Foot dragging

‘A Room of Her Own,” the exhibition of the art of twenty-five women artists working in Great Britain between the last half of the Victorian Era and the end of WWII at The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts,is best understood as a case study in what it took for women artists to gain a foothold in the male-dominated art world. The 87 wildly variegated works of art range from paintings, drawings and prints, to ceramics, stained glass and the decorative arts, with artistic styles ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to Cubist-style modernists.

Curator Alexis Goodwin’s starting point is Virginia Wolfe’s famous 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” which argues that for women to write fiction, they first need to have their own physical space in which to write. The proposition seems close to self-evident, but when women were mostly confined to the roles of wife and mother, it was revolutionary. Goodwin applies Wolfe’s idea about women writers to women visual artists, arguing that as was the case with writers, they needed their own physical spaces before they could make art. Although some artists in the exhibition did this by carving out corners within their homes, the more driven and financially independent set up art studios outside their homes. Interestingly, only 7 of the 25 women had children.