Old Mistresses

Publisher description (new ed.) : Feminist artists and historians have always been in the forefront of challenging the pejorative stereotyping of art made by women. They have exposed the myths about women's supposed creative inferiority and the assumption that art is the exclusive domain of men. First published in 1981 [this book] asks searching questions about women's position in culture and about the role of cultural myths and ideologies in the social definitions of masculinity and femininity. They develop a radically new analysis of the relations between women, art and ideology as they analyse the lives and, equally important, the works of women in both the fine and decorative arts from the late middle ages until the women's art movements of the 1970s.