Post 3 - Middle Ages and Renaissance - Iris G

H.W. - Quotes from readings and responses 09/17

Back in the Middle Ages in Europe, women were expected to wives and mothers. Their role was to manage house chores and fulfill domestic duties, like cooking, cleaning, and taking care of children. Sometimes they'd work alongside men in the field or learn a trade from their male relatives or husbands. Upper class women, had more privileges, like running estates when their husbands were away, or inheriting land and businessess when their husbands died, but were still expected to stay home, obey their husbands, and birth children.

It was through the church that women were able to escape these roles and become more educated than the average women. They'd become nuns or abbesses and were able to gain power and influence without the pressure of getting married and birthing children.

During the Renaissance, women were still contained within their roles, but wealthy women were able to become more educated in subjects like music and writing. They were able to afford private tutors and with the support of their family, become artists, musicians, and authors. 

Women artists were still taught mainly by their male relatives, and don't receive formal schooling in the arts. This meant that women artists had to make art differently. They weren't allowed to study the male body, so often women artists focused on feminine subjects and experiences like small paintings and portraits.

Middle Ages

Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, 1151

Anastasia Illuminated Manuscript

Renaissance 

Catherine Van Hemessen, Self Portrait, 1548, oil on canvas

Sofonisba Anguissola, self portrait at the easel, 1556, oil on canvas

Chadwick (class text)

Moralists then might have argued about whether education was a good thing for girls, but a literate wife was becoming essential to the mercantile families that formed the new Florentine middle class. The chronicler Giovanni Villani reported that by 1338 eight to ten thousand Florentine children, male and female, were attending elementary school to learn their letters: yet by the fifteenth century, women’s roles in general economic life had become more circumscribed.

Not until the sixteenth century did a few women manage to turn the new Renaissance emphasis on virtue and gentility into positive attributes for the woman artist. Their careers were made possible by birth into artist families and the training that accompanied it, or into the upper class where the spread of Renaissance ideas about the desirability of education opened new possibilities for women.

Guerrilla Girls

What do women want? They want the human to be neither man nor woman.

Claude Cahun 1925: My opinion about homosexuality and homosexuals is exactly the same as heterosexuality and heterosexuals. All depends on individuals and circumstances. I claim a general freedom of behavior.