Art Museum Visit

My visit the the Saint Louis Art Museum focused mostly around images of women from 1800's America. One of the biggest themes of these paintings is the public/private divide between men and women. One of the most striking images was in a painting that depicted election day in the early 1800's. As we have discussed in class, the reasoning behind the public/private divide often centers around the idea that the public is too rough and threatens to taint the purity of women, while the private is supposed to remain innocent and be a haven for men from the trials of the public world. Women, who make up the private sphere, are supposed to be the enforcers of virtue and morality in an otherwise immoral society.

The paining expresses this belief perfectly. It depicts men drunkenly celebrating in huge crowds in the street in front of city hall, with a group of women dressed in all white standing on a balcony in the background. The public streets are shown as unsafe and unclean for the innocent women. While the problem is clearly much more extreme in the painting, this problem of using paternalistic understandings of protection to oppress women is still very much alive in contemporary America, and its depiction in this painting shows that the problems facing women have not disappeared, but have instead changed form in order to avoid detection and continue to survive.