The Gender of Photography

How Masculine and Feminine Values Shaped the History of Nineteenth-Century Photography

Nicole Hudgins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Photography

It would be unthinkable now to omit early female pioneers from any survey of photography's history in the Western world. Yet for many years the gendered language of American, British and French photographic literature made it appear that women's interactions with early photography did not count as significant contributions.

Using French and English photo journals, cartoons, art criticism, novels, and early career guides aimed at women, this volume will show why and how early photographic clubs, journals, exhibitions, and studios insisted on masculine values and authority, and how Victorian women engaged with photography despite that dominant trend. Focusing on the period before 1890, when women were yet to develop the self-assurance that would lead to broader recognition of the value of their work, this study probes the mechanisms by which exclusion took place and explores how women practiced photography anyway, both as amateurs and professionals.

Challenging the marginalization of women's work in the early history of photography, this is essential reading for students and scholars of photography, history and gender studies.

Part One The "Femininity" of Photography

1 What was the Problem with Femininity?

In the arts as in the sciences, masculine perspectives have until recently been confused with universal experience. Thus "the" human history of Europe, the United States, the history of art, and the history of photography have actually recounted the history of mainly mens "masculine" activity, with women's activities, whether conforming to or transgressing their "feminine duties," relegated, sometimes literally on the page, to the margins.

The convention of masculine "universality" in texts, wherein the masculinity of actors and concerns goes unmentioned yet overwhelmingly dominates, has been identified by few historians, except feminist scholars. Women's desires, and their insistence on their own subjectivity (in other words, their existence as ends-in-themselves rather than as objects of male interpretation or as men's acolytes), have nevertheless disrupted masculine "universality" at many points in history. Since the eighteenth century, the production of historical texts has adapted to these disruptions in a number of ways, from the assertion of "natural" female subordination by philosophers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin in the nineteenth century, to the partial acknowledgement of female subjectivity in twentieth century texts.

Acknowledgement of women "masters" has appeared in photographic histories that include the contributions of, for example, Julia Margaret Cameron, Frances B. Johnston, and Diane Arbus, while yet preserving a "masculine" perspective as universal. By a "masculine" perspective here I mean one that focuses on the "paternity" of photography (as I will discuss in some detail in later chapters), and the triumph of Modernism in the hands of a post-First World War American avant-garde, byway of classically"masculine" genres such as street photography, documentary photography, landscape, war photography, and female nudes.

An intriguing example of how this perspective persists may be found in Ian Jeffrey s provocatively titled Revisions: An Alternative History of Photography, which accompanied the reopening of Britain's National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in 1999.¹ Jeffrey made a point of mentioning Julia Margaret Cameron in his preface, as one of the "major artists" of photography.² Ironically, though, his "alternative" history reinforced the masculinist perspective by recreating a scientific history of the medium wherein women participants are utterly absent. Photo illustrations in his preface include the following: a calotype of volcanic explosions,³ a glass negative showing the polarization of light through the mineral calcite, a glass print depicting a labelled collection of birds' eggs, a calotype of a cuneiform fragment in the British Museum, a Kodak street scene, and a First World War autochrome. Although, as I will show, British women amateurs also delved into "masculine" genres such as scientific classification and exploration, their names are absent from Jeffrey's book (not a single illustration is attributed to a woman). Thus, Jeffrey not only excluded the "feminine" of photography, he doubled the imbalance by ignoring female photographers who chose "masculine" fields, such as Anna Atkins or Rosalind Franklin (if we are restricting ourselves to British examples).

What was the problem with femininity?

Historically, the framing of femininity as a "problem" to be "solved" arose in a number of domains. Beginning in the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, the so-called Woman Question arose as a critical subject in multiple fields and disciplines, as men and women grappled with the challenging notion that women's individualism, aspirations, and rights were as legitimate as men's,⁴ Nineteenth-century writers and lecturers saw the "problem," or paradox, within their republican model of civilization, which prescribed a strictly private sphere for women but which nevertheless produced female authors, painters, actresses, and activists who successfully expressed themselves in public, sometimes to popular acclaim.

This problem was even more serious in the domain of work and wages. The postrevolutionary North Atlantic ideal prescribed domesticity for women (i.e., non-waged work at home), but the demographic reality was that many women had neither fathers nor husbands who could support them financially. What to do? This social reality unleashed a flood of literature over several decades proposing possible solutions that, it was hoped, would not alter mens monopoly over either the professions or the fine arts. For as we will see, masculinity after the revolutionary era was bound up in men's professional achievement and creativity.

Femininity was a problem in another sense. Nineteenth-century women and girls were under twenty-four-hour surveillance in their communities, for fear of social or sexual impropriety. Bourgeois custom dictated that unmarried women avoid unchaperoned contact with men who were not their relatives. The purpose of this rule was to prevent women (not men) from losing their virginity before marriage. Married women were also under surveillance in their communities, owing to the fear that extramarital sex would lead to illegitimate offspring, which was (and remains) the governing fear of patriarchal societies.⁵ Confining rules played an important role in discouraging women from taking up photography, since working with the camera would easily lead to unsupervised contact with non-related men.

As the large "recovery"literature has made clear, beginning with Naomi Rosenblum's History of Women Photographers, many women embraced photography as professionals and amateurs from the 1840s, despite being under surveillance. Nevertheless, middleclass women were hyper-aware of situations that could "compromise" their good (i.e., chaste) reputations. There are many examples of these gendered faux pas in nineteenth-century literature, from Emily Brontë to Emile Zola to Kate Chopin. For instance, the character of Christine in Zola's L'CEuvre (1885-6) poses an interesting example for us because of the importance in the novel of various image workers (artists). While the male characters in the novel roam the streets of Paris at all hours with impunity, as male photographers would also have done, poor Christine, provided with neither training nor education for any decent employment, worries about how her presence on the streets might be perceived while making her way alone at night to her new job as a lady's companion. Later, she must sneak through the city to meet her secret lover, the painter and hero of the novel. Early women artists and photographers who did outdoor work in urban areas were rare because, as Rosenblum wrote,

they were not supposed to appear unaccompanied in city streets. Besides the usual fears of being accosted by strange men or coming face to face with prostitutes, there was the problem of attracting too much attention to get on with the work.⁶

Owing to the prevalence of prostitution, a woman alone in the streets might also be accosted by policemen. Although, as we will see, by the 1890s a variety of factors (legal, social, technological) combined to lead North Atlantic women photographers, finally, to reject the idea that they were not supposed to be in the streets.

Contemporaneous with Zolas work was Amy Levys The Romance of a Shop (1888), which is especially relevant to our inquiry. Levy's novel describes a group of sisters who open a photographic studio in London, in defiance of social and family disapproval. The character of Aunt Caroline pronounces the scheme as "dangerous," both because operating a business would bring the girls into promiscuous contact with strange men, and because it would supposedly make them less attractive to prospective suitors. One sister reports, "She spoke freely of loss of caste; damage to prospects—vague and delicate possession of the female sex—and of the complicated evils which must necessarily arise from an undertaking so completely devoid of chaperones.^"7 Never mind that the Lorimer sisters face destitution unless they find employment. Although Levy's contempt for her character of Aunt Caroline is plainly drawn,⁸ Caroline nevertheless represents the conventional reaction to women asserting their right to creativity and independence during the period.

Sometimes such literary scenarios made it seem as if taboos against female liberty were created by women policing each other, rather than men. But more likely, the origins of women's mutual "policing" must have come from their internalizing, first as girls, what was a patriarchal taboo. The reality on the street was that actual vice squads, made up of male police, had powers to arrest women during this period if they suspected them of solicitation. This humiliation was one of the sexist measures of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain, against which Josephine Butler and many others campaigned. The Act was repealed in 1886 in Britain, but as late as 1903 in France, the Forissier Affair saw legal fallout from the wrongful (and humiliating) arrest of two middle-class women in Paris.⁹

Whatever the law said, most middle-class women received the intended message from such incidents, ensuring that before 1914,¹⁰ they would think twice before setting up camera tripods in public or working in photographic studios with unrelated men. Likewise, joining a photo club (founded and dominated by men) would be tricky, as would trying their hand at street photography, landscape photography, or any other genre they could not pursue at home. Early women photographers, then, were confined; but, as we will see, this confinement sometimes gave rise to innovative approaches to their craft. Furthermore, every once in a while, a self-confident woman participated in the above activities outside the home before 1890, convention be damned. It was these figures,like Marcelia W.Barnes (b. 1808, active 1850s-70),EuniceN.Lockwood (18401905), and Catharine Weed Barnes (1851-1913), who helped make female leadership in photographic institutions thinkable.¹¹

Finally, the problem of femininity also characterized much of the twentieth-century historiography of photography. "Feminine" practices, notably mixed-media albums but even the turn-of-the-century Pictorialist movement led by men,¹² were largely rejected by mid-to-late-twentieth-century scholars, collectors, and curators as "impure" practices (that is, undesirably hybrid).¹³ This historical aversion to the "feminine" in photography, what we might also describe as the suppression of yin, unsurprisingly produced a reaction in the literature. The uncovering of "feminine" work (mainly women's) became an international project over several generations of scholars and collectors since the 1970s, reaching undeniable heights in the key texts described in the Introduction. The challenge now is to integrate our new knowledge of women's presence in the history of photography's e...