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Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books in History, the channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Martha Moffat-Peacock, professor of art history at Brigham Young University about to talk about her new book, Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives, Imaging Women of Consequence in the Dutch Golden Age, out 2020 with Brill. Hello, Martha, and welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks so much for inviting me.
Oh, it's wonderful. It's a joy. So how are you? Are you in Provo?
Next door in Orm, but yes, B.Y.U, Brigham Young University is in Provo, Utah. It's so beautiful. It is. It's a gorgeous place and nice weather, and we're getting all vaccinated up, so that's all a good thing.
Yeah, do you think you'll be able to come over this summer to Europe for work? That's what I was hoping. I'm starting a new book project, and so just waiting for the Netherlands to open up so I can get in. That's soon, very soon.
And maybe we'll actually, by the time you get here, maybe we'll have spring for you, because we don't have it yet, but we promise that it'll happen at some point. So yeah, soon, we hope we'll open for vaccinated Americans. All right. OK, so I really enjoyed reading the book.
It's so nice. It's, you know, with these Brill books, there's something just wonderful about holding a Brill book in your hand. It's just solid. And you know, it's quality scholarship, and it's great printing, and it's so they're just wonderful.
So it was really nice. All right, so our first task is to establish how this fits into your academic trajectory, right? So I take a look at your CV, and I see that from very early on, you have been about representation and gender in the Dutch Golden Age. So how did you get interested in the Low Countries?
Well, that's an interesting question. I have been interested really in the Low Countries since I started as an undergraduate. I was first attracted to strange and weird artists like Hieronymus Bosch. But when I started in graduate school, I really became attracted to the art of the 17th century Dutch Republic.
And I think in particular, because it was all about women, for the first time in art history, you really begin to see a keen interest in contemporary women and representing contemporary women, not historical women, so not religious subjects and not mythological subjects, but real women, women who actually existed at the time. And it was entirely new in art history. So it really attracted me to think, what is going on in this culture where women play such an important role that their lives are represented again and again in the art of the period? Very cool.
All right, so how did you become interested? What got you from your interest in women representation in the Dutch Golden Age into this book? This book actually is years and years from research. Actually, this whole section on harpies, I started to work on for my dissertation.
So it goes clear back to the late 80s. And I just kept working on representations of women in various kinds of settings. And I just continued to do little bits of research on various aspects of women's lives in the Dutch Republic. And the book just got bigger and bigger.
I was originally just going to write it on harpies. And then I began to see there were these interesting connections between the harpies that I first studied or shrewish women, essentially represented in art, women who beat up their husbands and stole their husbands' trousers and who forced their husbands to do female tours and so on. Interesting connections to particularly heroines. And you'll notice in the book, I have a couple of references, contemporary references to men who are writing sort of pseudo histories who talk about the famous heroines of the Dutch revolt and say things like, yeah, this leads to women becoming overbearing and too powerful in our culture and so on.
And they begin to sort of resent that, particularly some men are saying, yeah, I wouldn't want to marry one of these women. I wouldn't want a two powerful wife, those kinds of things. But linking it up then to these heroines. So then I became really interested in the heroines, particularly K.
Now, Simon's Hasselar, who really became the most famous hero slash heroine of the revolt, was greatly celebrated. And even still today, that word is used, that name is used to represent a kind of manish woman, a woman who's powerful and overbearing and so on. So I became really interested in that connection between the heroines and these resented harpies, the Jewish-Jewish kind of women. And then I, in the 90s, in the late 90s, there was a lot of scholarship coming out about domestic images, about images of women in the household.
And it took this tone of patriarchy, of explaining these and interpreting these through looking at more or less like the famous Jakob Katz, who was the most popular, more or less really, of the Dutch golden age. And so they began to see these then as these images of women who were told by men the roles that they should perform, and therefore these images were a way of inculcating in women and attitude, of modesty and deference and so on. And I just kept thinking, okay, I got these great heroines here, who are really powerful women in the Dutch Republic. And then I got these harpies who are also these really powerful overbearing women.
And then somehow this overwhelming sense of patriarchy in housewife images just didn't even fit with what I knew about Dutch women. So I wanted to come up with an understanding of these images, not from a contemporary feminist point of view, but from how women in the 17th century would have viewed these. And I found more and more evidence that really these images are a celebration of women and of their roles in society and how significant that role, particularly of motherhood, was, that they ruled the roost and that the family really was the keystone of Dutch life, that the family and the emphasis on family and raising good little burgers and burger rest was so important to Dutch culture. And then it made me sort of see domesticity and images of women in the home in a totally different light as really a celebration of women's contributions to culture.
All right. So you open the book with this quote from L'Orovico Giódardini from 1567. And I'm going to read it. The women govern all, both within the doors and without, and make all bargains, which joined with the natural desire that women have to bear rule, making them too too imperious and troublesome.
I love that. So could you tell me why you chose this as your opening? Well, I wanted it to be the sort of starting point, really, for my examination of what's called the long 17th century. In other words, for the Dutch, their golden age for many scholars really begins with the revolt.
And I wanted us to have a sense then from the outset, women were already participating in storming churches and destroying icons in the Catholic churches and so on. So I wanted us to have a sort of starting point for realizing that from the outset of the Republic, women were already joining in in a ferocious fashion. And they were already becoming very sort of public in their activities in sort of liberating the Dutch from their Spanish Catholic king. So I thought it was a nice starting point to say, all right, there's going to be a change.
There is a shifting terrain here. And we're already engaging women in very public, very dynamic, very powerful kinds of ways. So he already watched this. He'd been experiencing this.
He'd seen those iconic classic riots. And he understood how significant women were in that historic moment. Yeah, and we'll talk about that. And then this kind of backlash.
We'll get to that in a second. So one of the things I appreciate is just how much opening this book, I love that by the end of page three, I know exactly what I'm going to be reading, not enough scholars do this. And I find it so frustrating. I'm a fan of the murder mystery.
And I don't need suspense in my nonfiction. Tell me what you're going to tell me and how. And I love that you are just right in there. You're like, I'm going to talk about this and this, and this is what I'm going to tell you.
And then you do it. It's fabulous. But the other thing that I really love is that right away, page three, there are some great images. By page five, I'm looking at the battle for the trousers, which is really great engraving.
I sent to a couple of my girlfriends. I feel like an old copy of the engraving. And they were just like, yes, I feel that. So tell me about the idea.
I actually do have no idea. Hundreds of images that you're using this for? Over 250 images. And really, the images are the best part.
Whenever somebody sees these images of this room, we still just laugh at them today. They are so fun. They are so funny. They're so creative and ingenious.
One of the things I really appreciate about the Dutch is they really came up with a whole new iconography in terms of art. They came up with whole new, I mean, not that they weren't at all related to the medieval past. The Battle of the Trousers was an old theme by the 17th century. But the ways in which they caricatured these and made them so funny and so humorous.
So it's almost like watching a slapstick kind of drama right before your very eyes. And so when certain Dutch art historians talk about how the Dutch never laughed or never thought these things were funny, I'm just like, that's just not reasonable in my mind because we still laugh at them today. We still think they're really funny and humorous kinds of images. And I loved this idea of sorting out why they would have been funny to women and why they would have been funny to men.
And so as you've noticed, the book is very interdisciplinary. I touch on philosophy and psychology and sociology and economics and anthropology and so on. But for scholars who study humor, one of the things they really began to understand is that when men and women look at jokes, they are oftentimes laughing at two different jokes. So for me, these harpy images then are wonderful representations where yes, you can see that they would be funny to men because in a superiority kind of approach to humor, there's the sense of men saying, that's not me.
I'm not the overrun husband here. And for women is the sense of, yes, women are triumphant. Yes, women are powerful in these images. So I love that element of humor and thinking about how again, particularly women would have viewed these images.
That really is the point of this book is in looking at images of heroines and harpies and housewives, how would it have affected them? Well, how would they have interpreted these things? What would they have seen when looking at these images? And you really do make this point that while sometimes the images that these are propaganda almost or they're being used to teach women or try to scold women for their behavior.
And that's not how it reads at all to a different segment of population. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that's wonderful. And most Dutch art history up to the point of, well, really, well into the 21st century, most of Dutch art history took this really firm patriarchal moralizing male-centered position without ever really investigating what women would have seen.
Which makes some little sense when we're talking about a period where women are exercising power in all kinds of realms, right? That's why it was so important to set up that historical context for women. I think when you really begin to understand that in relation to other women in comparison to other women throughout Europe in the 17th century, they had an amazing number of rights and abilities that women elsewhere didn't have everything from inheriting property to even married women being able to own their own businesses, to represent themselves in the courts, to be able to be regenteses, to be governesses of civic institutions. These are things I've heard of elsewhere in Europe.
So, you know, relatively speaking, they were pretty powerful women. So the variety of images you use, we've got engravings, things that would have been like kind of broadsheets, some lots of portraits, what kind of other images am I missing? Genre scenes of women in the home, so paintings as well, as you'll notice, a great deal of the third chapter is paintings. And that's because domestic genre imagery really became one of the most popular categories of painting in 17th century.
And the second chapter is a lot of prints. These were obviously things that were meant to be sold, not just throughout the Netherlands, but throughout Europe. A lot of them you'll notice have inscriptions in other languages. So readily transportable cheap prints that were accessible to everybody.
And then the hero ones, there's a kind of interesting mix of both. And prints of Kano, for example, became so popular that we just see a plethora of those types of images, but also paintings, formal paintings that were of Kano, for example, that were in the town hall, those kinds of things. So it does interestingly fit into a kind of media that best, I think, represents the kinds of audiences. So for the for the Jewish heartbeat, obviously those had a popular appeal to a wide variety of economic classes as well as nationalities.
Right, and that's another important piece of the puzzle that you cover is that there is the Netherlands are rich, rich, rich, right, but then there, and it's also this huge international situation. So we've got people in the low countries from all over the world. And some of them are the richest people that the world's ever seen, and some of them are barely managing, right? So there's a wide variety of images there.
Right, and the thing I like about it being so accessible, so cheap, so available to a wide variety of economic classes is that it gives us, I think, a more complete understanding of women generally having access to these discourses, not just the very elite of the society. So that there was a celebration obviously of a Kano or of Anne Marie of Anshurman amongst all classes of women. In other words, those portrait prints of these military and cultural heroines were available to even the lower-classest people who didn't have a lot of money. And at times didn't even have to be literate really to be able to appreciate these.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of this is didactic, like their images that can be easily accessible for people who aren't literate, which is like that really gives us a much rounder picture, yeah. So your first chapter, Heroines opens with a mention of a traditional woman, the traditional women that are valorized in the medieval and early modern area, and various catalogs of good women. And so some are warrior queens, like Zenobia, the biblical Deborah, the medieval folk hero Joan of Arc. But these women were much rarer than the other sorts of women, maybe best demonstrated, like, best represented by Lucretia, who loses her virtue and kills herself or Susanna, who's celebrated her purity.
And then you just say very simply, Dutch heroines in contrast were distinctive in many ways. So tell me how, what are these Dutch heroines like? What characterizes them? Well, the great thing about them is they're not royalty.
In other words, it's not a celebration of somebody who's in a powerful position. These were ordinary, everyday, murder women. And just fought with such great bravery that they became noted by foreigners, as well as by people of the Netherlands. And so first of all, they are ordinary women who don't have high status in the society and who don't have that sort of religious significance of becoming saying so or that kind of thing.
And so they are women that I think the ordinary Dutch women could relate to. They're like me, they're heroic like me. And the interesting thing also about these accounts that we have of the revolt in various cities, you know, this man who went from city to city and they would be siege the city and sort of try to starve them into submission and so on. And we have a sense that women just really joined in this fight, not so much at shooting or killing soldiers, beheading them as in chain-house case, but but pouring tar and pitch over the walls, throwing stones at them.
So whatever weapons they had, they used. But because the cities were besieged, it was essentially the whole city joined in. Women, men, children, but particularly women were noted for their valor in all these instances in protecting their city, they're protecting their rights, their liberty, their independence, all of those kinds of things. So that was such a valued characteristic amongst people in the Dutch Golden Age that I think that women participating in this really put them at a level of being sort of equal to the men in their quest for independence, freedom, liberty, all of those kinds of things.
So the Dutch heroine then was an ordinary woman. If you see depictions of K-N-O in the book, you'll see she's never the beautiful seductress. She's never the really young, pure, virginal kind of figure either. She is just an ordinary woman, and she is shown as rather manly and not lovely kind of figure, which again is so different from typical representations of women in art history up to that point in time.
And so I do think that once again, women would really have related to just this ordinary, not attractive, not seductive woman who was celebrated for her strength, her courage, her manliness, rather than for characteristics that women had been noted for such a long time. Safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors making sure my car doesn't get stolen. It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars. And it means there's no need to wear me when I play at the park.
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Safer Ontario, paid for by the government of Ontario. Yeah, no one's gonna mistake her. I wonder if she's the artist's mistress or something. That is not the image you see of her.
When you see her holding up the head, you're like, yup, that tracks. Well done you. There's appreciation for these strong women. But then there's also a backlash, which I think you really cover in harpies as well.
I mean, other places you talk about it. But harpies is really about this backlash against these women. And some of the critiques of the Dutch women follow the traditional tropes we see elsewhere in Europe. But some are unique.
So tell me, how are Dutch women particularly difficult to manage? Right. They develop this reputation for being bossy, overbearing, Jewish-Jewish, really from the outset of the revolt. And I backtrack just a little bit in that section, because I want to say that I don't think harpies just suddenly appear on the scene at the moment of the revolt.
Peter Broigal had treated the theme earlier on, and he's a 16th century Netherlandish artist. So there had been these references to powerful women before that. And as I point out, two scholars have implied and Walter Gibson both point to characteristics in the 16th century that might have already led to this stereotype of the overbearing Netherlandish woman. First of all, as I point out, the Netherlands had been ruled really by women throughout most of the 16th century, all relatives of Charles V.
V.E.M. Burr. And they had had control over the Netherlands. So perhaps a backlash to having a woman ruler is part of this.
But also that women were really participating, as Hermann Playpoint's out in trade. And things even in the 16th century, women had more rights to participate in trade and so on than elsewhere, so that there was already a powerful contingent of women in the Netherlands. By the time the revolt starts, that really enabled them, I think, to have the audacity to go in and storm the churches and fight against the Spaniards and so on. In other words, it wasn't such a leap from the women of the past to this new revolutionary heroine who was brave enough to fight in this manner.
So there was a kind of history of that. Women had been educated in the Netherlands from a fairly early period. And it is interesting to note that so many women of the period notice that the lack of education is what keeps women in a subjugated position. So even famous feminists of the period are saying women need to get educated because this will liberate them.
So I think that's an aspect of Netherlands culture that really does go back to an earlier era. So by the time we have the revolt, women are really positioned then, I think, to play a more important role than they would have been otherwise. So after that, it's like the gates have blown open and women are now free to do many more things than they had even in the past. That with the onset now of the new Dutch Republic, which meant really changing culture in significant ways.
It was a new religion. It was, Calvinism was the official religion, even though only about half of the people in the Dutch Republic were actually Calvinist. They were the official church. So it was a new religion, a new sort of cultural structure that was put into place now with the Dutch Republic, which allowed women then to, I think, play a significant role.
It's sort of like a sense of, hey, we fought the battle. We are now liberated also, not just men. We are all free. And we're going to structure a new society.
And that society did mean that women participated in the economics. They participated in the governing of civic institutions. They participated in really very public ways, while also still celebrating those traditional roles now of women in a new society where the Catholic Church was not the sort of main instructor of how people should behave. It was the mother in the home, that kept control.
And as you can see in the book, Johann von Beverfeich, who was a doctor, wrote this book on the excellence of the female sex. And he talks about roles of women in such an interesting way. In this book, he celebrates the heroines. He has a whole section in the later edition that celebrates the heroines of the revolt.
But he also talks about the cultural heroines of the era. He dedicates that second book to Anne-Marie Oven Sherman, who really was this internationally famous scholar of the era, spoke languages and was just a magnificent example of female scholarship internationally. But he celebrates all of those women. But he also talks about mothers.
He also talks about housewives. How important they are for Dutch culture. He talks about them as rulers of their realm, like a king would govern a country. He talks about how foundational they are, how important they are for the structuring of Dutch society.
And then he goes on to say, they're only doing these roles because that's habit. That's not nature. It's not biology, which is so different from the rest of Europe. And then he goes on to say, my celebration of housewives is not a way to limit them to these roles.
It is simply saying they are foundational. They are important. And if they were given opportunities in the public spirit, they could do so much more. I mean, it is such a feminist argument that it's really quite amazing that it occurs in the 17th century.
So I find him really good evidence that there were attitudes, that women were capable of all things, that women did have power in all of these various kinds of roles we've been talking about. And so let's pivot a little to talk about the, this is an interesting thing that I realized, as I'm saying it out loud, is what I want to talk about now is domestic violence, as we would call it. We see a lot of spousal abuse. But in a way, it's portrayed often in a very humorous way.
And I see this place where women are humorously doing a lot of the violence. What tell me what's going on there? How does this relate? That is such an interesting contrast to the rest of Europe as well as I point out in the book.
In Germany, yeah, there are violence women, but men, they're killed. And the stories in the prison, so on. I mean, it is really homicidal kind of violence against women. Same thing in England.
The same kind of violence of men towards women is often the case. Having scoured all the Dutch art I could get my hands on, there is maybe one, maybe two instances that I can even think of where men are shown fighting back. That is, to me, an amazing aspect of Dutch culture. That it's always women doing the violence.
It's always women who are the powerful ones. Now in part, that might be in a misogynist kind of way, a way of blaming women, of saying, yeah, it's all their fault. Look at these dangerous truths. But I also think it's this sense of, we don't fight back against these powerful women.
I mean, I do think it's interesting that women would have just seen instance after instance after instance of women triumphing, women being the ones who win the day, who are able to overcome men. And in that way, I do think it relates in interesting ways to sort of social history of the relationship between spouses and women. She comes away saying patriarchy was just constantly questioned in 17th century Dutch culture. That in the law courts, for example, you have just as many instances of women beating up their husbands as you have the opposite.
And so I mean, that is pretty unusual. You must agree, I think, in terms of Western culture that that many cases of husbands coming forward and saying, my wife beat me up. Yeah, well, in case of the court, right? Like, you have to, to take that public, you have to expect that your neighbors are not just going to, you know, take part in some shari vari ritual, make fun of you.
That this is a known quantity that they're speaking to. We don't see that as much in other places. And I do think that because punishment is not really needed out on these women, I think there is a sort of sense that they got away with it. And that, and just a realization and recognition of, yes, there are a lot of powerful women in the Dutch Republic.
Now, clearly, I'm not saying this is a matriarchal culture. I'm not saying that, you know, women had political power in the same way that men had in that kind of thing. Nevertheless, I do think it is interesting that women are always shown triumphing as a kind of reflection then of the way that at least certain men saw this culture, that women really were powerful. Right, and it's like very in a physical realm, which is meant to be a male realm, as opposed to just this moral one, which is very interesting.
And if we only saw it in images, then I might think it was a critique of the brassie Dutch women. But it's showing up in court records as well. This is a legitimate phenomenon. And church records as well, church records of overbearing women, men having to get permission from their wives to go abroad, all kinds of things that suggest, and I do love the foreigners' journals in this regard as well because you name it, men who visit the Netherlands from Italy, from Spain, from England, from France, from Germany, all come to the same conclusion that women really rule the roost in marriages, that they really are the ones who make important decisions about the household.
And again, because the Dutch Republic was a culture that really valued the family, the home, that and saw this as kind of independent from the state, that that realm was given such import and that wives were given such the power really in the relationship between husband and wife that everybody knows it. I mean, it wasn't just a stereotype that got repeated over and over again. Each one of these foreigners relates some anecdote about powerful women that they particularly found astonishing in relationship to the way women were in their culture. And this is another kind of access of record that allows you to really pinpoint, like I'm making these images of my hands, listeners, where I'm kind of triangulating images, like legal records, church records, and then these travel narratives, which are wonderful stories always, right?
And you learn about as much as you learn about the travelers home country as you learn, but this idea that Dutch women are just overbearing. Powerful, a little scary, it just comes through over and over again. Okay, one of the things that you talk about quite a bit, which I'm guessing most of our listeners have never heard of is the battle for the trousers. And I just first of all, I love saying battle for the trousers.
I love that that is a thing. And I love it if you can tell our listeners a little bit more about the battle for the trousers. Well, even going back to late medieval times, the distinctiveness of dress between men and women, men wearing pants and women wearing dresses, then became a sort of gender stereotype so that women trying to wear trousers, take trousers from their husbands, those kinds of things became a really important signifier of the idea that the woman ruled her husband to that. She had power over her husband.
And so these scenes of battling for the trousers are metaphoric in that way, and that that was a signifier that the woman had power in the marriage. But again, as you were just talking about the physicality of those battles, just becomes so funny, so humorous. And that, again, even today, we just sort of delight in these images of women who are so powerful. And again, the character of these women, their shrewishness comes out in their faces of these women who delight really in having their husbands subjugated in this fashion.
And there's some interesting ones besides the one you had brought up earlier by Karl von Lunder, where a woman has her leg in one side of the pants, and the man has his leg in the other side of the pants, and then she's grabbing his hair and sort of beating him up. You also have these great images of men subjugated into kneeling before their wives and putting the trousers on them as if, this is a real sign of humiliation then for the husband who has to actually dress his wife in the trousers in this fashion. And then from that, you have all kinds of other signs of submission. He has to kiss her thumb, which is another sign of subjugation, or she carries the Oberhand banner, the upper hand banner, showing that she has triumphed over him.
So the pantofle using her slipper, the pantofle, to beat up her husband, a sign that he was a pantofle-held, which is a hand-packed husband. All of these wonderful puns and symbols that they come up with. And again, I think it's so ingenious, the amount of iconography that develops just over the bossy wife. I do spend a lot of time on the heartbeats, but I really want to emphasize how this gets developed in a myriad of ways visually to keep underscoring the stereotype of the bossy to the housewife.
It wasn't just a passing sort of joke. It was deeply embedded in Dutch culture, that the henetaster, the man who feels the hand, gropes the hand for eggs, which was considered a female chore, or the spinning husband, the husband is forced to spin, and use women's tools that they just come up with so many ways of exploring the theme of the bossy housewife says to me, this is pretty much reflective of the Dutch male psyche, and of their paranoia over powerful women, which does, I think, bespeak the actuality, the real existence of this in Dutch culture, but also the existence of a true battle of the sexes. And I love that even scholars like Anne-Marie von Sherman talk about going to war, going to battle against men, because there really was a battle of the sexes. It's not just a 21st century, you know, kind of impressing our own feminist di-drive on these people, it is, this actually existed.
There was a battle of the sexes. Men were afraid of powerful women, and women felt like men needed to be shown their place. So I think there is, again, a wider cultural kind of evidence that comes into play here to suggest that, yes, the battle actually existed, and yes, they spent a whole lot of time on it. Yeah, there is a cultural obsession with this.
And hilarious images, just hilarious images. And we still say, you know, she wears the pants in the family, but we don't have dozens of cartoon drawings of couples literally fighting over pants, like, you know, where a man putting pants on his wife as if he were her maidservant. They're just, they're everywhere. And also the joke books of the time that Rudolph Decker has worked on, the majority of them are fighting between spouses in this very kind of way.
Numerous, numerous varses of the period deal with this theme. So it's in the visual arts, but it's also in the textual sources of the era. Sure. So we've got these, like, the heroines who are outstanding.
We have the harpies who are of this other, very comical representation. And you see, in some places, right, and very angry representations, I guess, in others. But then with the housewives, you see how much more normative thing. And first of all, the art that we're looking at is a little bit more permanent, a little bit more upscale.
I guess I want to say, we're looking at a lot more oils and things like that, and what you're reading. But here, you still see, even in the housewives chapter, as you talked about earlier, that Dutch women control their homes in a lot of ways, right? So what is it that Dutch women are doing? How important are they really in society, like in their homes?
What kind of control do they exercise there? And that's why I find the anthropological arguments so helpful here, is because anthropologists find that societies that give a great deal of emphasis to home and family are the most egalitarian in terms of male and female power. And I think that's actually what happened here. I think that women in this role were seen as essential to Dutch middle class society.
And because they were lifted up in that way, I think it did make them more of an equal partner with their husband. So while you can have a moralist, like Jakob Cott, saying, father should rule in the home, nevertheless, he's celebrating women. He talks about the great Annamarie von Sherman. He talks about Annamarie's vision.
He talks about all these great women scholars and who had very public reputations and so on. So at the same time that he's saying, yeah, you should be in the home. There's also this great celebration of educated women and women who are important in the society in other ways. So I think that this role, we really have to be careful not to see it through 21st century eyes.
We have to say, how was motherhood? How was housewife? Were you seen in the 17th century? And that's really what I tried to uncover.
And as I've already mentioned, Baber Vikes Text is really helpful in this regard because he talks about how important, how foundational this role is for Dutch society. But you also then have just snippets of evidence like the patrons of Vermeer who did so many images of women in the home, how the wife is the one who leaves this great amount of money to Vermeer in her will. Such that it suggests, I mean, we just have a bear suggestion here, but nevertheless, it is a sense that she may well have been the one wanting those paintings from Vermeer. And she wanted these images of women.
And it was really, I think, a celebration of women so that you could look at an image of somebody who was like you, who makes things like you, who spins like you, who rules over the servants like you do, who organizes the home, like you do. So it shows these women as extremely competent, women who could do all things, women who contributed to the economy, but who also raised good, you know, virtuous children and ran well organized household and so on. So showing them as incredibly capable women, I don't know if you've ever been to places like Bruce, where you still can see Lace Makers out working. It's an incredible process.
I mean, they hardly are even paying attention to what they are doing. And yet they work with such quickness, such speed, that you're just sort of amazed, standing there watching it. So I think that when we look at an image of a Lace Maker, we have to say, that's as much about, wow, look at the skill of this woman as it is about she's fulfilling female roles. And I do think it's really important that at the outset of this plethora of images that come forth of women in the home, it's a woman who really changes the narrative.
It's a woman, a hertavrokman who does this series of prints, a woman in the home doing a variety of tasks, sewing, baking pancakes, spinning, scrubbing metalware, that totally changes the narrative about women. So during the first half of the century, you have all of these images of shrewish harpies and showing women in a very caricature, a negative kind of manner. But then she totally changes that. For example, pancake bakers, if you even think of Rembrandt or Herndavalder, always the pancake baker was this shrewish, harpiesch old woman who was tempting fat greedy children with her pancakes because pancakes had been a lentin prohibition.
And so they always had connotations of evil. Now she shows this pancake baker from the back. We don't even see her face. Again, she's a sort of middle-aged, largest woman here.
And you have to really examine it to realize she is making pancakes. So she takes this stereotype and totally turns in on its head to this positive view of women cooking at the harp and she shows her from the back. In other words, how shocking is that? Think of any art history from the Renaissance period earlier than this.
How often do you see the main characters shown from the back? All right, for me, that is an indication she wanted the woman to be able to say, that's me. I'm sitting here in front of the harp. I'm like her cooking the pancakes.
She's not displaying what she's doing in a moralizing way to say women you should stay at home and bake pancakes. And that wouldn't even make sense because it had this negative stereotype. So as a moral of virtue, it certainly doesn't fit, even though that's what certain discharge historians upset about this image. Instead, it's this sense of this is you.
This is you cooking pancakes in the house. And it is this sense, again, of people, and like the Horacella DePaul talks about in the 19th century where you are given a place so that women could so relate to these images as women like themselves. And again, they're shown as heroic women. They're strong.
They're powerful. They're forceful. They're doing difficult tasks here. And she really, and the same thing with the woman scouring, it had always been this sort of erotic subject matter of a young woman scouring metalware, tempting some old man who's voyeuristically looking at her because pots with open mouths had very suggestive kinds of meanings as they're scrubbing these pots.
And she again totally changes that. No coy inviting glance out toward the viewer here. No seductive, low decolatage. Instead, she's turned her back towards us.
Her sleeves are rolled up. She's got these muscular arms that would have been necessary in the scrubbing of all these metal implements. So she totally changes the narrative. And as I tried to show lots of men are influenced by her, rel, d'hoc, even Vermeer, I think, has been influenced by her.
And so these prints, again, that were readily accessible, I think became really the model for domestic imagery after that. And she's never been given credit for that. And I think that it makes such a difference that it was a woman empathetic to women's lives that made this series and really transformed Dutch domestic imagery. That's great.
I'm glad that you're redeeming this woman. You can see what she's doing. And this feels like a good place. And it's a pull it together.
So I've taken a lot of your time. And we've gotten to what we need to talk about. So let's wrap it up. Just one more question.
What are you doing now? What's next? Well, let's see if you ever get over here, Geddack. Yes, there's a partnership between the publisher, Len Humphreys, and the Getty that have come together to bring forth a series on women artists, which I think is so exciting.
I'm just excited to read all the volumes that come out of this collaboration. So I was asked to do a volume on Joanna Kirten, who I talk about in the chapter on Heroines. She's this incredible woman in the turn of the 17th century into the 18th century. And she's talked about in Halbrocken's biography.
He's a biographer of artists. And he gives her 11 pages of elaboration on this incredible woman who sold an embroidery to the emperor for 4,000 guilders, which is three times what Rembrandt was paid for the nightwatch essentially. She had truly an international reputation, which Rembrandt always wanted and never really achieved. But she truly received patronage from all over Europe and was most famed for her paper cutting.
They are incredible images that are essentially white cut paper overlaid on a dark background, or sometimes they were placed in glass, so you could see through them. And you have to cut out all the details essentially with scissors or with a knife. She does this incredible series of famous men, the William III portrait that she does, up King William III is one of the most amazing images I've ever seen in the whole history of art. So she's able to capture textural effects and details that are just phenomenal in the realm of paper cutting.
Her house in Amsterdam called Bublock, she married late in life to a merchant whose name was Bloc, became a museum. Peter, the great goes and visits from Russia. She just becomes a kind of phenomena. So I'm really excited to write this volume on her and her life, just a fascinating character who was sort of lost to us for a time.
And I hope to revive the importance of her contribution in this volume. Wonderful. I'm so excited to read that. When I'm wonderful.
Well, I hope you get over here soon. I hope this works out. Thank you so much again for your time. And I wish you the best.
Take care. Thank you, YouTube. Bye bye. Bye bye.