Murray Hill Institute
Newsletter
November 2005
Volume 2, Number 3

In Kathleen D. McCarthy’s book on women’s contribution to philanthropy in the arts in the years 1830 to 1930, she goes well beyond her stated purpose, and gives us a much bigger picture of women’s relationship to the arts and society surrounding them. This book is compelling in the number of themes it covers as a history of women’s contributions to culture. While addressing the issues of women as artists, women as organizers of arts support groups, women as collectors and connoisseurs, and the lack of women in the principle positions on major museums, the author presents interesting case-histories, biographies of particularly interesting women, and manages to present a history which is enjoyable to read.

Kathleen D. McCarthy writes from her position as associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Graduate School and University Center, CUNY. Her complete bibliography and use of historical sources show her knowledge of an unusual branch of history. She uses quotations from contemporary sources which serve to put the situations she describes in the light they were seen in at the time.

An amazing amount of material is put into the book’s 245 pages. McCarthy begins with the topic “Separatist Strategies,” which focuses on the role of women just before and after the Civil War, who served the arts by creating group initiatives to aid women in the arts. She concentrates on Candace Wheeler, founder of the New York Society of Decorative Arts. McCarthy explores the idea prevalent at the time that the decorative arts were the sphere of women (as they relate to the care of the home), while the Fine Arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) should be in the care of (according to Darwin) "the more highly evolved male brain,” (quoted p. 94). The support for decorative arts had a further humanitarian benefit of giving an opportunity of gainful employment to the “genteel poor” such as women left widows by the Civil War.

The next section of the book discusses women artists themselves, the difficulties they had in the lack of training opportunities, and the prejudice against art (or, in fact, almost any paid profession) as a suitable vocation for a respectable woman. She gives us short case-histories of various woman artists at the end of the nineteenth century (such as the Impressionist, Mary Cassatt) and those who helped them in their careers. She presents the difficulty for women artists who married, and often had to abandon their careers to do so, even when they married fellow artists. The same chapter gives short histories of the founding of four of the great museums in the U.S. (Chicago’s Art Institute, the Metropolitan in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.) While McCarthy emphasizes that women were rarely included in the roster of Trustees, and not hired as curators until well into the twentieth century, they had roles to play as donors and fund-raisers. She is always ready to include the exceptions to the general patterns, rather than only using facts that exclude women.

The last half or so of the book uses the lives of several outstanding women patrons of the arts, who were the leaders of the new “independent” woman, able to use money inherited from fathers or husbands, social position, and (in the case of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her own talent as an artist) to make their ideas on art and connoisseurship legitimate and sought after. In addition to Whitney, who founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, sketches are given of Isabella Stewart Gardner who created her own museum in Boston with her collection, and Gertrude Stein and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, two women who supported the avant garde. One of McCarthy’s themes in this chapter, is that it was more often women who would take a chance on supporting the new and unusual.

Some of her anecdotes and quotations from contemporary reviews show us clearly how much women’s roles have changed. One is naturally incensed when one reads that a woman’s sculpture was chosen by a committee for a prize, only to be rescinded when the jury found out that the artist was a woman. We may also be annoyed by the mention of an article that was written to belittle Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s art, entitled: “Poor Little Rich Girl and her Art: Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney’s Struggles to Be Taken Seriously as a Sculptor without Having Starved in a Garret.” (p. 222) Some histories of women’s issues are unfairly biased against men, but this one is almost always fair. First of all, men’s roles in philanthropy and the arts during this period are included in the book to paint a complete picture of the era. (I noticed only once an unfair assumption that men who were involved in “the Tile Club”, were only in “the more feminized areas of the decorative arts” for “their desire for material gain.” This accusation is rather put into doubt by the author’s own subsequent descriptions of the social camaraderie of the Tile Club. Selfish motives are assumed without cause.)

There are some flaws in the writing of this book. The author has a tendency to use clichés. She describes periods of time by nicknames such as “antebellum,” the “Gilded Age” or the “Jazz Age” without making it clear what time period is actually meant. The text is much clearer when she simply uses actual dates. At times, her narrative is somewhat jumbled chronologically. In her narrative about Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, for example, she jumps forward and backward in time quite a lot. Because McCarthy is trying to juggle a lot of themes, she should probably be excused for organizing her material out of a time line, but the reader does have to be careful to follow it at times. There are also a couple of mistakes in the history of art. Marcel Duchamp should not be described as a “Cubist”, but rather an artist of the Dada School, or even a surrealist. A notable omission was the importance of the English artist William Morris in creating the interest in Decorative Arts at the end of the nineteenth century.

McCarthy’s book is valuable as history with a rather unusual point of view. It also provides interesting biographical material of women who were catalysts in the changing culture in the time period covered. I would like to suggest that the book has a further benefit: it raises questions for women of our present millennium, as we study issues of less than a hundred years ago in a society that has already changed radically in many ways.

Some of the questions raised are the following:

• How can we continue the tradition of women volunteering their time to artistic and humanitarian causes with the more difficult balancing they have to manage between professional lives and family?
• Should the work of women artists be viewed separately from men artists (at least at times) in separate museums or exhibitions, or are we ready to be gender-blind and let art by women speak for itself alongside that of men?
• Now that women have their own means, earned by their own professional endeavors and investments, how are they spending it to contribute to the arts and other humanitarian causes?

Women are now taking their places on the Boards of Museums rather than simply being the organizers of bazaars and fundraising parties. However, they still are the primary presence in the planning of events, perhaps because they have feminine qualities that enable them to provide an atmosphere of hospitality and warmth wherever they are. This is something women should celebrate. At the same time, it is not the only skill women have.

Where do we want to go from here?

We have some inspiring role models of women who transformed their culture in this book, despite some circumstances that we might term mistakes. We can also see the difference in our times in the roles of women in society, mostly for the better. We can use the experience of history to inform us as we proceed to foster culture in the new millennium.
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Sarah Phelps Smith, Ph.D., is an art historian who lectures, writes, and
leads tours to Italy.