Women, culture and Europe are all huge subjects. This field is by no means uncharted territory, but it has no overall atlas. There are many maps: histories of Europe, of culture, of single countries and monographs on particular aspects of our subject - French painting, German philosophy, Italian opera, the nineteenth-century English novel, and so on. But they are often either too vast or too narrow in scale to be helpful, except as a starting point; many are concerned with one country, one sector or one period, and (until recently) one sex. Feminist scholarship has set out to provide an alternative body of literature, again very heterogeneous. The following paragraphs offer a brief overview of how the writing about the field has evolved; for individual works, see the guide to further reading and notes at the end of the chapter.
Perhaps understandably, since they have to cover so much ground, general works on European history rarely give more than token space either to cultural matters or to women, and scarcely ever mention them in the same breath. Among recent attempts at this difficult genre, Norman Davies’s tour de force Europe: A History (1996) is more attentive to arts and intellectual developments than many, and is particularly good on music, but his references to women are idiosyncratic and patchy. Even today, some general histories continue to show little sign of the impact of feminist scholarship. The chapter on ‘Culture’ in a recent textbook history of twentieth-century Europe mentioned 106 men and seven women, the latter references being strikingly trivial and dismissive: Josephine Baker and her banana skirt, Isadora Duncan and her scarf.7 The alternative European history, focusing on ‘women in Europe’, to which the present work belongs, is more likely to cover education, work, politics, family and everyday life, providing good supplements to other chapters in this collection, than the arts, although there are some helpful exceptions.8
If we turn to works on cultural history, often in practice largely concerned with western Europe, we face the existing corpus of literary history, art history, musicology and histories of high culture. Traditionally, such works have been, and in many cases still are, written out of a concern to make known and understood ‘the big names’ of music, fine art and literature, and the dominant schools, movements and groups or alternatively those that were in rebellion against the preceding tradition: the classical composers, the Romantic poets, the impressionists, the surrealists, the New Wave film directors, and so on. The creative and artistic networks of the European past which so often constituted themselves into movements, thereby increasing their visibility and providing support and solidarity for their members, were mostly groups of men, brought together by the kinds of sociability open to them and virtually closed to women. Some famous women were always certain of a place in cultural narratives, especially in literature. But for the most part, literary and artistic movements in modern Europe have been overwhelmingly male, at least until the twentieth century.9 And the notion of ‘the canon’, that is, the works of art accepted as constituting a tradition or set of pinnacles of achievement (Italian opera, Western pictorial art, ‘great books’) has been dominated by the names of men.
Accordingly, the ‘canon’ has become a target and a matter of dispute for feminist, and other kinds of revisionist scholarship. During the 1980s and 1990s, it became something of a cliche that ‘dead white men’ dominated the lists of cultural achievement. In particular, many feminists argued that the canon was imposed by a particular kind of literary/cultural history developed in the nineteenth century, the product of male establishment institutions.10 The canon is primarily a literary notion and, because of the particular development of literature departments in British and US universities (less so in Continental Europe), chronologically the first feminist challenge to traditional cultural history came from literature specialists, generally Anglo-American scholars. The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar was one of the best-known early examples of such scholarship. This pioneering and still very readable book sought to make sense of certain women writers, not merely as practitioners in the established tradition of the novel, but as a distinct kind of creative writer, shaped by factors that were not the same as for male writers. In their preface to a reissue of the book in 2000, the authors recall how in the 1970s this idea was seen as odd and controversial. They point out that the many changes in literary theory have now made their own approach seem elitist and canonical: the rediscovery and evaluation of non-elite women writers, whether women of colour, of the working class, or from minority cultures, the rise of post-colonial, post-structuralist and queer theory among other things, have all challenged the idea of the canon, which does of course continue to be defended or adapted in other quarters.11 There is now a large body of writing on women and literature. As well as thematic and stylistic studies applying various kinds of critical theory to both men and women’s writing, this corpus also includes explorations of a wider range of genres than the traditional poetry/drama/fiction triad. It has resurrected forgotten, neglected or underestimated women writers, and it has examined the conditions of literary production, to see how these differed for men and women.
Similar approaches, though the number of studies is considerably smaller, have been undertaken by feminist or gender-conscious art historians, musicologists and specialists in cinema. The picture here is more patchy and is still developing. While art history now has a fairly well-developed feminist branch, so to speak, musicology is an area of relatively recent openness to gender scholarship. And if gender studies in Anglo-American cinema are well established, in some European countries, especially that major player, France, they are still not particularly welcome. Any such approaches to French film come from outside, mainly by British and North American scholars. The approaches taken in these areas range from analysis of apprenticeship and the conditions of production of fine art or musical composition, through the gendering of the ‘male gaze’ in both art and film, to studies of less-known women artists and genres.
Although much of this research has been concerned to rediscover women performers and creators, some of it has also highlighted women as consumers, readers and audiences. Here mention should be made of a gender-conscious type of history emerging from the cultural studies inspired by such thinkers as Jurgen Habermas, Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu and concerned with the relationship between the production and consumption of culture in general. In the original writings of these theorists, a space for gendered analysis was always theoretically possible, though in practice not very deeply explored. For example, Habermas, whose work has been a major influence, sought to ‘map the formation of a polite and informed public in the early modern period’, but in practice concentrated on the ‘public sphere’ of sociability created by certain spaces predominantly frequented by men: coffee houses, magazines, clubs, universities, artist’s studios, and so on. Recent historians who have pointed out that ‘in Habermas’s narrative’, women were ‘virtually invisible’, have looked at other social environments and have sought to reconfigure the map of ‘polite society’, locating women as essential participants in the cultural field, ‘an informed public’ parallel with that of men.12
Finally, in this brief survey of genres, mention should be made of reference works and the possible range of miscellaneous sources. While reference works produced before about 1980 are often unlikely to be useful tools for the historian of women and the arts, there has been a revolution in this area of publishing too. Many biographical dictionaries and ‘companions’ to art, literature and music have been redesigned in order to provide more gender balance. The serious researcher will of course also have to be prepared to investigate primary sources: contemporary publications, archives, manuscripts, exhibition catalogues, programme notes, theatre programmes, and so forth. In short, although there is not much available in the way of a European-wide synthesis on ‘women and the arts’, there is a very rich body of both single-discipline and interdisciplinary scholarship, as well as primary material, which historians may not have regularly explored, but from which hypotheses can be constructed to start building a better informed cultural history of Europe.
World History
