The 1910 class notes for the all-woman Garland School of Homemaking in Boston were titled \u201cTimes Where We Need the Man.\u201d The list of gendered chores now seems antiquarian: chop wood, sweep ashes, care for horses, and bring in coal.<\/p>\n
But one chore still sounds familiar. It reads: \u201cwash windows (?)\u201d<\/p>\n
That question mark, a sign of the longstanding tug-of-war over housework, survived the past century intact. But relations between American men and women have changed a great deal \u2014 and are still changing.<\/p>\n
One aspect of ever-shifting gender relations is being explored this semester at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study<\/a>: space, that wide realm of interiors and exteriors that marks the social commons \u2014 that is, everything outside our bodies. How are men and women negotiating access to space? And how have those negotiations changed over time?<\/p>\n In mid-April, Radcliffe will sponsor \u201cInside\/Out: Exploring Gender and Space in Life, Culture, and Art<\/a>,\u201d a two-day international conference of artists, architects, researchers, legal scholars, and sociologists. It\u2019s part of an annual series of Radcliffe spring conferences on gender that have explored war, food, and other points of intersection between the sexes.<\/p>\n The conferences are usually accompanied by an exhibit in the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library<\/a> on the History of Women in America, and \u201cInside\/Out\u201d is no exception. \u201cInside\/Out: The Geography of Gendered Space,\u201d by turns grave and whimsical, is on display through October.<\/p>\n The exhibit is in four parts, each representing a realm within space: private, public, political, and artistic. The categories are derived from feminist scholar Kerstin Shands, who sees two types of gendered spaces. \u201cBracing\u201d spaces represent resistance, and \u201cembracing\u201d spaces imply empowerment and safety.<\/p>\n In the \u201cprivate\u201d section of \u201cInside\/Out,\u201d there are documents, magazines, books, and photographs that illustrate what for centuries was regarded as a woman\u2019s exclusive purview, the household.<\/p>\n The 1910 class notes are there, in looping old-fashioned handwriting. So are fragile issues of 19th century magazines, with titles such as Mrs. Mayfield\u2019s Happy Home (1877) and The Mother at Home and Household Magazine (1864).<\/p>\n On display in the same case are passages from books that express the exclusivity \u2014 and confinement \u2014 of a woman\u2019s household dominion. In her 1875 novel \u201cWe and Our Neighbors,\u201d Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin,\u201d offers up a passage that would make a modern-day Eliza flee across the ice to escape the slavery of gender: \u201cSelf begins to melt away into something lighter,\u201d she wrote of women kept inside by social norms. \u201cHer home is the new personification of herself.\u201d A passage from \u201cArt in the Home\u201d (1879) goes further, by modern standards, declaring that a woman \u201cshould be herself the noblest ornament of her ornamental dwelling.\u201d<\/p>\n For 19th century women who were uncomfortable being ornaments, there was travel, or even living alone in cities, a set of spaces explored in the exhibit\u2019s \u201cpublic\u201d section. In cities, women could take on nontraditional roles, said the exhibit notes. Lynn, Mass., entrepreneur Lydia E. Pinkham (1819-1883) did well, turning her home remedy for \u201cfemale maladies\u201d into the most popular patent medicine of the age.<\/p>\n But urban spaces were also segregated by gender. An engraving from the July 21, 1875, Illustrated London News pictures a \u201cladies\u201d window at a New York post office. \u201cI just love the image of going to a post office and having their window be for me,\u201d said Schlesinger executive director Marilyn Dunn<\/a>, with a laugh. \u201cIt captures the idea of gendered space.\u201d<\/p>\n In the same display case is a note on the Women\u2019s Hotel in New York City, which opened in 1878, offering a week\u2019s board and lodging for $6. The Barbizon, a more contemporary women-only hotel, was profiled in a 1963 issue of the New York Evening Post. The headline was \u201cWhere the Boys Are Not.\u201d<\/p>\n Where the boys are not is also a theme in the \u201cartistic\u201d section of the \u201cInside\/Out\u201d exhibit. There\u2019s a photo of Judy Chicago<\/a> and Miriam Schapiro<\/a>, co-founders of the California Institute of the Arts Feminist Art Program, at \u201cWomenhouse<\/a>.\u201d The 1971 art installation, set up in a deserted Hollywood mansion, featured the work of only women, and men were banned from the opening.<\/p>\n But the same section in the exhibit shows that the art world was often where the boys were and the women were not. On display is a 1985 banner from the Guerilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist artists formed to protest a Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art show. Of the 169 artists represented, they complained, only 13 were women.<\/p>\n The banner, a spoof on an odalisque-like nude, also claimed that while 5 percent of the artists were women, 85 percent of the nudes were. \u201cDo women have to be naked,\u201d the banner asked, \u201cto get into the Met. Museum?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInside\/Out\u201d offers a glimpse at the feminist pioneers of the art world, including sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), who was born in Watertown, Mass. She sculpted \u201cThe Sleeping Faun,\u201d a male figure whose softened musculature rewrote the standards of masculine display. Hosmer\u2019s plaster model of \u201cQueen Isabella of Castile\u201d \u2014 monumental and imperial \u2014 was intended to show that the queen was the equal of explorer Christopher Columbus, whose iconic journey she helped to sponsor.<\/p>\n The sculptor \u201cwas very much interested in female heroism,\u201d said Schlesinger operations manager Bruce Williams, who co-chaired the exhibit committee.<\/p>\n An 1861 photograph shows Hosmer \u2014 elfin, pugnacious, and defiant \u2014 in the center of a group of rough male artisans in Italy. On the back, the inscription reads, \u201cHosmer and Her Men.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there is that sphere that is more familiar \u2014 or at least more dramatic \u2014 than the others: \u201cpolitical\u201d space. This section looks at \u201csites of resistance,\u201d said Williams, including the parades, protests, sit-ins, and other events that demanded expanded access for women in social and physical spaces.<\/p>\n Protest is on display, in the video touch-screen portion of \u201cInside\/Out,\u201d including black-and-white footage from a stormy 1970 takeover of the New York offices of Ladies\u2019 Home Journal by feminists. The magazine\u2019s editorial policy, they said, kept women in the confining grooves of \u201cchildren, kitchen, and church.\u201d<\/p>\n One joyful photograph, a line of women at the front of a protest march, is from the opening of the 1977 National Women\u2019s Conference in Houston. Prominent in the picture are Betty Friedan, author of \u201cThe Feminine Mystique,\u201d and Bella Abzug, a New York lawyer, activist, and congresswoman. Abzug is famous for her defiant pun: \u201cThis woman\u2019s place is in the House \u2014 the House of Representatives.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cInside\/Out: Exploring Gender and Space in Life, Culture, and Art\u201d will be held April 15-16, Radcliffe Gymnasium, 10 Garden St. Free and open to the public, registration <\/a>is required. Deadline to register is April 5.<\/em><\/p>\n