This thesis focuses on an African-American female artist, Valerie Maynard, examining how she synthesizes African and American elements in her works. It provides detailed formal and iconographical analyses, revealing concealed meanings and paying special attention to those works with which the artist mirrors the Black experience in the United States and Africa on the other side of the Atlantic. In the process, the thesis sheds new light on the significance of Valerie Maynard's work and how she has used some of them to embody the Black quest for freedom and social justice during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

In this thesis I consider the unique position that Polish artist Zofia Stryjeńska (1891-1974) occupied during the interwar period. Lauded during her time as the most popular artist in Poland, the acceptance of Stryjeńska's female voice in representing a national vocabulary was unprecedented and deserves closer examination. I assert that Poland's history of oppression created a unique environment where women as archetypal figures often took on masculine roles. These 'transgressive types' were visible in the literature and art of the 19th and 20th centuries. Stryjeńska's art, as well as her behavior, capitalized on these transgressive traditions. Women played an important role as visual and ideological figures within the national mythologies of Poland, and while these mythologies situated women as authorities in protecting, cultivating, and renewing the land, and by extension the nation, few women actually achieved the status of shaping them. Zofia Stryjeńska was an example of one who did. At the age of twenty-one Zofia cut her hair, dressed as her brother, and, as a boy, enrolled in the academy of fine art in Munich. This act found precedence in the years of Polish imagery and it ultimately allowed her to create a space for herself and her art. This thesis pays particular attention to Stryjeńska's part in the 1928 renovation of the Warsaw town square. Like many other artists at this time, she worked in many mediums and employed folk-art motifs and styles in the quest to create a truly "Polish" style. Stryjeńska's art drew on national images of Polish women as the Virgin Mary, the good Polish Mother, and Pagan Goddess. Idealized tropes, such as these, often represented a disconnect between everyday social norms and the greater ideals of a national identity. Zofia Stryjeńska embodied this juxtaposition. Her art drew on national images of Polish women filled with blurred gender boundaries. These images, prominent for centuries, at once empowered Polish women while also being relegated safely to the abstract realm of legend and myth. These female ideals, therefore, served as less of a threat to the rigid gender expectations that were a part of everyday Polish life. Zofia Stryjeńska was an example of a woman who laid claim to the female ideals of Polish culture. She used myth to define her behavior; her studies in Munich, and by doing so launched her life into the realm of myth, creating a sensationalized image more legend than reality.

Following work intends to investigate the revaluation of impressionist Berthe Moriot’s art throughout the years, and what has played a part in both the forgetting and remembering of Morisot. Thus, this master thesis will also explore how the gender of the artist can affect the price development and value of the art, and will therefore compare Morisot to her peers. In addition to contributing to the literature by examining the importance of gender and auction prices, it appears that this study will be the first to examine the sales statistics of Berthe Morisot’s paintings in a comparison with the male impressionists in any depth. The results show that Morisot in comparison with her male peers generally sells less alsters to lower prices. The results also show that Morsiot’s price development has increased more in the last few decades than the impressionistic men, with exception for Claude Monet. Furthermore, the results show that Morisot’s fall and then later rise, is a reflection of the societal views on the female artist, and identified the importance of acknowledgement and visibility of female artists which proved to be an essential determining factor for prices.

Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) est une femme peintre du XVIIème siècle bolonais. La ville de Bologne mérite en soi un discours philogyne, dans la mesure où plusieurs femmes étaient non seulement reconnues pour leur érudition, mais également diplômées dans les domaines littéraire et scientifique. Elisabetta Sirani ne déroge pas à la règle en associant une solide culture générale et une profession considérée en premier lieu comme virile : la peinture. Le profil d’Elisabetta Sirani présente à la fois un intérêt biographique et iconographique ; double orientation reliant étroitement art et littérature. Le personnage d’Elisabetta Sirani s’inscrit également dans l’histoire, superposant les différents genres littéraires. Le XIXème siècle est en ce sens révélateur de la revisitation d’un fait divers en mythe. / Elisabetta Sirani (1638-1665) was a Bolognese 17th century women painter. Bologna was considered a philogynous city, since many Bolognese women were famous for their erudition and for being laureates in literature and sciences. Elisabetta Sirani was not an exception, she was a well-educated and cultured woman whose occupation as a painter was mostly seen as a virile one. Elisabetta Sirani’s profile presents both a biographical and iconographic interest ; a double orientation that closely relates art to literature. Elisabetta Sirani was part of history too as her character was reintrepreted by various literary genres. The 19th century revealed the reinterpretation of a chronicle into a myth.

Lucy Snowe, the heroine of <i>Villette</i>, Charlotte Brontës final novel, is in constant conflict with the dichotomies of patriarchal culture. As she is perpetually torn between the opposing forces of patriarchy, Lucy Snowe inhabits what she calls her own <i>still shadow-world</i> (Brontë164). This thesis explains the nature of the intermediate space Lucy Snowe occupies and examines its repercussions on her mental state. Chapter One theorizes the effect of patriarchal dichotomies on Lucy Snowe to demonstrate that her mental conflict has its roots in the female experience of the opposition between nature and culture. Chapter Twos analysis of the nineteenth-century medical understanding of madness shows that Lucy Snowes melancholy is a symptom of the intermediacy created by conflicting patriarchal expectations. Chapter Three compares Lucy Snowe to the female figure in patriarchal master narratives, which draws attention to the serious consequences of patriarchal culture on women and demonstrates that Lucy is representative of women in conflict with patriarchal expectations. Ultimately, as part of Charlotte Brontës endeavor to represent truth rather than reality, Villette challenges patriarchal expectations of women and presents a different vision of womanhood.

Lucy Snowe, the heroine of <i>Villette</i>, Charlotte Brontës final novel, is in constant conflict with the dichotomies of patriarchal culture. As she is perpetually torn between the opposing forces of patriarchy, Lucy Snowe inhabits what she calls her own <i>still shadow-world</i> (Brontë164). This thesis explains the nature of the intermediate space Lucy Snowe occupies and examines its repercussions on her mental state. Chapter One theorizes the effect of patriarchal dichotomies on Lucy Snowe to demonstrate that her mental conflict has its roots in the female experience of the opposition between nature and culture. Chapter Twos analysis of the nineteenth-century medical understanding of madness shows that Lucy Snowes melancholy is a symptom of the intermediacy created by conflicting patriarchal expectations. Chapter Three compares Lucy Snowe to the female figure in patriarchal master narratives, which draws attention to the serious consequences of patriarchal culture on women and demonstrates that Lucy is representative of women in conflict with patriarchal expectations. Ultimately, as part of Charlotte Brontës endeavor to represent truth rather than reality, Villette challenges patriarchal expectations of women and presents a different vision of womanhood.

Cultural and historical accounts of self-help literature typically describe its development and focus in terms of the autonomous, public male subject of the nineteenth century. This literary study recognizes that as masculine self-help discourse became widely accessible in the mid nineteenth century, mid-Victorian feminist novels, periodicals, and tracts developed versions of self-help that disrupted the dominant cultural view that the single female was helpless and “redundant” if she did not become a wife and mother. I argue that the dual focus of Victorian self-help discourse on the ability to help oneself and others was attractive for Victorian feminist writers who needed to manipulate the terms of the domestic ideal of woman as influential helpmeet, if women’s independence and civic duty were to be made culturally palatable. Chapter One focuses on how Dinah Mulock Craik drew on self-help values popularized in mid-century articles and collective biographies by Samuel Smiles, while rejecting the genre of biography for its invasiveness into female lives. By imagining a deformed single artist heroine in the context of her 1851 bildungsroman, Olive, Craik highlighted and contested the objectification of women within Victorian culture while reproducing other forms of female difference based on dominant constructions of class, sexuality, and race. Chapter Two extends formal and thematic considerations of self-help discourse to a comparison of masculine colonial accounts of class-climbing and the projection of a self-reliant, yet deeply unstable, domestic female by Maria Rye and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. Chapter Three exerts critical pressure on the tension between individual and mutual help by charting the debate that raged between liberal individualism and collectivism in the labour movement, particularly in The Women’s Union Journal. Returning to a focus on the binary of female aberrance and normalcy within Victorian culture, Chapter Four analyzes late-century case studies of nervous illnesses alongside Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 New Woman novel that promoted self-help for women as desirable yet unattainable in a society still largely structured around the domestic ideal. At its broadest, this dissertation explores points of convergence and departure between Victorian masculine and feminine self-help texts, and touches on reverberations of this Victorian discourse in today’s self-help works directed at women in Western culture.

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The purpose of this essay is to investigate The Woman with the Puppets by Isobel Gloag from a feminist perspective, to find how it challenge the male gaze and patriarchy. I also seek to understand how other female artists past and present compare to Gloag’s painting. The method is Panofsky’s iconology with modifications through Aavitsland’s thoughts of the grammatical structure that the composition holds. To reach social bearings upon the ability to generate this type of historical genre painting Bourdieu’s toolbox of capital, habitus and strategies has been applied. The painting is a feminist expression of the feminist discussions regarding marriage, equality and law that took place at the time of the paintings creation. Through the use of established norm with an ambiguity, female nude and male marionette puppets, the male gaze and patriarchy is challenged. Gloag is the only female artist of her time that has generated a history genre painting in a feminist spirit that challenges multitude of issues in one composition.

The dissertation Art and Motherhood deals with the influence of motherhood on the experienced reality of women active in artistic practice - artists, theorists, curators and activists. Using feminist and artistic research methods, I collect and analyse the specific experiences of individual mothers. Capturing the breadth of possible views, perspectives and experiences that motherhood brings is essential to my research. I am not concerned in isolation instances of specific artistic realisations, but rather with the processes, environments and contexts of making, and the creative and life strategies employed in reconciling the personal and professional roles of individual women artists. The content of a series of thirty-five conducted interviews comprises the research material for the work, but is also the source for the practical component of the dissertation - the book Milk and Honey co-published by the wo-men and AVU publishing houses. The practice of two related community-based mothers' groups - Breastfeeding Guerillas and Mothers Artlovers is also examined. While Breastfeeding Guerrilla is a support group for mothers promoting and normalizing breastfeeding, Mothers Artlovers is a support group for parents in the arts. All of these research units set a community-based perspective on all research affecting the universal, multi-layered and inherently collective topic of motherhood.