Introduction

In Eliot’s poem, the two lines quoted above occur twice as a refrain. They are open to more than one interpretation. Are ‘the women’ representatives of the cultured elite who intimidate the insecure Prufrock? Or are they themselves the object of satire, as the rhythm of the verse seems to suggest? After all, they are merely ‘talking of’, rather than seriously interested in Michelangelo, the ultimate figure of the male creator, who has wrestled with marble and painted the Sistine Chapel. The reader is invited to view them as a group: ‘women’, rather than as individuals responding to art. Enjoying only a superficial relation to high culture, they recognise the name but not the inspiration. As they chat about art, the tinkle of coffee spoons is never far away.

‘Women’ have a particular relation to art in most historical narratives, but only rarely as producers, or even as serious consumers. More often they are included in the discussion as art’s subject matter. Many of the creations we identify as works of art have highly gendered associations: paintings, sculptures, literature, certain kinds of music, theatre and cinema. Much of western European art has been quite explicitly concerned with love and desire, more often than not heterosexual. There is consequently a plentiful literature about the representation of women: as virgins, madonnas, mothers, femmes fatales, whores or, alternatively, as female workers, picturesque or exploited - in both cases identities that are largely sex-related. This chapter will not be concerned with representation, on which so much has been written. Rather, it is concerned with the historical experience women could have of the arts as producers (creating art), interpreters (performing art) and consumers (enjoying art). These are subjects more readily studied by specialists on the arts than by historians, and take us into interdisciplinary territory. This territory is also related to, though mostly distinct from, the question of popular culture, examined in the previous chapter by Tammy

Proctor, but the continuum between ‘high’ and ‘popular culture’ contains many overlaps: in cinema and the novel to take just two examples.

Exaggerating only slightly, one could argue that until about thirty years ago there was a dominant discourse about the arts which tended to marginalise women on almost all these fronts. It could simply take the form of ignoring them as creators, practitioners or consumers. Or it could explain away women’s absence from centre stage but grant them a minor role as audience or inspiration. It used to be argued quite seriously that all ‘women’ as a group had less incentive to become creative than men, since their energies were absorbed in domestic and maternal activity. And yet paradoxically, cultural pursuits such as painting, reading and music were seen as appropriate to girls’ education. In the period since 1700, European women, at least in the social classes that enjoyed some cultural capital, were increasingly entrusted with the skills needed to appreciate the arts: literacy, foreign languages and ‘accomplishments’, such as pianoplaying or painting. Such exposure was generally in small, homeopathic doses, enough to enable them to read books or to play music, but stopping short of the rigorous training available in universities or conservatoires for their brothers (see the chapter by Rebecca Rogers in this volume, pp. 93-133). Consequently their cultural experience could be dismissed as dabbling in ‘minor genres’ such as watercolours, or practising such ‘minor arts’ as needlework, while they were also identified as the chief readers of light literature and target audiences for melodrama and sentimental cinema. They might be able to talk about Michelangelo, but there was little chance of their approaching a mature understanding of his work, let alone competing with it.

At the same time, over the period covered by this book, another discourse emerged in which ‘creativity’ was associated with genius and generally supplied with rather male characteristics.1 As the arts became less institutionally attached to church and court, there appeared what we might call for short the romantic vision of creativity represented by the solitary, almost always male genius, in revolt against the rules, forging his own destiny and fighting or despising the constraints of class, money and society. The only social bond he might recognise was that of the artistic fraternity. The romantic hero often encounters entrapment by love, which hardly ever works out. Entanglement with women is seen as a negative destiny, leading to tragedy or - even worse perhaps - to marriage and domesticity. The nineteenth-century version of the romantic hero is the subject of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, following the beloved in a pursuit that ends on the scaffold. More prosaically, the twentieth-century writer Cyril Connolly, in his book Enemies of Promise (1938), identified a key ‘enemy of good art’ - for men - as ‘the pram in the hall’. Whereas before 1700 women had on the whole been faced with institutional obstacles to artistic endeavour, in the centuries since then, they have also been confronted with a set of widely disseminated assumptions about masculine and feminine modes of thought.

I have exaggerated these discourses for the purposes of exposition, of course. But some version of them will be familiar to most readers. And at least as regards women creators, there is a case to answer, which requires some explanation. After all, until quite recently, there have been relatively few women artists or composers (or philosophers), and even fewer who have been famous. Literature, admittedly, has had more of a female hall of fame, even if the same few women’s names recur constantly, compared to a much longer roll-call of male writers. Over the past twenty or thirty years, an alternative feminist discourse has challenged the restrictive assumptions described above. It has taken many forms: analysis of male representations of women, explorations of the taboos or obstacles to creativity, rediscovery of creative women neglected or forgotten by official chroniclers, sociology of the arts, personal testimony. In her autobiography, the literary critic Lorna Sage looked back through the critical eyes of her later feminist self at her one-time heroes, the American Beat poets of the 1950s and their view of female biological destiny:

It’s galling to realise that you were a creature of mythology: girls were the enemies of promise, a trap for boys, although with the wisdom of hindsight you can see that the opposite was the case. In those seductive yarns about freedom [such as Kerouac’s On the Road] . . . [girls] are meant to stay put in one spot of time.2

How best then to approach this simultaneous history of presence and absence? The solution adopted in this chapter is to consider the arts as a ‘cultural field’, in the sense of the term used by Pierre Bourdieu, that is, an overall context in which some activities and some players may have more status or power than others, but where such relationships are constantly changing: ‘the cultural field is a structured space of relations. . . New entrants to the field [are] necessarily situated within the network of competing positions’.3 It will approach this concept from the specific point of view of gender, rather than Bourdieu’s more usual approach via social class. This will mean looking at the ways of entry to the cultural field and its gate-keeping mechanisms, the kinds of activity and genres that commanded most respect and the shifts over time. It will draw on recent approaches in cultural history that have considered consumers of the arts (readership, audiences) as well as artists, and it will owe much to the ‘rescue missions’ of feminist history.

A first step is to historicise the cultural field. The period under review, 1700 to the present, marked some kind of break from previous ages. In his innovative book on culture in eighteenth-century England, John Brewer refers to a collective portrait shown at the Royal Academy exhibition in London in 1779. The painter was Richard Samuel, the painting was entitled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, and the nine women represented were: Anna Letitia Barbauld, poet and essayist; Elizabeth Carter, translator of the ancients; Elizabeth Griffith, Irish actress, playwright and novelist; Angelika Kauffmann, painter and Royal Academy member; Elizabeth Linley, singer; Charlotte Lennox, novelist; Catharine Macaulay, historian; Elizabeth Montagu, leader of the ‘London Bluestockings’ and literary patron; and Hannah More, playwright and polemicist. The Romantic vision of the female muse suggested that her role was to inspire the solitary genius. But the women in the painting, composed during the European Enlightenment, were, like the original Muses of Antiquity, practitioners: well-known, educated and talented inhabitants of the artistic world.4

The picture is analysed in Brewer’s book as a sign of women’s increased ‘cultural power’, greeted in some quarters by anxiety about the ‘feminization of culture’. But it should occasion no surprise to find women rather prominently present in the cultural landscape by the late eighteenth century. As Brewer remarks, they were ‘everywhere’: as readers of periodicals and novels, as patrons of circulating libraries, members of the audience for theatre and opera, purchasers of paintings, and so on.5 This is a list which envisages women primarily as consuming rather than producing culture, and is not without its internal problems and qualifications. Until then, however, in European history women had had a low profile whether as producers or even consumers of art. As well as facing institutional prohibitions from church and society, most women had far less education than their male equivalents. So it had been uncommon before the eighteenth century to find them fulfilling more active roles: as interpreters (singers and actresses, for example), as appreciative audiences for fine art or literature, as patrons (though this was more possible) and, least of all, as creative artists themselves.

Uncommon, but not unknown. In the courts and convents of medieval Europe, participation in the arts by privileged women was not entirely ruled out. Certain exceptional women were well known in their time and have often been rediscovered since: women such as the composer Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), the writer Christine de Pizan (1364-1431), the poet-storyteller Marguerite of Navarre (1492-1549). Later developments did not come from nowhere. But it can be argued that the cultural field as a whole for all inhabitants of Europe began to expand seriously only towards the end of the seventeenth century, enabling people previously excluded by their social class or their sex to have some place in it. As Roy Porter puts it, ‘the pool of cultural players encompassed ever larger numbers of women and provincials, and more middle-class and even lower-class figures’.6 Male literacy had been increasing since at least the Reformation; women’s literacy, although still lagging behind, started to catch up, at least in the privileged classes, in most European countries. While almost universally excluded from liturgical music, women had begun to sing in concerts in certain Italian courts and cities. Actresses appeared on stage for the first time at the court of Louis XIV and in Restoration England. Women writers were increasingly published and read in eighteenth-century Europe. These were recent and patchy developments, but they were part of a gradual change in the landscape. From now on, women would play an essential, though still rarely a determining role, in European culture. Over the 300 years of our study, 1700 to 2000, a number of further changes took place in the cultural field: sometimes gradual, sometimes surprisingly sudden, and sometimes hardly visible at all.

In the following survey, to avoid either a series of national catalogues or an impossible attempt to depict the whole of European culture in every age, the three central chronological sections, here described as the ‘long’ eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, will each take a particular focus: they concentrate in turn on an area of the arts both significant in European terms and one which witnessed some new development of gender balance. For the first period, roughly 1680-1810, the centre of interest will be the performing arts: theatre, music, opera and dance. For the ‘long nineteenth century’ (1789-1914) the chosen focus is the written word: reading, translation and writing. Finally, the ‘long twentieth century’, from about the 1890s to 2000, will consider the visual and fine arts, including photography and cinema. In each case, there will be excursions forwards and back in time as appropriate.