ABSTRACT
Simply defined, the standard definition of feminism is the advocacy for the social, economic, and political rights of women to ensure that they are guaranteed equal status with men. The word in English is derived from the French féminisme, first used in a very particular historical moment, during the social unrest in late nineteenth-century France when women struggled to promote their rights. The concept of feminist iconography is probably most appropriately applied to modern artists, particularly beginning in the 1970s, who created works to highlight contemporary social and political causes, and these artists were and are, by and large, female. The use of feminist theory as a tool to analyze medieval visual culture has followed a trajectory, with shifts in attention and interest. The initial focus on the recovery of female artists from the Middle Ages relatively quickly changed to investigations of medieval representations of women, and the way that such images served as vehicles to examine attitudes toward women.
