‘A Fair Field and No Favour'

In spite of such British personalities as the late Dame Ethel Smyth, the late Dame Ethel Walker, and the living painter Dame Laura Knight, women have not yet made, as women, any special impact on music and painting. As feminist art historians Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker have argued, women have always been engaged in the production of art but in order to explain how women’s marginalization is produced, this chapter examines how art history and criticism treats women’s art production. Contemporary feminists like Winifred Holtby insisted that women should be given ‘a fair field and no favour’ in the workplace. Women’s development as artists was undercut by a training system in which they had to prove their sincerity as artists in the face of the assumption of peers, teachers, and parents that they were simply ‘matrix-to-marriage’ girls.