Women, Art and Society, by Whitney Chadwick

A single image typifies Chadwick's unrelenting feminist agenda. Alice Walker's "Wounded Feelings" (1861) portrays a distressed young woman being consoled by another, while a pretty girl attracts a beau. For Chadwick, the "rituals of courtship" are here opposed to "the solidarity of female friendship". This reading seems anachronistic. Her reading of Bridget Riley's view that "Women's liberation when applied to artists seems to me a naïve concept" is manipulative: "Women... were forced to deny any identification with other women." CH