Student Work

“Woman is the Other; she is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her ” said Simone de Beauvoir, in “The Second Sex”. Throughout history, women’s stories have been told with very apparent undertones of insignificance, women’s place and role as historical figures has always been demerited in some way or another, by simply being reduced to placeholders for male achievement. The purposeful ignoring of women as a whole, and to disregard them of any actual significance has opened up a space and initiated a pattern of patriarchal storytelling, furtherly embedding sexism into our culture, and more importantly history.

This cycle of erasure continues to haunt our culture and can be seen through the misattribution of accomplishments, as was the case for Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the most astonishing Italian renaissance painters whose work got wrongly attributed to male artists such as Titian and Francisco de Zurbarán, and for Policarpa Salavarrieta and Manuela Beltrán, both Colombian revolutionary figures known for contributing to dismantle the Spanish regime. 

Selft portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola. This self portrait dislplays her ability and talent as an artist, and can speak on greater levels to the way in which her work sometimes went unacknowledged.

Both Salavarrieta and Beltrán face the type of erasure in which they are stolen from their sense identity and autonomy and are invoked as muses, being idolized to the point of dehumanization, some individuals arguing against their mere existence and attempting to play it off as a myth.  A myth of two women who are the complete embodiment of the patriotic values we so deeply care for, a myth that symbolized the history of a nation. One can begin to wonder, at what point does genuine admiration and awe transform into simply turning these women into ghosts? Based on the previous examples one can come to notice a pattern, in which historians make these women muses, not necessarily due to any actual interest in them, but more so to provide male historical figures a subject through which they can feel a sense of accomplishment. 

Portrait of Policarpa Salavarrieta by Jose Maria Espinosa. This painting is one of the most famous paintings of her, it used to be on the $10,000 Colombian pesos bill, symbolizing her importance in Colombian history.

Mass media fails to portray women accurately, they are subjected to dated and limited standards of womanhood, divesting them of the possibility of being accomplished, multifaceted individuals. “Deprived, as woman is, of political power, she has to face contempt of her sex, open and covert scorn of womanhood, depreciatory allusions to her intellectual powers, – all tending to hamper with her inventive genius.” said American writer and activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, acknowledging the limitations women face in regards to actually claiming the benefits of their worth, hindering them from actually taking up space in history. 

“To emancipate woman is to refuse to confine her to the relations she bears to man” said de Beauvoir, for women’s erasure to truly come to an end, we as a collective have to learn to strive away from and in some way “unlearn” the sexism that we have been taught for thousands of years. To detach women from their male acquaintances and to start acknowledging their value and importance as individuals, systematic under-recognition leads to the strengthening of patriarchal power dynamics. The strengthening of these discourages young girls from truly pursuing their passions and aspirations, at times just because said aspirations imply working in a male-dominated field. The only way for young girls to truly find themselves is through liberation, that not only implying to detach from the patriarchal expectations to comply with a sense of one-dimensional womanhood, but highlighting the cruciality of challenging society’s confinement of women’s identity.