| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America. By Laura R. Prieto. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xii, 292 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-674-00486-8.)

Going beyond Burton J. Bledstein's assertion that professionalism is linked to middle-class status and control, Laura R. Prieto argues that from 1818 to 1930 American women artists professionalized by refashioning elements of middle-class gender ideology, a process she calls "female professionalism." This interesting book certainly makes the case that women artists used middle-class ideas about womanhood to legitimate their positions as serious artists but often by neglecting to explore other professional strategies, as well as regional and economic differences.

During the nineteenth century, women artists became professionals, as did men, "by identifying themselves as members of the middle class rather than artisans and tradespeople" (p. 20). For women this meant pushing at the boundaries set by the ideal of true womanhood. In self-portraits, artists of 1818 to the 1830s depicted themselves as genteel women engaged in a ladylike pursuit. In the 1840s and 1850s artists connected the domestic arts and virtues, such as embroidery and motherhood, to the fine arts of painting and sculpting and used the language of domesticity to found clubs and associations to match those of male professionals. In the 1860s, women developed the sexually segregated life class to provide a domestic space in which they too could study from a nude model, the sign of artistic professionalism, and at the same time retain their purity, the symbol of middle-class womanhood.

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