Abstract

Through the course of history, women’s portrayal of women in visual art has been influenced by societal norms and definitively progressive social movements. This has resulted in the creation and development of specific gender-and- class-and-race related stylistic conventions. Although there is documentation of women operating as professional artists as early as the Renaissance Era (such as Lavinia Fontana and Artemisia Gentileschi), later intellectual movements such as the Enlightenment positively influenced the development of social movements such as feminism and the Women’s Rights Movement, resulting in greater recognition and mobility for professional women artists lasting into the present day. This is especially evident in paintings created by European and American women artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, as it was during these periods and in these areas that these particular intellectual and social movements occurred. Analyzing and juxtaposing paintings from artists in these periods— including Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Anna Bilinska-Bohdanowicz, and Suzanne Valadon, Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet— this thesis focuses on intersections between feminist history and visual art to document how women artists have used visual art to help empower the female gender. Through the discussion and comparison of artworks by the artists listed above, this thesis will examine how the female gender is constructed in visual art and demonstrate how this representation has developed alongside historical movements to both empower and explore female gender as a reality.

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