the University of Leeds in 1979 – Pollock had joined
the department in 1976 [Orton and Pollock viii]). As well as teaching
themselves, the Collective also engaged in teaching others about
feminist approaches to art and art history, visiting colleges and
universities to give talks, and in 1974-75 by teaching an adult
education evening class.
There are many interesting things that emerge from the
narrative of the Collective's establishment and work. First is the self-
directed nature of the work, undertaken actively as a collective. This
was not institutionally sanctioned, college or art school learning: it
was ad hoc, driven by urgency, need, and curiosity, supplementary to
other work and responsibilities, and informed, as quoted above, by
the British working-class tradition of self-help groups.12 This is
distinct from the situation in the USA where the major breakthroughs
at the intersection of the women's movement and the art world (like
Nochlin's ''conversion'' to the movement through reading and the class
she taught, or the Feminist Art Programme run by Judy Chicago and
Miriam Schapiro) happened on campus and in the context of degree
programmes. Second is that the Collective, while a women's group,
was inspired by socialism as well as feminism: they took the writings
of men like Jan Myrdal and John Berger from which to learn and

11
against which to test their developing feminist theory. Third is the
late arrival of ''Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?'': in
stating that the Collective (formed after July 1973) ''had Nochlin
just'', Pollock may be either referring to the slow distribution of the
January 1971 article, or the 1973 reprint in Thomas B. Hess and
Elizabeth C. Baker's anthology Art and Sexual Politics. We cannot
assume that what was happening in one country was known about
simultaneously in another – even in the same language, and with the
ease of communication that is presumed between the UK and the
USA art and academic worlds. The chronology of production is not
the same as the chronology of reception. Finally, the impulse that
shaped the collective's reading, and the lessons learned from it, was
that the values and exclusions of culture are formed ideologically: the
structures of the artworld are not neutral, and the exclusion,
denigration, and devaluing of art by women was neither oversight nor
accident. The remedy would be found in changing cultural,
educational, political and philosophical structures, not in simply
adding women to the roster.

Publishing in the 1970s

In the mid-1970s in the USA a handful of books on women artists

were published such as Eleanor Tufts' Our Hidden Heritage: Five
Centuries of Women Artists (1973) and Karen Petersen and J.J.
Wilson's Women Artists: Recognition And Reappraisal From The
Early Middle Ages To The Twentieth Century (USA: 1976; this was
not published in the UK until 1978). In 1976 Women Artists 1550-
1950, curated by Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin (the
exhibition that still ranks as the most comprehensive of its kind with
158 works by 84 painters from North America and Europe), opened
in Los Angeles and then toured through 1977 to Austin TX,
Pittsburgh PA, and Brooklyn NY. There was a substantial catalogue
by Harris and Nochlin which was later translated into Italian and
French.13 In Europe, Lee Vergine's book The Body as Language,
published in Italy in 1974, was important, although it included only
10 women among the 61 artists discussed.14 In 1979 in the

12
Netherlands, the exhibition Feministische kunst international had a
catalogue, illustrated but written in Dutch.

The contemporary editions of major Art History survey texts

commonly set for courses at the time included no women artists (such
as Janson's The History of Art) or only a handful (like Gombrich's The
Story of Art), and the task assumed by the feminist histories of art in
the USA as most needed and possible was to do the archival work.
Their aim was that, through publishing the findings of research on
women artists who had been excised from these histories, they could
correct the balance. Mostly, the methodology was biographical, rather
than attempting to situate the artists historically; and it replicated
dominant modes of American art historical writing at the time. This
was quite different from the work of the Collective, outlined above.
Even if the work of the Collective had not crossed the Atlantic, it was
as if the warnings sounded by Nochlin had not been heard: there was
little or no critical historicizing of the artists and their work, nor
attempts to understand the sexist structures that had ensured their
marginalization. In the UK in 1979, Germaine Greer published The
Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work,
which repeats these problems: a huge amount of research and detail,
recounted in a dashing style by the literary historian and counter-
culture journalist. But again the title indicates an expectation: that if
only these obstacles (grouped into chapters such as ''Family,'' ''Love,''
''Humiliation,'' ''The Disappearing Oeuvre'') could be removed, then
these women could and would be included in Art History – a very
different position to that of the key writers from the Collective, all of
whom were publishing work at the time that Greer was writing this
book.

1972 on: Spare Rib

In the 1970s, feminists who were writing about art were also,
naturally, writing about art that was being made by feminists.
Although this may seem obvious and (in hindsight) to be expected, it
happened in a reflexive movement in recognition of a number of
things. The writing about and in Art History that some members of

13
the Collective were undertaking was taking place within the strictures
of an academic discipline while simultaneously trying to change that
discipline radically; the writing of art criticism, which has no
academic discipline informing it, was often undertaken as a more
directly activist process. There was the recognition that contemporary
art criticism as found in art journals, newspapers, and elsewhere was
insufficient, that art by women was infrequently reviewed, that the
language used in reviews was highly gender-specific, and that art
with feminist intent was not understood. Additionally, there was the
urgent desire to address other feminists, to let them know about the
art that was being made, to debate the choices confronting artists who
identified themselves as feminists (choices of materials, of aesthetics,
of the content of the art, of the venues to show the art), and of course
to talk about why the work was being made, and how it might
resonate with the concerns of feminist viewers. In the 1970s, the
small handful of feminist art critics changed what they wrote about
and the way they wrote about it in mainstream art magazines; they
established dedicated magazines, newsletters, and other publications
on feminist art; and they wrote about art for more general feminist
magazines.15 It is possible to go back to these early publications and
see how collectively they provide a critique of a form of writing that
on the surface appeared free and unfettered (see the apocryphal
saying that the only thing you need to be an art critic is a stout pair of
boots), but which under scrutiny was as set about with prejudice and
ideologically-shaped presumptions as was Art History.
The UK feminist monthly magazine Spare Rib, launched in
1972, included in its pages from the start articles on culture of interest
to feminists, whether made by women or with aspects interesting for
feminist analysis. Mainly theatre, music, or literature, there was also
substantial material on the visual arts. For example, issue 8 (1973)
included Laura Mulvey's article on the fetishistic imagery of pop
artist Allen Jones, two years before Screen published her ''Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema''. Tracing through the pages of Spare
Rib the first eight years of the 14-year intellectual partnership of
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock is instructive. Both women had
studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art (though at
different times and at different educational levels – Parker, BA 1966-

14
1969; Pollock, MA 1970-1972), and so had been trained in
traditional, conservative, art historical methodologies. While the later
years of their partnership were seen publicly in the jointly authored
Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) and the jointly
edited Journals of Marie Bashkirtseff (1985) and Framing Feminism:
Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985 (1987), its early years can
now be discerned primarily in the little-documented space of the
Women's Art History Collective, and in Spare Rib until 1981. More
recently, Pollock has written movingly about Rozsika Parker's
contribution to art writing, ''what I retrospectively recognise as the
radical innovations of [Parker], who initiated feminist art history in
Britain. […] In the 1970s Rosie had created a form of art writing that
would compel me for most of my working life'' (Pollock, ''Writing
from the Heart'' 19-33).
Parker had already joined the editorial board of Spare Rib by
the time she and Pollock met in 1973, and she remained on it for 12
years. Her writing for it includes:
• 1972: SR5: on three women gallery owners;
• 1973: SR10: ''Old Mistresses'' on some of the artists in the
exhibition of the same title in Baltimore, USA, the previous year;
• 1974: SR22: on American photographer Diane Arbus (1923-
1971) and British cartoonist Posy Simmonds (1945-); SR25, on
c.7500, the exhibition in London curated by Lucy Lippard of women
conceptual artists;
• 1975: SR34, on Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-
1884); SR37, on embroidery; SR41, on English painter Mary Beale
(1633-1699);
• 1977: SR54, on Italian feminist artist Suzanne Santoro (1946-
);
• 1978: SR72, on American artist resident in London, Susan
Hiller (1940-); SR 74, on Hayward Annual II (discussed below),
• 1980: SR99, on the exhibition ''Women's Images of Men'' at
the ICA, London.

While Griselda Pollock appeared in a cover photograph for

SR 8, 1973, with feminist writer Anna Coote as members of ''The
Women's Lobby,'' her first writing for the magazine was in 1974:

15
• 1974: SR21, ''Underground Women,'' on the few works by
women in the National Gallery and their relegation to the gallery
stores.
Then followed:
• SR26, on patchwork and quilting;
• 1976: SR45, a review of the film Jaws, drawing upon
psychoanalytic theory;
• 1981: SR103, a review article on the feminist exhibition at the
ICA, London, curated by Lucy Lippard: ''Issue: Social Strategies by
Women Artists.''
Also in 1981, in SR113, the two women discussed the
impulses for their newly published joint work, Old Mistresses, which
I address at greater length below.

We can trace through these articles a strong intellectual

development and partnership, based upon theoretical readings
concerning ideology, psychoanalysis, and representation, which are
then deployed in discussing the subject of each article with rigorous
attention to historical and cultural particularity, nuance, and
signification. For example, the important position that is put forward
in Old Mistresses and maintained by Pollock in her later work - that
there have always been women artists, but they have been ''written
out'' by the ideology and methods of modern Art History - can also be
found in Rozsika Parker's 1973 article ''Old Mistresses'':
even art history students are unaware that women painted
professionally during the sixteenth century. Why this
ignorance? It may be because modern Art History is grounded
in the late nineteenth century when, perhaps as a reaction to
the feminist movement, male writers began to deny the
equality of women's talent and to disregard them as serious
professional artists. (11)
For the most part (Pollock's review of Jaws being an exception), the
theory within both women's writing in Spare Rib is worn lightly, to
demonstrate an approach to the subject matter, rather than the essays
being used to explore the details of a theoretical position. That was to
come in the material where Pollock was addressing a more academic
audience.

16
1977: ''What's Wrong with Images of Women?''

By publishing in Spare Rib, the main magazine in the UK where

grassroots feminist politics and ways of working were debated, by
introducing there both discussion of feminist practices in art and
feminist practices of Art History, as well as in their work with others
in the Women's Art History Collective, both Parker and Pollock
integrated what I call an activism of process in their working lives.
What I mean by this phrase, ''activism of process'', is that activism
within the women's movement was not only about getting out onto
the streets and demonstrating, or lobbying in relation to women's
health issues, or being active within trade unions (as for example with
the Dagenham [1968] and Grunwick [1976-78] strikes). It also
involved deep thinking about how work could be done and
relationships altered, whether at home, in the workplace, or in
political interventions. Ensuring that those used to speaking up did
not dominate, that those not used to speaking up had their voices
heard, that privilege conferred by patriarchy (as well as that conferred
by class and race) was consistently questioned, that true consensus
could be arrived at – a laborious process for those used to simple
majority democracy – all of these and more, underpinned by
consciousness-raising, ensured that how individuals and groups
worked together was as important as their stated aim. While the ends
never justified the means, sometimes the means produced, or were,
the ends. It is hard at the distance of over 40 years to convey the
crucial, time-consuming urgency to these processes of feminist
activism; but they changed lives, relationships, careers, education,
and academic disciplines.
At the same time Griselda Pollock was turning some of her
PhD material on modernity into academic publications (some jointly
authored with art historian Fred Orton),16 her first explicitly feminist
academic essay synthesized the practice of an activist feminist
thinking which ignores disciplinary boundaries; both drawing upon
and contributing to feminist developments in the emergent field of
Visual Culture.17 ''What's Wrong with Images of Women?'' was
published in Screen Education, the journal that emerged from film

17
theory journal Screen with the aim of addressing educational issues in
film studies. Much of the writing in both journals was in development
of Marxist or Feminist critique, drawing upon radical theory
(including radical use of psychoanalytic theory) to contribute to
discussions of culture that did not collapse back into appreciation,
connoisseurship, or theories of the ''auteur''. Pollock signals the wider
political intention of her essay – ''to address the ways in which
feminist discussions of women were undertheorised''18 – in both its
first sentence and its final note:
I want to address myself within this article to what I consider
to be an unbridged gap within the women's movement
between an awareness of the role of ideology in visual
representations of women in our oppression, and the level of
critical and theoretical analysis developed by a small number
of largely professionally involved women[...]Although this
piece has been written entirely by me, the ideas and work
contained within it are the result of the collective work of the
Women's Art History Collective.
I join the two together here to stress the activist processes of the
1970s women's movement, and Griselda Pollock's engagement with
and fundamental contribution to them.
The decision to publish feminist analysis in 1977 in a journal
with a focus on cultural education and pedagogy is significant. I want
to pause for a moment to give an added layer of context informing the
intellectual activity of the period and place. Pedagogy of the
Oppressed by the Brazilian Paulo Freire was published in English in
1970, and the Austrian Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society was
published in English in 1971, followed by other works by both
writers through the 1970s, stimulating much discussion among
educators and radicals about the relationships between different
pedagogies and the shape of societies. In 1947 compulsory schooling
in England and Wales had been extended from age 14 to 15; in 1972
it was further extended to 16. In 1963, The Robbins Report had
recommended a radical expansion of the university system, stating
that places ''should be available to all who were qualified for them by
ability and attainment,'' (The Robbins Report 8) rather than by the
ability to pay. As a result, higher education in the UK – almost

18
exclusively a state-funded system – opened up to the aspirations of
working class and lower middle-class people, providing means-tested
grants to help all qualified children access higher education. This
helped shift the attitudes about and access to higher education of not
only working-class people, but of all women. Slowly, and not without
pain, the university system shifted in the 1970s and 1980s toward the
possibility of critique from within. These decades also saw the
flourishing of the long-established Workers Educational Association
(which drew upon collective, elective, community-based and auto-
didactic pedagogies), and the Ruskin College (established 1899 by
trade unions and other left and working-class coalitions in Oxford,
but not part of the university).19
Griselda Pollock's presentation of ''What's Wrong with Images
of Women?'' as a tool to aid teaching situations should be understood
against this background, as should her description of the Collective's
activity: ''Many of the points I shall raise below were originally
developed by the collective work of a group of women over a long
period of time, collecting images and experimenting in different
teaching situations'' (25). Her feminist thinking was tested in
collective political work within the women's liberation movement,
and developed (as she states in the quotes above) as a response to a
perceived gap between that work on the one hand (which was
reaching an advanced stage of development but only involved a small
number of women) and, on the other hand, the related questions
provoked by the wider movement which led to numerous workshops
and courses on ''Images of Women'' in conferences and educational
establishments. Such events (in my own personal recollections from
the late 1970s onwards) often assumed a transparency of reading
images, and assumed that problems would be solved through creating
''positive images'' of women.
Pollock suggests four areas for questioning: first, the confusion and
mystification of the issue created by the title ''Images of Women'';
second, ''the problematic and as yet undefined relation between so
called High Culture and the Media or Popular Culture''; third, ''the
lack of theoretical definitions of what terms like sexist, patriarchal or
bourgeois mean when applied to images''; and fourth, ''what practices
can be suggested in order to rupture dominant ideology and undertake

19
a radical critique and transformation of visual imagery''. (''What's
Wrong with Images of Women?'' 26)
Given relatively limited resource for images in the
publication, Pollock talks us through various strategies and examples,
using the male/female reversal (something also suggested by Berger
(Ways of Seeing 64)) as a constant. This includes substituting men for
women in advertising imagery and flipping the gender in their written
texts; contrasting how jeans are advertised to men and to women
(what is seen as appropriately masculine and feminine modes of
representation); the appearance of the ''erotic'' male nude in the pages
of Viva, a glossy women's magazine, and at the same time the first
appearance in the pages of pornographic magazine Penthouse full
female genital imagery (i.e. a woman with her legs spread and
genitals clearly visible, rather than legs together). This latter is then
contrasted with the censoring by the Arts Council of Great Britain of
a work by Suzanne Santoro which used photographic vaginal
imagery. Linda Nochlin's attempt to expose the social acceptance of
women's breasts as purchasable apples in 19th century pornography
by creating her own version with a man holding a tray of bananas
under his penis and sporting what can only be described as a goofy
expression is given a respectful critique of its inevitable failure. 20
Paul Gauguin's similarly structured 1899 painting of a Tahitian
woman with her breasts nestling on a tray of mango flowers is
contrasted with what Pollock analyses as another problematic work –
Paula Modersohn Becker's 1906 Self-Portrait (Fig.), naked from the
waist up with a flower in each hand. While the Nochlin photograph
fails due to the impossibility of effective reversal, she argues, the
Modersohn Becker fails as a self-portrait of the artist: ''it neither
works as a nude, for there is too much self-possession, not as a
statement of an artist since the associations are of nature not culture.''
In the figurative tradition that Modersohn Becker was trying to
emulate, iconographic references to nature, flowers and fruit signify
''woman'', not ''artist''; Pollock argues that what we see in the painting
is ''the inseparability of signifier and signified'' that undoes the term
''images of women'': the clash between the ideologically-informed
trope of the Gauguinesque ''nude'' (female, as/in nature, removed
from modern culture other than that of the gaze and brush of the

20
western male artist) and the artist's desire to represent herself in her
art (Pollock, ''What's Wrong with Images of Women?'' 32-33).
Two of the most significant proposals that Pollock makes in
the course of the article are, first, to indicate the ''absolute
insufficiency of the notion current in the women's movement which
suggests that women artists can create an alternative imagery outside
existing forms'', and, second, that
notions of patriarchal ideology engendered by a recourse to
psychoanalysis are on their own inadequate and insufficiently
historical and the issue must be located in terms of capitalism
and bourgeois ideology for, as I have briefly indicated above,
one of the dominant significations of woman is that of sale
and commodity. (''What's Wrong with Images of Women?''
30-31)

1978-1979: Hayward Annual II

In her second academic article explicitly developing feminist visual

theory, Griselda Pollock addresses the UK art establishment and art
criticism as bounded by ideology and patriarchal thinking.
''Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition 1978''
follows the sequence of events that led to Hayward Annual II (HAII)
and its reception: an exhibition surveying contemporary UK art,
curated by five women artists and exhibiting 16 women and seven
men.21 In the introduction, and in a style which will be familiar to
those who have read her later work, Pollock picks up some grounding
details and quotes, and proceeds to slice forensically through the
surface and immediate evidence they provide of condescension,
defensiveness and sexism versus fairness, in order to then propose
examination of underlying structures and values: what we might
thereafter call the ideological bases of patriarchal cultural politics.
She writes:
Women artists have never been excluded from culture, but
they have occupied and spoken from a different place within
it. That place can be recognised as essential to the meanings
dominant in our culture, for the insistent stereotyping of
women's work as ''feminine'' makes women's art a kind of

21
 opposition, a structuring category constructed to ensure never-
acknowledged masculine meanings and masculine dominance.
Such a position is for women themselves problematic and
contradictory, but also potentially radical22. (Pollock,
''Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition
1978'' 34)
The essay is in three sections, addressing HAII's ''position in the
British art context; its relation to women's art practices in Britain; its
critical reception.'' Here too Pollock has established an element that
resonates throughout her later work: the need to attend explicitly to
context, to political, historical and cultural specificity, and to
distinguish those particularities rather than submerge them into an
undifferentiated global feminist critique. The 1960s/1970s feminist
principle that the personal is political in this approach assumes a
personal that is not innate but formed by, and contributory to, context.
In explicitly identifying the British context, Pollock is primarily
contrasting it from the situation in the USA, for two reasons. First,
she contrasts the work of the Collective and her own work with the
''analyses provided by American feminists'' in that the problem is not
one of ''neglect of women of the past and discrimination against
contemporary women artists''; in distinction she proposes that there
have always been women artists but they have been ascribed
particular positions, which are historically specific. It is ''the discourse
of art and art history'' that ''should be subject to analysis as it is both
historically determined and historically significant'' (Pollock,
''Feminism, Femininity and the Hayward Annual Exhibition 1978''
34).
Pollock's second differentiation of the British context from that of the
US is found in her response to the essay written by American feminist
critic Lucy Lippard for the catalogue for HAII. Pollock teases out and
examines some issues that arise from Lippard's essay. She challenges
some of Lippard's assumptions – for example, that the exhibition
''provided an opportunity to see under-exhibited, underrated women
artists'': not so, says Pollock; the artists are ''reasonably successful in
establishment terms''. She also questions Lippard's analysis that HAII
may be more beneficial for the British art world than for women
artists, and wonders if Lippard is suggesting a parallel or alternative

22
model for women. This, says Pollock, could merely encourage
''women artists to embrace of their own free will the separate sphere
of operations to which they have been consigned since the nineteenth
century by art history, critics and art organisations.” In distinction, the
analysis Pollock provides and the strategies she suggests are
interventionist.
We can see here, in the context of contemporary art and art
criticism, the analysis that Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker were
concurrently developing as they wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art
and Ideology in the mid-late 1970s: women practitioners have always
existed but have been written about as tangential and elsewhere to the
canon by the discipline of Art History; women have not been fully
excluded from Art History, but rather they have been allocated spaces
deemed appropriate (''feminine''), ''great art'' has been structured in
such a way that women are always elsewhere, and women have then
been judged by their ability to fulfil these pre-ordained criteria. Hence
the double-bind that women artists find themselves in (including by
critics of HAII), that their work is judged ''feminine'' and therefore
weak (as ''feminine'' and associated words like delicate or pretty
rarely designate full approval in Art History and criticism), or their
work is described as strong and therefore not feminine (or even that
they, women artists, are improperly feminine). Either way, Parker and
Pollock argue, the work of women is never judged in Art History as
equal to work by men. The issue is not simply of neglect or
discrimination: women have made work because of, as well as
despite, their situation; but their relationship to the discipline of Art
History is structural. Art History, as a set of discourses, structures
''the feminine'' to confirm ''the masculine'' and therefore ''the canon''
that Art History develops is contingent upon these definitions of
attributes of masculinity. This analysis is again in distinction from
what Pollock here describes as an ''American'' approach, identifying a
trend in developing feminist art history there to identify ''lost'' women
artists and simply add them to existing narratives of art's history. The
problems and solutions, as evoked in this essay on HAII, are
ideological and structural, and argue that without intervention at that
level, culture will not be amenable to feminist change.

23
1981: Old Mistresses: Women, Art, And Ideology

In 1981, against the background of the feminist, political, and

philosophical work undertaken in the Women's Art History
Collective, and a 1970s British feminist culture informed by
contemporary socialist-feminist writers such as the historian Sheila
Rowbotham and the psychoanalyst Juliet Mitchell, came the book
that remains the most important (because so generative) questioning
of the gendered structures of Art History, and the sexual politics at
play in various categories of its activity. As influential and
paradigmatic as Nochlin's article a decade earlier, Rozsika Parker and
Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology is not a
chronology of art by women. It does not aim to simply re-cover the
ground of Tufts, Petersen and Wilson, or Greer, accounting for and
surveying women artists and their work. Instead, in five succinct
chapters, it aims to find out why women artists were written out of
and by 20th century Art History, ''why women's art has been
misrepresented and what this treatment of women in art reveals about
the ideological basis of the writing and teaching of art history'' (Old
Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology xvii). Art History, therefore, in
Old Mistresses, is far from being a potentially disinterested, value-
free, field that just happens to have harboured sexist exclusions, and
is floating above them, waiting to incorporate women once the sexist
behaviour can be rectified (as may be deduced from some of the
1970s publications mentioned earlier). Instead, Parker and Pollock
argue that there are three layers of Art History that need to be
disentangled at each step of the way in order to understand the
ideological structures that inform the whole endeavour: the overall
field of study; the historical material to be studied; and the academic
discipline that undertakes that study.
Co-written from 1975 onwards, Old Mistresses was originally
due to be published in 1979, but due to the bankruptcy of the original
publisher, it did not appear until 1981. The originally-intended date
would have seen it appearing the same year that both Judy Chicago's
The Dinner Party and Mary Kelly's Post Partum Document were first
exhibited in full,23 and the year of Greer's The Obstacle Race. The
ideas within it were developing, as we have seen, since the early to

24
mid 1970s. The chapters take the reader through the supposedly
natural, essentialist, stereotypes of femininity in Art History's
treatment of women artists; the hierarchy of the arts that has been
established in the discipline of Art History, with ''crafts'' and
''feminine'' arts held in lower esteem and oil painting at the pinnacle;
the modern definition of ''artist'' and how it excludes patriarchal ideals
of womanliness and actual women; the representations of women and
femininity in art; and work being produced by 20th century women,
including contemporary feminists, to engage with and combat some
of the issues that have been discussed – in particular, the tension
between definitions of ''woman'' and of ''artist''. ''Post Partum
Document'' provides a focus to explore these tensions – including the
denial by some critics and sections of the popular press that this was
art, that it addressed a proper subject for art, or that it was made from
materials that were proper to art.
In all of this, Parker and Pollock are working against the
categorisation provided by Tufts, Petersen and Wilson, and Greer –
the category of ''woman artist'' (or ''woman painter''). Instead, Parker
and Pollock ask: What is the category ''woman'' and what is the
category ''art''? What is the ideology that shapes and constructs both
categories? Are these antithetical constructions? Is the category
''woman artist'' the necessary ''other'' to confirm the patriarchal male
artist's construction of his own identity? How do we undo and
reconstruct these categories? In this, they critique Nochlin's 1971
arguments. Nochlin had argued that there were no great women artists
because of various social exclusions. She does not want a defensive
response, she wants women to achieve equality of access and
opportunity: feminism, she says, will be a catalyst for change in the
discipline of Art History. Parker and Pollock argue that there has
always been art made by women, but it has to be considered in its
historically specific context – which includes understanding the
specificity of the positions from which women could speak within
particular cultural situations. But (and this is where they took the
argument forward) this can only be achieved by understanding the
ideological formations of ''woman'', ''femininity'', ''art,'' and ''art
history''. Simply saying ''Look! Women artists!'' as some art historians
had done will not change the structures of Art History, nor will it

25
change the circumstances and critical reception of contemporary work
by women. Indeed, not until all three layers of the structures of Art
History (the field of study; the material objects; and the academic
discipline) are deconstructed will we fully understand the subject we
are studying: women as artists and the significance of their work.
As part of their argument, Parker and Pollock provide many
examples of the ways in which work by women has been disparaged
within Art History as lesser, weaker, feminine, or inappropriate for a
woman. Two stand out as they concern instances of re-attribution.
Judith Leyster's work has often been mis-attributed to being that of
Frans Hals; yet accounts of her work discuss ''the weakness of the
feminine hand'' (Old Mistresses 8): Parker and Pollock ask why then
her work was often attributed to Hals. In another example, a painting
praised when it was thought to be by Jacques-Louis David was re-
attributed to Constance Marie Charpentier, whereupon it was
described as having ''certain weaknesses of which a painter of David's
calibre would not have been guilty''24 (Old Mistresses 106). In both
cases, Parker and Pollock are pointing out that the prejudiced
assessment of the work when the sex of the artist is known is a result
of the oppositional categorisation of ''femininity'' and ''excellence'' in
Art History. The dangers for actual men artists are clear if art is
understood as having ''feminine'' qualities of emotion or
instinctiveness, rather than ''masculine'' qualities of rationality and
intellect, and therefore the language of Art History and qualities
associated with genius and artists become highly masculinised – the
stereotype of the artist as rejecting social norms and responsibilities is
the exact opposite of stereotypes of women and femininity as dutiful
providers of social cohesion, sacrificing their desires and time for
their families. In this game of situating women in relationship to a
weak femininity, the male artist's supreme position is not simply left
intact and unquestioned, it is strengthened in its position as the
unmarked norm by which others are judged, and this is reflected in
the very words of appraisal and disapprobation in the discipline.

Not a conclusion

26
Today's feminists and art workers have the benefit of over four
decades of publishing and activity to draw upon, unlike the women
who formed the Women's Art History Collective. Today, as a result,
it could be easy to perceive feminist thinking as establishment, or at
least mainstream, within academia and the art world: Griselda Pollock
has a distinguished academic record, as do other feminists teaching
art practice and art history in Britain. What I have wanted to convey
in this text is not a sense of imparting privileged knowledge, but
rather a conviction, born out in Pollock's early practice as the
groundwork for her subsequent work, that each step within politics
and social history has to be fought for not only intellectually but with
an examined activism of process. Without that, intellectual
engagement becomes an empty academic exercise. It has become all
too clear in recent years in Britain how quickly social democracy and
its institutions can be undone, laid waste to, and the ideas that
informed them ridiculed or simply ignored and replaced by
managerialism or neo-liberal ''common sense''. It is increasingly
urgent to insist that work for cultural change and social justice in the
name of under-represented groups is informed by rigorous thinking
and processes that embody that which we wish to achieve. We owe a
debt of thanks to Griselda Pollock not only for her remarkable body
of publications, but also for the tireless work of feminist activist
process that has generated and nurtured her life's work, from which
we all can learn.

27
 Notes

1. I am distinguishing between feminism as a developing political analysis

from the Enlightenment onwards, and the women’s liberation movement as
a moment in that history – the mass movement of the 1960s and 1970s,
sometimes in Anglophone cultures shortened to WLM, and in France,
where it was more formalized, to MLF.
2. For information about how she came to write it, see Maggie Doherty,
''What Kate Did.'' The New Republic. March 23rd, 2016. Web. September
2nd, 2017.< https://newrepublic.com/article/131897/kate >.
3. From this time onwards she did not engage much with political activism,
rather focusing upon painting.
4. At this time, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Radical Feminists tended
to analyse sexual oppression in terms of categories of women, men and
patriarchy; Marxist Feminists would analyse the social, material, and
economic realities of women's lives in contrast with those of men's lives.
Anarchist communists sought the abolition of the state, private property,
and waged labour in favour of common ownership.
5. The television programmes are occasionally available on YouTube or
UbuWeb.

28
6. For a dossier on information on this exhibition see pp. 187-191 in
Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (eds). Framing Feminism: Art and the
Women’s Movement 1970-1985. London: Pandora Press, 1987. See also^
Monica Sjöö (ed). Women are the Real Left! Manchester: Matri/Anarchy
Publications, 1979. 27–8. (Bristol Feminist Archive/Monica Sjoo
Papers/FA/Arch/92/file 1.); and Monica Sjöö, ''Art is a Revolutionary Act.''
WomanSpirit. 7.1 (1980): 55–8.
7. Please note that this paper gives the starting date of the Collective as
1972, as does Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker, eds. Framing
Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-1985. London: Pandora
Press, 1987. However, the latter also says that it started ''after the open
meeting organized at Swiss Cottage by the artists of Womanpower,'' which
was not until 1973. More recently, Pollock has given the start date as 1973
in Griselda Pollock, "Muscular Defences" (2012). The year 1973 is also
indicated in Pollock, "The Politics of Theory: Generations and Geographies
in Feminist Theory and the Histories of Art Histories".
8. The names are listed without Anthea Callen in the introduction to
Rozsika Parker, Framing Feminism: Art and the Women's Movement 1970-
1985. Pollock however has said to me in private correspondence (13 March
2017) that Callen was a regular member; also that Tickner was invited to
join the collective in 1974.
9. For examples of Lisa Tickner's feminist art history see, inter alia, ''The
Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970'', chapter in
Framing feminism: art and the women's movement, 1970-85; The Spectacle
of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914 (London: Chatto
and Windus, 1988); ''Feminism, Art History and Sexual Difference.''
Genders. 3 (1988). For Anthea Callen's art historical work, see for example
Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts
Movement 1870-1914. London: Astragal Books, 1979; The Spectacular
Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas. London and
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
10. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and
Ideology; Parker and Pollock (eds). Framing Feminism.
11. In the original, Pollock states it was Gunnar Myrdal (the Swedish
theorist of global economics, poverty and development) that they read; in
correspondence with the author in March 2017, she corrected this to G.
Myrdal's son, Jan: Jan Myrdal and Gun Kessle, Angkor: An Essay on Art
and Imperialism. Tr. Paul Britten Austin. London: Chatto & Windus 1971.
12. An example of such would be the Workers Educational Association
(WEA); and indeed, Pollock went on to undertake some teaching through
the WEA (personal correspondence, March 2017). The WEA was

29
established by Albert and Frances Mansbridge in 1903 as the ''Association
to Promote the Higher Education of Working Men'' and changed its name to
be non-gender-specific in 1905 following protests from the Women's Co-
Operative Guild. See Bernard Jennings, Albert Mansbridge: The Life and
Work of the Founder of the WEA. Leeds: University of Leeds with the
Workers Educational Association, 2002, and the WEA website.
13. Anne Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin, Women Artists 1550-1950.
New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1976.
14. Lea Vergine, Il Corpo Come Linguaggio. The book was bilingual:
Italian and English.
15. For an overview of the US publications of the 1970s, see Corinne
Robins, ''The Women's Art Magazines,'' Art Criticism. 1.2 (1978): 84-95. I
am not aware of any similar survey of the UK publications.
16. Amongst other publications: Griselda Pollock. ''Vincent van Gogh and
the British Museum.'' Burlington Magazine. Cxvi.860 (1974): 671-2;
Griselda Pollock. Millet. London: Oresko Books, 1977; Fred Orton and
Griselda Pollock. Vincent van Gogh. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1978; Griselda
Pollock, ''Van Gogh and the Poor Slaves.'' Peasants and Countrymen in
Literature. Ed. K. Parkinson. London: Roehampton Institute, 1982.
17. Clearly in her 1970s work on Van Gogh or Millet, Pollock is not not
writing as a feminist, nor eschewing a feminist position. However, these
works do not have the development of feminist critique as their main
impulse, which is why, given the constraints of space, I am not discussing
them here.
18. Griselda Pollock, personal communication to the author, 26.02.2017.
19. In these times of the rise of the neo-liberal university and of the
introduction of US-style funding systems (a shift from the state considering
education as good for the country to treating education as individual choice
on a consumer-model), it is important not to be nostalgic about the windows
that opened in the second half of the 20th century. However, I can see the
profound effect such policies had in my own family and on our
understanding of the power of education: my father, who left school as a
mixed-race, working class boy aged 14, was apprenticed to a bookbinder
and went on to become one of the finest craftsmen of his day, also
committed his whole working life to teaching full-time, with cost to his
volume of output as an artist; my mother, as the youngest in her working-
class socialist family was the only one able to be educated beyond 14, went
on to teacher-training college and then to teaching special needs education
to the children of car-workers in Oxford, while being a visiting lecturer on
the subject for decades at Oxford University and also a tutor at Ruskin
College. They also participated in the WEA as both students and teachers.

30
Their belief in the power of education as a mass force for good, to change
lives and society and not simply to enrich individuals, was passed on to me
and to my brother.
20. Pollock also wrote, with Pat Kahn, short articles for Women’s Report, a
bi-monthly publication of the Fawcett Society (none of the articles in
Women’s Report, however, credit any writers.) The cover of one issue
enacted one of Linda Nochlin’s reversals on the cover. CHECK DATE
Pollock, personal correspondence with the author, 26.02.2017.
21. Rozsika Parker previewed the exhibition and interviewed the selectors
for Spare Rib. 74 (1978): 20-22.
22. Pollock is using the term ''radical'' here not in reference to ''radical
feminism'' but in its sense of referring to the fundamental nature of the
matter at hand – i.e. potentially allowing women the possibility of
overturning such stereotyping and categories altogether.
23. Parts of Post Partum Document were exhibited at the ICA London in
1976 and in HAII in 1978.
24. Since the publication of Old Mistresses this painting has been further re-
attributed to another woman, Marie-Denise Villers).

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