This dissertation explores the gendered division of childcare in terms of concepts of the father and examines how these concepts have impacted on the production of women artists in the history of western art. The survey is restricted to western culture and is subdivided, according to changes in concepts of the father, into roughly three periods: the era of the pre-modern father, the era of the modern ideology regarding the mother, and the postmodern era, in which a new concept of the father was articulated. / Thesis (M.A.F.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

This dissertation examines a range of politicized artistic practices in Great Britain during the 1970s, a decade marked by economic decline and social fragmentation. The artists I primarily focus on in the pages that follow—William Furlong, Stephen Willats, Mary Kelly, and Conrad Atkinson—all appeared on Audio Arts, a “spoken magazine” distributed on audiocassette that was founded by Furlong in 1973. During the 1970s, Furlong, Willats, Kelly and Atkinson renegotiated their relationship to art institutions, expanded the role of the artist in society, and conceived of art as a form of political praxis, and this dissertation explores the strategies these artists devised to connect to publics outside the elite, bourgeois audience of art.