Feminism; Empowerment & the Arts (Part V): The Second Wave Rolls Along

A portrait of American artist Faith Ringgold (born October 8, 1930) found on her website.
(All images in this post can be clicked for larger views.)

"... the term 'sexism' was most likely coined on November 18, 1965, by Pauline M. Leet during a 'Student-Faculty Forum' at Franklin and Marshall College. Specifically, the word sexism appears in Leet's forum contribution 'Women and the Undergraduate,' and she defines it by comparing it to racism, stating in part: 'When you argue ... that since fewer women write good poetry this justifies their total exclusion, you are taking a position analogous to that of the racist - I might call you in this case a 'sexist'... Both the racist and the sexist are acting as if all that has happened had never happened, and both of them are making decisions and coming to conclusions about someone's value by referring to factors which are in both cases irrelevant.'"

-Via Wiki's entry for sexism. Inset right above is Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything by American feminist artist Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945).

"Ringgold showed White her paintings—still lifes and landscapes in what she called 'French' colors, which were very much in line with the gallery’s focus. The dealer studied the work, the artist told me, then said to her, 'You (pause) can’t (pause) do that.'

... Driving back to Harlem, she and Birdie talked about what had happened. 'I said to him,' Ringgold continued, 'You know something? I think what she’s saying is - it’s the 1960s, all hell is breaking loose all over, and you’re painting flowers and leaves. You can’t do that. Your job is to tell your story. Your story has to come out of your life, your environment, who you are, where you come from.'”

- From an ArtNews interview with American artist, Faith Ringgold, found with her 1969 painting (inset left) Black Light #10: Flag for the Moon Die Nigger, its title possibly a reference to the political biography released that year by Black activist, H. Rap Brown.

"Over the course of her sixty-year career, Faith Ringgold’s activism has moved strategically between reform and revolution. She helped form one of the first collectives for women of color artists in Brooklyn, led protests to push for the inclusion of artists of color at the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum, advocated for free speech as part of the Judson 3, and worked with women who were incarcerated on Rikers to make a mural for the prison...

Ringgold completed this self-portrait at the beginning of her career, concurrent with the rise of the Black Power and other radical political movements of the 1960s... the artist portrays herself with a determined gaze and folded arms, in a gesture simultaneously gentle and guarded. In reflecting on this painting and the political and artistic awakening she experienced during this time, Ringgold has said, “I was trying to find my voice, talking to myself through my art.”

- Excerpt from another article regarding Faith Ringgold which, along with her self-portrait, was sourced from this Brooklyn Museum page. The "Riker's Island" prison mural mentioned in the article can be found here, although I have since found information that the actual prison at the time (1971) was the New York Women's House of Detention, where black revolutionary Angela Davis was being held. It eventually moved to Riker's Island where it became a prison for men.

"Yes, I was in Europe in 1955. I went for a summer vacation for two months. I went to London and France and then to Paris and then to southern France. And then to Italy...You know, Negroes didn't at that time travel much. And I know one of the reasons, you just couldn't get accommodations and couldn't be comfortable, and I felt that I would find that it was the same thing there. That I would be a Negro, you know, in a white world. And that was very frightening. Plus I couldn't live up to any of the brilliance that I was sure I would encounter. But after being in England for awhile I began to come out a little bit, and I found that in Europe you are not a Negro. You're a person. And that was, oh, that was just a wonderful, wonderful experience. I didn't want to come home. I just didn't want to come home... In South Carolina I did a little of traveling... I remember once I got on the bus with some other teachers who were roommates. And I went and automatically sat in the first seat that was empty. And they came along, these Negro teachers, and gave a great whoopla, you know. "You mustn't sit there" and all that. I didn't know what had happened. I turned around and looked at the man next to me and he looked at me... 'You can't sit there.' he said, 'First of all it's the front of the bus, second of all you're sitting next to a white man.'"

- American artist Vivian Browne from a transcript of a 1968 interview found here. The photograph inset left featuring Browne and some of her work was sourced here. It was Vivian Browne who, in 1971, along with Faith Ringgold, formed the Where We At group of African-American women artists.

"...those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support."

- Attributed to Black feminist/womanist, activist, lesbian and poet, Audre Lorde (1934-1992), inset right. A West Indian American, Lorde championed the "outsider," a role she deeply identified with. As a black feminist she felt excluded from the prevailing feminist school, which she felt was academic, heterosexual and primarily white. She was an early Intersectional feminist, insisting that women acknowledge "differences between other women not as something to be tolerated, but something that is necessary to generate power and to actively 'be' in the world. This will create a community that embraces differences, which will ultimately lead to liberation. Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower."

"Arkansas State Senator Paul Van Dalsem got a roaring laugh in 1963 at the then all-male Optimist Club when he railed at women lobbying to improve educational opportunities for African Americans. He said his home county’s solution would be to get an uppity woman an extra milk cow. 'And if that’s not enough, we get her pregnant and keep her barefoot.'”

- Via "Trading in “Barefoot and Pregnant” for Economic and Reproductive Justice." Apparently, Van Dalsem was paraphrasing a statement made earlier in the century by Arthur E. Hertzler, a Kansas M.D.: "The only way to keep a woman happy is to keep her barefoot and pregnant."  Inset left is a linoleum block print by American artist Margaret Taylor-Burroughs (1915-2010) - The Faces of My People. In Chicago during1961, she and her husband co-founded the Ebony Museum of Negro History and Art in what amounted to the living room of their house. It relocated in 1973, becoming the oldest museum of African-American culture in the United States:  the DuSable Museum of African American History.

"There are few things which present greater obstacles to the improvement and elevation of woman to her appropriate sphere of usefulness and duty, than the laws which have been enacted to destroy her independence, and crush her individuality; laws which, although they are framed for her government, she has had no voice in establishing, and which rob her of some of her essential rights. Woman has no political existence. With the single exception of presenting a petition to the legislative body, she is a cipher in the nation…"

"Woman has been placed by John Quincy Adams, side by side with the slave… I thank him for ranking us with the oppressed; for I shall not find it difficult to show, that in all ages and countries, not even excepting enlightened republican America, woman has more or less been made a means to promote the welfare of man, without due regard to her own happiness, and the glory of God as the end of her creation…"

- Two quotes from Quaker abolitionist and early feminist (inset right, above), Sarah Moore Grimké (1792 - 1873), from her "Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women" found in this Women's History blog article. Inset left is an abolitionist coin or token which reads: "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?", a rallying cry paraphrased by Sojourner Truth (inset right) in her famous "Ain't I a Woman?" speech and further utilized by white abolitionist women who turned to feminism when they realized that, for the women of their time, abject servitude was merely several skin tones away. Today, modern slave traders are color-blind; all races of women and children (and some men) - most especially the poor - are victimized. See Human Trafficking. Also here and here.

“How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds
and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?”

- A quote from a speech by free-born African-American abolitionist and lecturer,
Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879) shown above. Also, see here.

"Let the women stay at home and hold their peace."

-Greek playwright Aeschylus, 467 B.C.

"A Woman is to be from her House three times:

when she is Christened, Married and Buried."

- British physician and preacher Thomas Fuller, 1732.

"A woman's place is in the house - the House of Representatives."

- 1970, Bella Abzug.
(Note: Abzug shot too low. Nowadays we'd say "the White House, Oval Office.")

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The Radicals and Revolutionaries

Racism, Sexism & Aunt Jemima's Revenge

Well, it took 6 months and number of Interludes (following this post), before I could crank out a follow-up. The sad fact is, artists are so subversive they even rebel against their own agendas! Anyway, my apologies... but, this post was quite a project - substantially revised several times when volumes of new material was found - and, as we have a lot of ground to cover, well, we may as well dig in now.

An untitled work by Birgit Jürgenssen, 1978.

First off, a kind of a re-cap. What was (hopefully) apparent in my previous post of the series - and will become increasingly apparent here - is that art created by women from the second wave period was tremendously broad in both diversity and scope. Moreover, many of the artists involved are still alive today and are continuing to produce art which is relevant. Regarding the artists who have passed - and some only in the past decade - their artistic contributions not only continue to maintain a "shelf-life" but, in some cases are so peculiarly contemporary, they could seamlessly be exhibited alongside artwork emerging today.

Case in point, Austrian artist Birgit Jürgenssen, who was born in 1949 and died at the age of 54. Her work is featured above inset right - which seems to depict a female primate in captivity - and below... examples which, as described here: "powerfully subverted the clichés of gender representation, social stereotyping, fetishism and forced domestication of women. Only recently has her work been rediscovered and acknowledged for its significance."

XXO - B/W photographs coloured with pastels, paint, and pencil - 1979, Birgit Jürgenssen.

Apart from her early death, It's hard to understand why and how an artist like Jürgenssen managed to fall through the cracks so rapidly while other feminist artists didn't. But, it may have been a result of feminism in Austria at the time (see here), or it may have had to do with her understated style - XXO, above, was an exception - or eclectic oeuvre. On the other hand, her Housewives' Kitchen Apron (Inset left) in which the "housewife" seems to be no more than an insignificant extension of her stove, was a bold, subversive statement because, in the 1950s and 60s - the early days of Big Consumerism - and the 70s, manufacturers needed you to believe just that: a woman's value was assessed by her proficiency as a housekeeper and her knowledge of the latest kitchen appliance, dish detergent, and repertoire of recipes involving Jello.
(And, according to television script-writers and advertisers, she got extra points if she wore a strand of pearls and lipstick while scrubbing the bathroom floor!)

"Realization" by British feminist photographer, Jo Spence (1935-1992).
Spence has donned a Halloween mask for her parody of a stereotypical cleaning
product ad from the 60s. Note the "Capitalism Works!" poster behind her.

There were even magazines devoted to women designed to drive this domestic indoctrination home. "Good Housekeeping" (inset right) for example, arrived on newsstands in the late 1800s, one member of a group of American "woman's" magazines: the Seven Sisters. It initially targeted wealthy, white, married women for whom "housekeeping" amounted to no more than managing the servants.

After the Great Depression, however, and, more importantly, post-WWII, working women were obliged to return to their homes (see previous post in this series) and middle-class housewives (and mothers) now comprised a more burgeoning demographic. Of note: while there are both UK and South American versions of Good Housekeeping, in the States its succession of editors were all male until 1995! Lastly, all but two of the "Seven Sisters" is still in existence to today... presumably modified for modern consumption.

In any event, there was more than one force at work in the domestication of women and, in spite of those feisty New Women from the earlier part of the 20th century, and the success stories of mid-century artists like Georgia O'Keefe, Louise Bourgeois, and Frida Kahlo, and even after Judy Chicago brought feminist art to the fore, worldwide enthusiasm for women visual artists - most especially blatantly feminist artists - was lukewarm. As it was, the skills of women artists were still considered inferior, and the historical records - in which women's artistic achievements continued to be dismissed - reflected this.

A sampling of Supersisters trading cards found here.

Even many of the feminists themselves seemed to discount art as a meaningful profession. When, in 1979, members of NOW created a set of 72 trading cards - Supersisters - to commemorate the achievements of famous women throughout contemporary history, although they included a number of celebrities from politics, sports and the entertainment field, plus a scattering of poets, writers, musicians, etc., not one of the 72 featured a visual artist.

6 (out of 11) feminist icons composing the Sister Chapel. Left to right is artist Frida Kahlo, poet Marianne Moore, activist Betty Friedan, Womanhero, the goddess Durga, and Saint Jeanne d'Arc as a pious country maiden.

Which is not to say the feminist artists themselves kept a low profile, but, inadvertently, theirs was a separate camp... and, necessarily, a self-supporting one. When, in 1974, abstract painter, Ilise Greenstein, conceived of a feminist spin on the Sistine Chapel - a monument to female empowerment featuring an image of God in feminine form - she aligned herself with the Woman's Interart Center in New York; a group formed by artist Jacqueline Skiles and one which, according to this announcement, folded only recently.

Several years later the Sister Chapel was born, primarily a henge-like circle of large paintings depicting notable women by a number of feminist artists. The subject matter was an odd collection of female "heroes" (predominately Caucasian, with the exception of Frida Kahlo and the Hindu warrior goddess, Durga, inset left). But, at least the artists did include 2 visual artists in the mix - Kahlo and Artemisia Gentilieschi.

My Nurse and I, 1937, Frida Kahlo.

As it happened, the Sister Chapel, while initially popular, was dismantled in the early 1980s and fell into obscurity until 2016 when it was discovered and reassembled by an art history professor, Andrew Hottie. It is now on permanent exhibit at Rowan University Art Gallery in Glassboro, New Jersey.

But, the overall bottom line is that the world was not yet sold on the idea of woman artists, any more than it was prepared for truly free women. Moreover, society as a whole was unwilling to relinquish its hold on all its designated home-makers, baby breeders, caregivers, domestic slaves, and sex-toys. And, (surprise, surprise) it is still unwilling.

Woman Vacuuming Pop Art, 1972, Pop artist Martha Rosler (b. 1943).
(One way of getting your "work" into an art gallery in the 70s.)

For women of color, however, there was a double jeopardy: she was marginalized for both her gender and the color of her skin. She was doubly a "minority", because most legislature - and social scientists - categorized all women as a subordinate group; "women and minorities" shared the same lack of status despite the fact that, regardless of color, women comprised half of the global population. Moreover, if poverty and/or class was part of the equation, a woman might be burdened by triple oppression.

In any event, the African-American women knew intimately that there were two foes to overthrow: racism and sexism. And, for a blatant example of both, clothed in Christmas coziness, we have a second Good Housekeeping cover (inset left) which featured a stereotypical cartoon mammy-figure carrying in a tray of food captioned: "Black cook bringing steaming Christmas pudding into the dining room..." 

I'm only surprised she isn't wheeling in a large carton of pancake mix... (also referred to as Slave in a Box). In spite of the fact that this cover was created in 1902 - and the so-called Reconstruction Amendments were allegedly put into effect over 30 years hence - the jolly "black cook," while theoretically a free woman, was still presented as primarily a kitchen fixture and fundamentally a servant. Apparently, someone forgot to free Aunt Jemima...