Virtual Symposium: Picturing Women at Work in the Nineteenth Century.

Few tropes of the nineteenth century were as overdetermined as that of the working woman. A locus of cultural anxieties and desires alike, working women have appeared through the histories of the period both as a bellwether of socioeconomic shifts and as a near-mythical type. Although the figure of the laboring woman was a popular subject in literature, visual art, ephemera, and other forms of cultural production throughout the nineteenth century, scholarship on her representation remains scant today.

This interdisciplinary virtual symposium, which will be held on two consecutive afternoons, seeks to bring together papers that consider depictions of nineteenth-century female workers and the role of feminized work in nineteenth-century art and visual culture. It is organized in conjunction with two upcoming exhibitions that contend with images of women’s labor in metropolitan France: Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism (Cleveland Museum of Art, October 8, 2023-January 14, 2024) and a show on Mary Cassatt and work (Philadelphia Museum of Art, summer 2024).

It will include a keynote address by Susan Hiner, Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Director of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies and Director of Research Development on the John Guy Vassar Chair, Vassar College.

We invite paper proposals that address representations of working women across the globe during the long nineteenth century and interpret this topic broadly, with a particular eye to how class and gender further intersect with race, ethnicity, nationality, and sexuality to make certain kinds of workers and work more or less visible as such. We are especially interested in approaches to this topic across global geographies of metropole, colony, and empire. Contributions are invited from scholars in fields including but not limited to art history, history, literature, sociology, and popular culture.

Interested scholars are invited to submit an abstract of no more than 350 words along with a CV no later than July 15, 2023, to womenatworkclevelandart.org.

Organized by Britany Salsbury, Cleveland Museum of Art; Laurel Garber, Philadelphia Museum of Art; and Nicole Georgopulos, University of British Columbia