ABSTRACT
The gendered division of space into the public world of work and the private sphere of the home in nineteenth-century industrialised society is widely discussed in sociological literature as an ideology of separate spheres in which the geography and architecture of the city reinforced the gendered division of labour. In the early twentieth century, sculpture began to abandon the plinth and its high moral tone, becoming object-like and increasingly abstract under the influence of cubism and African sculpture. The idea of sculpture as a totemic monument to the survival of a cataclysmic event is another important aspect of modernist sculpture. As feminist politics became increasingly pluralistic in the 1980s, there was no longer one feminist movement based on universal oppression, but a range of different perspectives based in differences of race, class, sexuality and disability. Helen Chadwick's autobiographical reframing of the female nude in the form of photographic installations was both bold and politically controversial.
