Conclusions

The historiography of high culture has not on the whole been generous towards women. For whatever reason, women artists have had to wait a long time before being the subject of discussion and research. They are not of course the only ones: fashions change in the arts. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for example (1911) has only a brief entry on Monteverdi and none at all on Vivaldi, today one of the most performed and written about of Italian composers. And it was only after the renewed interest in Vivaldi that scholarly (and popular) attention was accorded to the girl singers of the ospedali. When one looks for similar examples of women, several readily come to mind: Aphra Behn, the English playwright whose name was comparatively unknown to most students of literature, but who is much studied today, or the Welsh painter Gwen John, who in her lifetime was largely eclipsed by her brother Augustus, but who is now possibly more famous than he is. The picture has been transformed largely by Anglo-American scholarship, itself resulting from the impetus of the post-1970 women’s movement, particularly strong in English-speaking countries, where the academic environment was - crucially - sympathetic. On the European continent, the situation was less favourable: there are relatively fewer attempts to isolate women as a particular group of artists needing recognition. Indeed it sometimes seems as if there is, dare I say, a degree of overkill in British, North American and other English-speaking universities, while basic scholarship is still lacking across the Channel.

At the end of this very partial survey, what conclusions can be drawn? One relates to the chronology of the cultural field. By looking at the particular areas we have chosen here, we have sketched a possible chronology, showing that the dynamics of the field can change over time, allowing new entrants in or, alternatively, repelling them.

Women as performers were virtually dependent on the relaxing of certain rules in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, such as the propriety of appearing in public, which in turn reflected changes in the kind of spectacle that courts and popular audiences wanted or would countenance. Actresses, dancers and singers - working for payment, working at night, dressing up as other people, frequenting other performers in unchaperoned situations - were moving out of a woman’s normal life cycle and often paid the price by being considered deviant and immoral. If they lived up to the reputation, that is hardly to be wondered at. Yet they were playing an essential part in the cultural field, which would have been completely impoverished without them. Where would Mozart’s operas have been without the Susannas and the Fiordiligis or the Queens of the Night - those parts that he wrote for virtuoso high sopranos, among the first women to receive some kind of professional voice-training such as had been available to choirboys for centuries? Eighteenth - and nineteenth-century audiences expected to thrill to the emotions of real women in tragedies. The change once accomplished was not reversed. And by the late twentieth century, women performers, on stage, screen and in music, had parallel professional trajectories to those of men, and were being accorded the same attention; if there continued to be speculation about their private lives, then this was common to both sexes.

In literature, the key chronological variable was obviously literacy. Once they could read, women could expand their minds, though the mental furniture available to do that was not equal across the whole period. The history of women’s knowledge of the classics, for example, has been a very short one. A window of opportunity for learning Latin and Greek opened with the girls’ secondary schools founded in Europe from the late nineteenth century, only to close again as classical studies have fallen almost universally out of the curriculum in the present day. In terms of translating from modern languages and writing in their own however, women moved rather quickly into quite a prominent position in the literary field, at least in terms of numbers, during the nineteenth century. Overwhelmingly though, in Europe and elsewhere, women have published in one genre: fiction - and still do. For every ten or so women novelists, how many poets, playwrights or essayists are there? There are social and structural reasons at work here: writing for the theatre, television or the cinema, for example, is specialised work, dependent upon networks of relations and acquiring professional skills; philosophy requires an advanced education. The novel, in theory, requires no such apprenticeship, and poetry has been available to all who read and study poetry for themselves, although the number of well-known women poets is not great. In the nineteenth century, the time when women’s writing really began to take off, fiction and ‘life writing’ - autobiography, memoirs, diaries and letters - were the genres most likely to be chosen by a fledgling author. Much of this writing was not originally intended for publication. The persistence of the ‘domestic model’ of writing, if it can be called that, is not simple however. It has been argued, quite convincingly in my view, that ‘when the term “everyday life” was promoted to be worthy of art, women too could make their creative contribution’.108 But what after all is Anna Karenina if not a story of everyday life? In the twenty-first century, the novel is still, for both sexes, the dominant genre and the one most read; it is not peculiar to women authors. But again, a different historiography is emerging which looks at the entire field, rather than at the traditional canon: in this process, different genres become more visible. The Scottish writer Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-66) used to be regarded as the helpmeet and correspondent of her famous husband Thomas; she is now enshrined as ‘one of the best letter-writers in the English language’.109

Finally, in our differential chronology come the visual arts. Once more the gatekeeping and training possibilities have dictated the chronology. In a traditional sphere such as the fine arts, the apprenticeship to be served depended on institutions which might be informal (the artist’s studio) or formal (the academy, the art school) but into which women were intruders and minor players until pressure of numbers in the nineteenth century forced open the door. The presence of large numbers of women has increased the place taken in the visual arts by crafts and ‘minor genres’. Some reassessment of this minority status has already begun, though the field remains fairly polarised round certain ‘heroic’ forms: the easel painting, the large mural, the monument, the building. However, in the very recent period women have achieved international reputations in these genres too, and the changing nature of the visual arts to include conceptual art and video has seen more women’s names emerge. Even a small European country such as Scotland has at least three internationally recognised painters in Joan Eardley (1921-63), Anne Redpath (1895-1965) and Elizabeth Blackadder, (b. 1931). Italian woman architect Gae Aulenti designed the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. In photography, it is probably fair to say that the playing field has been more level than in many other arts, at least since the 1920s, perhaps because of its informal development. In the cinema however, despite some undeniable breakthroughs, women are still far more likely to be actors on screen than directors. In this way, the cinema mirrors the history of the theatre. In a collective enterprise calling for authority over a team, the relative absence of women directors (there are of course recent exceptions as noted, while in the theatre prominent directors include Ariane Mnouchkine, Ruth Berghaus and Deborah Warner) can be related to other types of glass ceiling. The case of cinema suggests that the chronology of women’s entrance into the arts is not linear and uniform but has varied with the context. It also usefully reminds us that the twentieth century, while undoubtedly bringing more freedom for women, has also seen Europe increasingly overshadowed by America in Western culture. That influence is far too complex to be discussed here, but is a hidden presence within much cultural activity, sometimes favouring women’s empowerment, sometimes, as in cinema, working the other way.

A group enterprise such as film-making is perhaps paralleled by the phenomenon of the support group. Within this chapter, the most frequent examples have been of individual women. Many innovative male artists - the French impressionists, say - have had to struggle against derision from the establishment. But they have often been able to draw support from others, and thereafter their group identity makes them even more visible: the cubists, the surrealists, the Angry Young Men and the post-1945 Italian neo-realist cinema directors are well-known twentieth-century examples, where the group has provided a special relationship to fame, even if individual artists are very different (or even reject the label). In every period, in fact, the European cultural field has been studded with knots of power made up by certain groups or generations of men. For women, such groups, until feminism provided a theoretical underpinning, were only rarely possible. The Venetian ospedale with which we started this survey was of course an unusual exception. As a musical institution, it was governed and shaped by men, but it did permit the emergence of talented women. Another possible case was that of the Berlin salons in the time of Rahel Varnhagen. Even more striking (though not described here in detail) was the society formed by a number of mainly expatriate women in Paris in the early twentieth century, where lesbian relationships provided a particular kind of support for women such as Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein, as thoroughly documented by Shari Benstock.110 There are also examples of women who have been integrated into a male group and have derived benefit from it: Berthe Morisot for instance, within the impressionists. And in some cases, such as the photographers in inter-war Paris, there was a mixed support group. But the group of women artists has rarely been a phenomenon in Europe; indeed there has been some reluctance to be labelled a ‘woman artist’ at all. This is perfectly understandable, in the current state of the arts, yet at the same time it does seem to be acquiescing in the dismissive male discourse.

Following on from that, a final word or two to justify this somewhat tentative attempt to historicise the relation between women and the arts in Europe. Two potential objections to the enterprise, cutting slightly across each other, could be made. First, that it is inherently elitist, since the arts have only ever been enjoyed by a privileged minority; and, second, that feminist attempts to restructure the canon, revaluing forgotten women writers or artists, are putting politics before quality, distorting the history of the arts. It cannot be gainsaid that for most people in Europe, throughout most of its history, ‘high art’ has been something fairly remote, accessible only to minorities. At the same time, at every level in society, women have generally been less likely than men, as Tammy Proctor points out in another context, to have the leisure time, or the cultural capital seriously to engage in or enjoy the arts, whether high or ‘low’ (pp. 299-340). ‘Talking of Michelangelo’ or learning a few tunes on the piano is no substitute for being taken seriously. That does not make it an elitist activity to enquire into the past and to speculate about the future. What survives, and what most people know of previous ages and civilisations, is their art. And the continuum between ‘high art’ and ‘popular art’ is a long one, which an attention to gender can help illuminate by suggesting that high status has usually been accorded to the more ‘heroic’ kinds of product (rather than say, embroidery, illustration or letter-writing). As historians, we need to be aware of the way the cultural field has been constructed and maintained and to try to illuminate its dark areas. As for quality, that is often a matter of taste and is certainly a disputatious area. But a practical approach is to try to fill in the gaps in a history that has for a long time neglected to analyse the gender of the arts. That need not mean making inflated and unsubstantiated claims for women just because they were women, but it does mean being willing to re-examine the canon and trying to see how women were placed within the cultural field of their time, as performers, creators or consumers of the arts.