No Room of One's Own: Mary Fairchild MacMonnies Low, Berthe Morisot, and The Awakening

Several art historians have discerned a gendered division of subject matter between male and female artists of the late 19th century. Griselda Pollock's landmark text, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” serves as both the first and fullest discussion of this issue from a feminist perspective. Pollock argues that women Impressionists should not be viewed as outside the development and rhetoric of modernity because of their failure to depict its most representative sites (cafés, bars, and other public spaces where bourgeois women dared not enter); rather, we should note their restricted, chiefly domestic realm as another space of modernity that these women were particularly adept at analyzing. According to Robert Herbert, works by women Impressionists are “easily distinguished” from those of their male counterparts, who tend to highlight the figures over their surroundings and fail to note the expressive capabilities of household furnishings. There is much to recommend the approaches of both Pollock and Herbert; in particular, they have given critical and aesthetic value to the paintings of women Impressionists in their analyses. But, paradoxically, their analyses also have the effect of reinforcing the same gendered distinctions of paintings once used to devalue those works by women.