Women Artists

"While some women undoubtedly felt discouraged or stifled by ladies' work, the evidence indicates that many women found it stimulating and fulfilling and that they employed it as a means for developing their own aesthetic sensibilities.(...) Such cases indicate that women's craftwork was not just the result of an oppressive redirection of feminine creativity into trivial pasttimes, but, in many cases, a considered elaboration of a feminine aesthetic. The by-now hoary question of why there have not been more women artists in Western history perhaps merits a different answer than the usual ones of feminine incapacity or subordination. The women artists were there. We have just not been looking in the right place."

Classen, Constance, Feminine Tactics: Crafting an Alternative Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, in Classen, Constance (ed), The Book of Touch, Berg, Oxford, New York 2005, p.237