The Big Man and the Little Woman - Part Three

   Part Three of the entry 'The Big Man and the Little Woman'


    In the mid to late 1960's in the United States, small groups of women met, talked and planned. These women gave birth to the second wave of feminism. Some of them had taken part in the civil rights movement in the U.S. Here men assumed the power and told women to stay in the kitchen, cook and serve meals, answer phones and do the clerical work.
      "The only position for women in our movement is prone," in effect said Stokely Carmichael, one of the leading civil rights activists of the 1960's.
      Educated women reacted against this belief in male superiority. They called it 'sexism'. Already Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique'  had been published in 1963. It was a very moderate book that called for some equality between men and women.
     Yet these younger women meeting in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and other places, went far further. They called ther present set-up 'patriarchy' or the rule of women by men. They vowed to overthrow patriarchy and put it in its place complete equality between men and women.
      They marched into the streets, demonstrated, recruited more women to their cause, grew in numbers and their cause called 'feminism' spread around the world.
     In the art world men nearly always devalued women's work. "Women cannot paint," said the modern painter Hans Hoffman. "Only men," he said in effect, "can spread their wings."
 Soon feminists scholars challenged this attitude. 'Why Are There No Great Women Artists' was written by art scholar Linda Nochlin. Nochlin pointed out in this article the tremendous obstacles women artists faced.
    Other feminists like the writer and author Germaine Greer, and artists like Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro scoured the history of art and found many great women artists.
     Soon the feminists discovered Frida Kahlo for in the early 1980's, Hayden Herrera's massive biography of Kahlo was published. Here was a woman who painted her pains, her worries and her disabilities. Also she married a man who abused her, cheated on her and had a massive ego.
     "The personal is the political," feminists started to say. In other words the everyday problems women faced were caused by patriarchy and male sexism. Kahlo's work revealed a lot of this. She was a victim of male oppression with a capital V.
    As women started to discover the work of Kahlo, a momentous thing happened. Communism started to unravel, first in China and then in the Soviet Union.. "It does not matter whether the cat is black or white," said china's new ruler Deng Xiao Ping, "as long as it catches the mouse." 'Little Deng' as he was called launched China on a capitalist course and scrapped nearly all the socialist rules and regulations in China.
    Then came a massive change in the Soviet Union. This too affected the way art historians looked at Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
        (End of Part Three. )