ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the social models of "artist" and "woman artist" and focuses on interviews with members of women's cooperative art galleries in Philadelphia and New York City to discuss how women artists position themselves in relation to these models. The woman artist as dabbler or "lady painter" descends from Victorian notions that well-brought-up women should be generalists, proficient in a number of useful, refined, but not too intellectually demanding activities, rather than excelling in one. Anna Jameson, nineteenth-century feminist organizer and champion of women in the arts, praised women artists in a manner that expresses dominant social definitions of "woman." In the case of "woman artist," the stigma is double edged. Women artists visibly and by social definition fail the tacit standard of maleness and certain aspects of the social model "artist" even as they know and strive to meet social criteria for being taken seriously as artists.
