Starting in the 1970s, feminists began to question the lack of women in art history studies and in museums. There was no shortage of depictions of women in art made by men, but little attention had been paid to women artists themselves. There was a new urgency to review the historical canon of traditional art and to accommodate women who had been ignored, disparaged, or who had not been given credit for their work. While, as always, much remains to be done to account for women artists around the world, there have been significant advances in this field over the past five decades. This introductory reading list, although not exhaustive, will provide an idea of how feminist art history developed as a field, including its main questions, critiques, and debates.
However, the most important thing is that it centralizes the place of the art education classroom in the dissemination of a revised and expanded historical canon of art. The authors point out that art history has been a conservative and slowly changing (or “monolithic”) discipline, especially when compared to fields such as literary studies, and that in 1987 there were very few feminist art historians holding professorships. While the women's movement of the 1970s encouraged both female artists and feminist art historians and critics to “change the art world so that it functions in a more socially responsible and non-elitist way,” while demanding equal opportunities and recognition for women in the arts, this progress was not without controversy.
