Assignment Critical Review and Research List

Monday, 12 May 2014

Assignment 4 Reading / Research List

Author	Date of Publication	Title	Edition	Place of Publication	Publisher
Greer, G	1993	The Female Eunuch	4th	GB	Harper Collins
Holdsworth, A	1988	Out of the Doll’s House	1st	GB	BBC Books
Dr (Mrs) Mohini Giri, V	2005	Emancipation & Empowerment of Women	2nd	India	Gyan Publishing House
Sills, L	2000	In Real Life – Six Women Photographers	1st	New York	Holiday House
Sandler, M W	2002	Against the Odds – Women Pioneers in the First Hundred Years of Photography	1st	New York	Rizzoli International Publications Ltd,
Conran, S	1975	Superwoman			Penguin Books
Newman, C	2000	Women Photographers at National Geographic	2nd	Washington	National Geographic Society

Tuesday, 6 May 2014

Finally completed this critical review

I have really struggled with this assignment but have finally sent it to my tutor for marking.  I'm hoping to get the whole module in for the July assessment rather than the November one which I thought might be achievable.

Here it is in total as sent to my tutor, a total of 2,189 words:

Subject: Emancipation of Women in the 20^th Century with special regard to women photographers

Terms of reference

This review will discuss how women have been able to liberate their lives from the drudgery of housework, childbirth and child rearing in the 20th century and develop their own careers.  It will be written with particular regard to women photographers.

Background

The socio-economic climate with regard to women in the 19th and early 20th century was focused on women who were expected to make an early marriage and rear children throughout their lives.  Those women that were luckily enough to be born into privileged families were not much better educated and they also spent most of their adult lives running a household, supporting their husbands and rearing children.  Education came to the masses when board schools were opened in the early 20th century and children had to compulsorily attend.  Even so, priority was given to boys who were encouraged to go on to secondary and higher education.  It was deemed not suitable for women to be educated, as they would ‘get above their station in life’.

Those women who were lucky enough to have siblings and husbands who had enquiring minds into science were able to latch on to hobbies and the work styles of their male relations to gain a form of education which enabled them to pursue ideas and experiences well out of their normal situations. 

Constance Fox Talbot (1811–1880), wife of Henry Fox Talbot, experimented with photography as early as 1839 under the watchful eye of her husband who was to become known inn later years as the first person to record a reprintable image.

Julia Margaret Cameron, (1815-1879) only took up photography at the age of 48 after bringing up her family, and was famous for her portraits of Charles Darwin, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson and others. 

Another well-known Victorian woman photographer was Lady Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865) who was a noted portrait photographer of the 1860s. She first began to experiment with photography in 1857, taking stereoscopic landscape photographs before moving to large-format, stand-alone portraits of her daughters.  Clementina was one of five children of Admiral Charles Elphinstone Fleeming and married Cornwallis Maude, 4th Viscount Hawarden in 1845 and the couple had eight children.  She turned to photography in late 1857 or early 1858 then aged 35, whilst living with her family in Ireland. She moved to London in 1859 which allowed her to set up a fashionable 1903 studio in South Kensington.

The mid 1800s proved a turning point for women to become educated and in 1848 Queen’s College for women was opened and many better-educated women were able to attend and gain a superior education.

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman to qualify as a doctor in 1883 but had to fight heavy prejudice throughout her working life.  Instead of a direct route into medicine, Elizabeth had to qualify in various other acceptable ways before forcing herself into medicine.

The Royal Photographic Society was founded in 1853 but it took until 1958 for the first woman president, Professor Margaret F Harker, to be appointed.

Suffragettes started the battle for equality in 1903 when the Pankhurst sisters held a meeting when it was decided that women would need to pursue extreme measures of civil disobedience to instigate change. 

Many women and girls took advantage of the First World War when millions of men were called up to fight.  Women filled in those openings and, when the war was over, refused to accept that they were unemployable.  After many battles with authority women over the age of 21 were allowed to vote in elections although it took many years to for women to be allowed to be recognised as professionally qualified people and take up responsible jobs.

Many people believe that women truly became free when the contraceptive pill was available to all women.  This allowed them to have control of their reproductive cycles and plan when they wanted to have children.

1900s-50s

Specific women photographers lives

Elizabeth "Lee" Miller, Lady Penrose (April 23, 1907 – July 21, 1977), Lee married in 1984 and became stepmother to her husband’s daughter and half sister.  She divorced in 1999 later had a relationship with artist David Byrne from 2007-2011.  Her later years were spent working on behalf of women’s liberation and the environment.

Cynthia "Cindy" Morris Sherman (born January 19, 1954) started her career in photography after working as a model.  She married in 1934 and gave up her professional photographic career.  In 1947 she divorced and remarried and bore a son at the age of 40 and gave up photography for gourmet cooking.  

Roni Horn (born September 25, 1955) unmarried lives in New York and often travels to Iceland to gain inspiration for her work.

Anna-Lou "Annie" Leibovitz (born October 2, 1949)

Annie Leibovitz has three children. Her daughter Sarah Cameron Leibovitz was born in October 2001 when Leibovitz was 52 years old. Her twins (two girls) Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005.

Fay Godwin (17 February 1931 – 27 May 2005)

Fay was an exception to rule in that she married in 1961 and had two sons in ***.  Her early photographic work was taking pictures of her family but when she moved into serious photography her husband supported her.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiET8P_cE2c

Martha Rosler is an American photographer. Born July 29, 1943 she works in various media and questions the relation of the corporation, the state and the family, media information and the individual, and public and private, she exposes the internalized oppression that underlies such cultural phenomena as the objectification of women.  There is no record of her being married or having a family, having concentrated on her professional life.  http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=476

1960s-2000s

The ‘Contraceptive Pill’ changed everything for women.  At long last they were able to control their fertility and make the decision when to have a family.

In the 1960s it has been quoted that men were in charge and women were secretaries and the Office of National Statistics showed that today 47% of women under 50 were married against 74% in 1979.

 ‘Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom’; Shirley Conran wrote the book Super Woman, published by Penguin Books in 1975 and wrote a guide on to how to organise married life in the 1970s and continue to work.  She meant that there were better things to do in life that be stuck at the kitchen sink.  Quoted in an article in the Daily Mail, 4 August 2012, Shirley was reported as saying, after a stormy relationship with her children that if she could turn back time she wouldn’t have had children. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2183474/Shirley-Conran-Superwoman-author-confesses-If-I-turn-time-I-wouldnt-children.html ).

I came to photography late in life as I had my two sons by the time I was in my early 20s.  I came back to photography in my late 20s but really studied it and earned a living from the mid 1980s. 

During the 1980s and 1990s, I worked for British Airways as a communications manager and later as a professional photographer at Heathrow Airport.  I found that I had to work twice as hard as any man to prove my worth.  The airport photographers who did corporate photography for the Heathrow based airlines and relevant linked companies were, more often than not, men.  When I first started earning a living taking photographs I was the person they called when no one else was available.  When I left the airport in the late 1990s to take up a teaching post, I was often the first person contacted for photographic sessions.  I had to maintain a friendly approachable persona with the more successful airport based photographers to ensure they would pass on my name if they were unable to fulfill a job request.

It was always a case of being more imaginative, a faster worker and able to come up with the results quicker than everyone else to ensure that I was chosen above all the rest.  One woman photographer I worked with at the airport who, I felt was thorough and came up with the requirements of any brief she was given, was criticized as being too slow.  She took her time setting up the background scenario but took too long.  I was able to come in with a quicker eye for detail and get some interesting images.  This was before the real age of digital photography so everything was on film and took time to process.  The quicker the pictures were back to the client the more likely it was that they would use you again if the results were satisfactory.

Current situation

Sexism still happens today. There aren’t many women on this earth who haven’t experienced sexism in one form or other. 

The Google top 100 photographers in 20th century lists only 13 women and the first woman in list is Diane Arbus at number 7 and Cindy Sherman comes in at number 13.    

Naomi Rosenblum, in her Introduction in the Women Photographers at the National Geographic comments “In a photograph taken in 1967 and inscribed ‘greatest photographic team in the world,’ 25 properly suited men are gathered around the desk of National Geographic (NG) Editor, Melville Bell Grosvenor.  The image suggests that the universal language of the photograph upon which this publication depends was solely a contribution of the male eye and mind.  Such a conclusion would be misleading as women photographers had already been making images NG for more than 50 years

Men seem to be able to do both, pursue their careers single mindedly travelling the world, leaving the family at home until their return.  Women still have to make the choice of marrying, having a family and working to pay the mortgage then having a career later in life, or having a career in their early adult life and putting off marriage and a family until their late 30s or early 40s.  Some girls / women have their family early in their lives and then go on to pursue their careers in later life.  This puts them at a disadvantage to women who have single mindedly followed their careers from leaving school as the job market is flooded with youngsters determined to make their way as photographers.

Women who have a career and family have to be very organised or have someone organising them.  Mumsnet website conducted a study on working mothers, according to the Daily Mail newspaper dated 14 April 2014, where only 13% of working mothers actually feel guilty about going to work.  With over 900 replies to their survey almost half of the responders (48%) said they were happier having a paid job rather than being a stay at home mum.  Of those who replied 33% said they would prefer to work and felt that staying at home made them feel undervalued.

One of the reasons cited for fewer mothers working part-time or full-time was a lack of nursery places and the Mumsnet website called on the government for longer opening hours at nurseries to enable more women to take up jobs in the workplace.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2603772/Working-mothers-no-longer-feel-guilty-away-children.html

At least the girls / women in the UK can expect to be educated in relative safety.  Not like Malala Yousafzai who was shot in the head by Taliban gunmen in Pakistan in October 2012.  All Malala wanted to do was to have an education and was brave enough to speak out for girls like herself.  She now lives in Britain, as she would very likely be killed if she returned to Pakistan.

In an interesting turn of events this month (April 2014), the presidential elections in Afghanistan had a woman running for vice-president.  Habiba Sarabi is the most prominent woman running in the Afghan election, which will choose a successor to President Hamid Karzai. Sarabi once served as Afghanistan's first female governor, and she is now seeking to become Afghanistan's first female vice-president.  Here, in a country where 10 years ago women were barely allowed to leave their homes there is a democracyforming that is recognised in the western world.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24379018

Summary / Conclusions

Some things have changed for the better in that women are now expected to receive compulsory education up until their 18^th birthday.  Whether they want to pursue further or higher education is now up to their own expectations and financial situation.  Grants and bursaries are available if they are pointed in the right direction.

Women, and women photographers in particular, still have to make a decision as to whether they want to follow their dreams and make a name in their chosen career and wait to have a family or choose a lesser job and follow their hearts into marriage, family and paying off the mortgage first.  Some women choose the option to have a marriage and a family early in their lives and then develop their chosen career when their families are adults and able to fend for themselves.  Whilst all women think things have changed, it seems that history repeats itself and we go round and round the Ixiom wheel repeating the same pattern of life in perpetuity. 

Saturday, 1 March 2014

Neglectful of adding to this work

It looks like I've been neglectful of this assignment as I concluded assignment 5 late last summer whilst the work was fresh in my head.  I have been thinking a lot about this critical review and have decided on what to write about.  When I read the brief for this assignment my thoughts immediately went to that topic on representations of gender, race and ethnicity in photography.

I have worked hard all my life and even when bringing up our children but was unable to move into my real love of working in photography due to family commitments.  When our sons had left school I was able to pursue this avenue and have put much of my energies into photography, but often found that being a woman there were some drawbacks in the seventies, eighties and nineties which still carried on prejudices against women.

My assignment will be entitled 'The Emancipation of Women in the 20th Century with Special Regard to Women in Photography".  People always say write about what you know best and, having lived and worked in the latter part of the 20th century, I feel eminently experienced enough to comment.

I have been seeking out the written word about the whole situation in the 20th century and women photographers in particular and it helps that there is such a spotlight this year (2014) on the situation of women in the first world war as this seems to have been a major turning point in the emancipation of women.