Mary Cassatt

This reference organizes and describes the primary and secondary literature surrounding Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzales, and Marie Bracquemond, four major women Impressionist artists. The Impressionist group included several women artists of considerable ability whose works and lives were largely ignored until the advent of feminist art criticism in the early 1970s. They studied, worked, and exhibited with their male counterparts including Degas, Manet, Monet, and Pissarro. The entries provide extensive coverage of the careers, critical reception, exhibition history, and growing reputations of these four female artists and discuss women Impressionists in general as they shared the challenges of becoming accepted as professional artists in late 19th-century society.

"An interesting and original collection. A must for all those interested in women artists and the women who have written about them."--Linda Nochlin, author of "Representing Women

"Kristen Frederickson and Sarah Webb have provided us with a missing link, a truly feminist art history that connects with the work done in the 1970s and thankfully ignores the 'post-feminist' hiatus. "Singular Women is a model for future scholarship on women's art. If only the books it inspires are as rigorous, vigorous, varied, and readable as this one."--Lucy Lippard, author of "The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Feminist Essays on Art

"The most provocative, challenging, and intimate writing to appear in feminist art history since Linda Nochlin launched the field with her essay 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists?' Thirty years later there are both great women artists and great women writers. This book assembles some of the best and boldest among them. Not afraid to address the boring, the failed, the neglected, or the masterpiece, "Singular Women sets the standard for feminist art history of the twenty-first century."--Peggy Phelan, author of the survey essay in" Art and Feminism, ed. Helena Reckitt

"This important volume addresses the vexed question whether the traditional monograph, rightly under suspicion in recent years, can be reinvented to serve feminist art history well. Its excellent--and varied--essays answer with a confident and convincing affirmative, demonstrating how we can talk about women's art practice without abandoning the biographical and social stories that enable and illuminate it."--Janet Wolff, author of "Resident Alien: Feminist Cultural Criticism

"Contributes newunderstandings to the now familiar problems of writing biographies of artists and, in particular, writing about a woman artist. It re-inscribes the woman artist in the discourse while probing--through a variety of approaches--the possibi

As exemplified by Madame Butterfly, East-West relations have often been expressed as the relations between the masculine, dominant West and the feminine, submissive East. Yet, this binary model does not account for the important role of white women in the construction of Orientalism. Mari Yoshihara's study examines a wide range of white women who were attracted to Japan and China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and shows how, through their engagement with Asia, these women found new forms of expression, power, and freedom that were often denied to them in other realms of their lives in America. She demonstrates how white women's attraction to Asia shaped and was shaped by a complex mix of exoticism for the foreign, admiration for the refined, desire for power and control, and love and compassion for the people of Asia. Through concrete historical narratives and careful textual analysis, she examines the ideological context for America's changing discourse about Asia and interrogates the power and appeal--as well as the problems and limitations--of American Orientalism for white women's explorations of their identities. Combining the analysis of race and gender in the United States and the study of U.S.-Asian relations, Yoshihara's work represents the transnational direction of scholarship in American Studies and U.S. history. In addition, this interdisciplinary work brings together diverse materials and approaches, including cultural history, material culture, visual arts, performance studies, and literary analysis.