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Dutch housewife worker
Nicolaes Maes, "Young Woman Peeling Apples" ca. 1655 This painting represents the Dutch everday life as a house-wife and doing her household duties. It would be uncommon for Dutch women in 1655 to perform much work outside the home. -
Utopia and Imperialism
La Sinapia (unknown author, Spain)
This utopia, set in South America at that time dominated by the spanish monarchy, intertwins the fantasized vision of the new world as a place of ‘primitive‘ innocence and ‘uncivilized‘ moral with political critic. Indeed, through the contrast with the idyllic description of the Sinapia where everyone is equal and participates in the political life, the author criticizes the monarchy's absolutism and what he perceives as its moral decadence. -
Women's Education and Enlightenment
Reading Voltaire's Tragedy the Orphan of China at Mme Geoffrin's Salon in 1755, by Anicet Lemonnier
The painting portrays women's participation and involvement in intellectual debates and discussions as advocated by the ideas of Enlightenment, mainly those of intellectual freedom and use of reasoning. In the seventeeth century, many women hosted Salons and discussions, which demonstrates women's ambition to learn and to spread their ideas, similar to the ideas presented in the painting. -
Utopia and the Enlightenment
Louis Sébastien Mercier, The year 2440
In this utopia, Mercier inspires himself from the enlightenment's thoughts and ideals to design how a perfected Paris would be 700 years later. Exalting reason and knowledge as a way to achieve social progress, Mercier's ideal society is freed from nobility and absolutism, based on religious tolerance and a fair system of taxes.These ideas would later be central during the French revolution, nineteen years later. -
The Crinoline in women's fashion
Marie-Antoinette d'Autriche, reine de France (1755-1793), en robe à paniers vers 1785 by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755, 1793), depicts Marie-Antoinette of Austria, Queen of France, wearing a crinoline dress around 1785 . This style represents the style worn by women. It consisted of having a metal frame under the layers of the dress in order to create the illusion of bigger dresses. This type of dress restricted the movements of women, representing how women were constrained in society. -
Women's Education and Victorian Age
Bowle's Drawing Book for Ladies, by Augustin Hecke (1785)
The cover page of a drawing book for ladies with a collection of flowers to be drawn in and methods for women to improve their needle work. This guiding book was a source of education for women who were expected to stay within the household and to be educated on the basis of learning tasks related to domesticity. This sort of knowledge was also to prepare an ideal kind of women and wife, the one that displays feminine manners. -
Women's Education and Revolutions
Vindication of Rights of Women, by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
The two pages of introduction from Wollstonecraft's book reflects her criticism towards traditional educational teaching offered to women, where emphasis was placed on the female body and beauty rather than on her mind. She was inspired by the ideas advanced by the French Revolution, mainly those of citizen rights and equality before the law, where she argues that women's education should be equal to those offered to men. -
Industrialization and utopian socialism
Charles Fourier’s Phalanstery
This “societary palace dedicated to humanity“ was designed to allow workers to experience a life in community and share the benefits of their labour. Guaranteeing workers' access to arts, education and music, it was made to remedy to the social and economical hardships caused by the labour metamorphosis brought by industrialization. -
Nationalist utopias
Josef Kajetan Tyl, “Kde Domov Muj?“
In this song called “Where is my patry“, the nationalist poet longs for Czechoslovakia (at the time dominated by the Habsburg Monarchy),depicted a heaven on earth. Through this exaltation of an ethnical utopia, this poem crystallizes the patriotic hopes and demands for political changes of culturally and politically alienated people under foreign domination in the 19th.
“Paradise on earth it is to see/ And this is that beautiful land/The Czech land, my home! “ -
Women Miners in Industrial Revolution
1842 Parliamentary Papers from Great Britain highlight the women coal workers of the Industrial Revoltion. These women account their fatigue after long hours, non nutritious food, and lack of time at home. These statements represent the countless women workers during this industrial time period. -
The Bloomer Costume changing the norms.
"ONE OF THE DELIGHTFUL RESULTS OF BLOOMERISM. - THE LADIES WILL POP THE QUESTION.
Present amongst intellectuals in the 1840s, it was made popular by American women's rights activist, Amelia Jenks Bloomer. Frowned upon, it was thought that it would reverse gender norms and roles, just as the caricature demonstrates. Although a step forward towards dress reform and more confortable clothing, the style died out shortly after it appeared. -
1857- Women's work and Farming
Jean-Francois Millet, "The Gleaners" (1857) This painting portrays the low working class women in France in which there was little progress and much work for the women -
The Corset and the Fashionable slim waist
Douglas and Sherwood's Celebrated Tournure Corset Part of the women’s fashion for four centuries. This type of clothing was worn in order to get that “hourglass” shape in which they had a very slim waist and at the same time pushing up the breast to make them seem bigger . This garment distorted women's bodies, and would later be the subject of critic due to the health hazards it caused. -
The Ombrelle a shield from the sun
Lise with Umbrella by Pierre- Auguste Renoir (1867) Museum Folkwang
The Ombrelle was an accessory used by women. becoming popular in the mid-19th century. Used only by women of upper class distinguishing themselves from other women, becoming an “indispensable accessory for a proper lady”. It shielded women from the sun while symbolizing a women's respectability. -
Dress Reform Furthered by Bicycles
Victoria Bikes (c. 1900) cycling poster from Londonderry's era. Written in german, the poster shows a woman wearing a modified dress in order to ride the bicycle comfortably. These new dresses, inspired by the bloomer costume, were the beginning of acceptable reform in society where women started being allowed to wear trousers, but only for specific sports. -
Women's Education and Industrialization
Petite Dentellieres, by Mary Lancaster Lucas (1907)
The painting portrays several young girls as laceworkers who are being taught by a female adult. During the late eighteenth century, Europe underwent rapid industrialization, which affected the quality of girl's education of the time. The workplace became another form of educational training that responded to the growing economic demands of Europe. As a result, girl's education was limited and constraining, mostly for poor working families. -
Russian fashion and health
The women of the Russian royal family, 1914 (Fine arts Image Daily Mail.)
In 1914, dress reform was closely tied to women's health. Women's clothing was meant to be confortable and promote women's health, which meant ending distorting women's body in the pursuit of the ideal of beauty. -
Women's Education and Reforms
Photograph of Mordvinova, Bekatov, Filosofova, Stasova, Belozerskai, Tarnvoskaia and Menzhinskaia by unknown (1915)
A photograph of the founders of the Bestuzhevskie courses. These Russian women fought for rights to higher education in Imperial Russia, when the country was udergoing several political and social reforms. Although, Russian women faced several challenges, they successfully established the Bestuzhevskie Institute. -
1915-Vera Brittain and VADs in World War 1
In Vera Brittain's autobiography, "A Testament of Youth," Vera accounts her time as a VAD/nurse during World War 1. This is one of the many examples of work women were expected to do during the war due to limited means with their men off to war all over Europe. -
Women's Education and War
The graduating class of Bais Ya'akov in Lodz, Poland, Uknown (1934)
A photograph of the second graduating class of the Jewish all girls school of Bais Ya'akov in Poland. The establishment of the school by Sarah Schenirer at a time when women were denied acess to education and when anti-semetisim was on the rise, demonstrates the ambitions of minorities to pursuit schooling. Many Jewish teachers made the effort to keept the school running after the Second World war, in which they succeeded. -
Utopia and propaganda in the interwar crisis
Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will
This propaganda movie designed to glorify Nazism uses utopian representations of the regime, depicting it as one of greatness, modernity and fraternity in order to manipulate the reality and rally people to the ideology. Portraying Hitler as a hero about to bring a better future, utopian narratives are here used to address the concerns of the German people in the interwar economic crisis and thus obscure the dreadful reality of Nazi ideology. -
German working women during the war
"German World War II recruitment poster for women Auxiliaries" Creator unknown. This poster represents a change in the need for German women for the help, which was a progress to the previous notion that women should be at home to perserve the Aryan race. -
Female workers during the Second World War
This photo from the National Archieves represents the countless women workers during the Second World War, Like WWI, women were deperately needed to perform mens jobs from technological work to more common household labor -
Totalitarian dystopias
Georges Orwell, Animal Farm
In this dystopian satire, Georges Orwell draws a parallel between Stalin's authoritarian regime and the way an animal farm, exalting ideals of equality to free itsefl from human capitalist exploitation, dramatically turns into a dystopian reality once it is governed by a totalitarian leader. Using these ideals as propaganda tools, Stalin's regime transformed utopian hopes for an egalitarian society into the horrific reality of famines and political repression.
