ABSTRACT
The history of art, like other scholarly disciplines, has matured over the centuries by expanding its boundaries to include new ways of looking at its subject. Feminism, or the historical discovery of women, has had in the past decade a comparably broadening effect upon art history. Feminism has raised other, even more fundamental questions for art history as a humanistic discipline, questions that are now affecting its functioning at all levels and that may ultimately lead to its redefinition. In its broadest terms, one could define the impact of feminism on art history as an adjustment of historical perspective, and, at the outset, an analogy may help one to establish this point. Along with the dominance of a masculine value system in art and art history has often come a blindness to female experience, or, sometimes quite literally, to female existence.
