ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the relationships existing among women, art, and power in a group of visual images from the late eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. These visual images have been chosen for the most part because they represent women in situations involving power—most usually its lack. Strength and weakness are understood to be the natural corollaries of gender difference. Yet it is more accurate to say, in a work like Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, that it is the representation of gender differences—male versus female—that immediately establishes that opposition between strength and weakness which is the point of the picture. Francisco Goya y Lucientes women, in the etching And They Are Like Wild Beasts from the "Disasters of War" series, though obviously not ladies, are shown behaving quite differently from those in In Memoriam. Although fact the peasant women resort to violence itself functions as a sign of the extremity of the situation.
