Book Review

Claiming Their Place in the Academy

Stephanie Cassidy
University of California, San Diego

Laura R. Prieto's At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America explores how women artists negotiated restrictions placed upon their pursuit of a creative life from roughly the 1820s to the 1930s. To claim the status of "artist," both as an identity and a vocation, women confronted pervasive sex-based discrimination. Although this fact has become a standard feature in biographies of women artists, few scholars have surveyed the range of institutional exclusions and dismissive stereotypes for their origin in shared assumptions about women, artists, and the gendered nature of creativity. This is Prieto's starting point from which she documents those policies and customs intended to suppress or thwart women's artistic ambitions and women's (mostly) defiant and resourceful reactions to them. Throughout Prieto maintains an undivided focus on women's perspectives that allows her to delineate in fascinating detail exactly how the position and experience of women artists were distinct from men's.

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In this study, her revised doctoral dissertation, Prieto argues that the very concept of "woman artist" during the antebellum era embodied the contradictory imperatives of middle class womanhood and artistic professionalism. To pursue a career as an artist was to form an identity independent of a woman's prescribed familial role. Establishing a studio, procuring models, traveling abroad for training, and securing commissions could be perceived as mildly disconcerting or even suspect, if an artist was a woman. Further, their visibility and mobility within the public sphere and inevitable contact with the marketplace undermined feminine ideals of domesticity, purity, and submissiveness. While men easily fulfilled the requirements of professionalism, women, she argues, faced "a more complicated, difficult, and ultimately different process" in becoming full-fledged artists (18). To justify their activities, women emphasized their feminine role as keepers of culture where creative ambition was couched as an expression of women's "natural" artistic affinities. Such efforts as Elizabeth Ellet's influential Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (1859), "legitimate[d] work that would otherwise [have] appear[ed] deviant, improper, and even 'unsexing'" (34). To complement these rationalizations, women artists forged, what Prieto terms, "professional separatism." This middle ground enabled them to draw, paint, and sculpt, often at home, while upholding their traditional domestic responsibilities, thus "not endanger[ing] either their womanhood or their class status" (25). For women who transgressed boundaries of respectable behavior, the consequences could be swift and severe. Neoclassical sculptor Louisa Lander lost the esteem and patronage of Nathaniel Hawthorne after she was rumored to have posed as a model. Prieto's supporting case studies provide a compelling elaboration of this theme, even if some of the material has been synthesized from secondary sources.

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