Off the Pedestal

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Pictures of women portrayed as professional, athletic, and intellectual seem common to us today, but until the late nineteenth century, such representations of strong, self-reliant women were virtually, if not completely, absent from the visual arts and literature. Off the Pedestal is the first book to explore the radical change that occurred in the representation of women immediately after the Civil War. Three critical essays draw on the visual culture of the period to show how postbellum social changes in the United States brought issues of subordination and autonomy to the surface for women in much the same way that it did for blacks. As women began attending college in greater numbers, entering professions previously dominated by men, and demanding greater personal freedom, these “new women” were featured more frequently in the visual arts and in a manner that made it clear that they had ambitions outside the domestic sphere. The complexity and pervasiveness of these women fascinated many of the most well known painters, illustrators, and writers of the time, including Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, William Merritt Chase, Charles Dana Gibson, Henry James, Edi

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