In the Vanguard of Feminism : a 17th-Century Priest

 

What if I told you that the first modern feminist was a man, lived in the 17th century, and was a priest? I’m guessing you’d be especially skeptical about the priest part, so I’ll add that when this father of feminism wrote his vindications of women’s rights, he wasn’t a priest yet. He became one later, probably because he was broke.
 
His name was François Poulain de la Barre (actually, he added “de la Barre” later in life, and “Poulain” was sometimes spelled “Poullain”), and he grew up in Paris. His parents decided early on that he would become a priest, preferably with a doctoral degree so that he could rise through the ranks in the Church. He began his schooling at 9 and at 16 entered the Sorbonne, where he was force-fed a dry, Scholastic, all-Latin curriculum straight out of antiquity and the Middle Ages, with a special emphasis on the classics and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We know that Poulain excelled in his studies, and we also know that at 19, armed with his bachelor’s, he left school rather than acquire his doctorate, at which point his parents may have cut him off. For the first half of the next decade, he seems to have been an intellectual-about-town. He immersed himself in the free-for-all of the “Radical Enlightenment,” a more intensely anti-authoritarian strain of the early Enlightenment.
 
We don’t know much about the young Poulain’s daily activities, but we do know that, even before he left school, he was frequenting a freethinkers’ debate society that sometimes took on topics such as “whether women’s passions are stronger than men’s” and “whether the study of the arts and sciences is useful to women.” He may have gone to salons where the elites of the day gathered to expound upon new ideas and discuss novels, and perhaps even read their own work aloud. Aristocratic or well-to-do women hosted these affairs—some evidence suggests that he may have been a distant cousin of one eminent salonnière—and because Poulain probably hadn’t met many women in school, their presence would have offered its own kind of education. He was a man in search of a new worldview, and when he finally came up with one, it was audacious.
 
While still in his mid-20s, Poulain wrote three books in quick succession (1673–75). They constitute the first rigorously reasoned attack on the patriarchy. Before that, proto-feminist women (there were more of them than you’d think) tended to defend their sex by citing the accomplishments of queens and heroines of history and myth. Poulain instead used logic to demonstrate the absolute equality of women and men, and to make the case for their right to equal treatment under the law, equal access to education, and equal professional opportunities. (He saw no reason women couldn’t occupy high clerical positions, putting him a good 350 years ahead of a still-resistant Catholic Church.) Poulain rejected a marital contract that granted men dominion over women; he declared that marriage should be between equals, like friendship, and that husbands forced wives into a submissive role for no better reason than that they were “out-and-out bullies.”
 
On the long list of revolutionary reassessments of conventional wisdom that make the Radical Enlightenment feel eerily contemporary, scholars have left out gender equality. Until now. Poulain is forcing them to put it in. He saw sexism as systemic, though he wouldn’t have used either term. And he took a position only now beginning to claim a place in the vanguard of feminism: He deemed the work of motherhood necessary, and as worthy of respect and—he implies, though doesn’t say so directly—of pay as any other form of labor. Indeed, withholding education and opportunity from anyone—female, peasant, Turk—squandered human resources: “How many people remain in the mire when they might have distinguished themselves if they had been given encouragement?” Everyone who contributes to society is useful, and all useful contributions are equally valuable.
 
 
His titles were long, in the manner of the day—the subtitle of On the Equality of the Two Sexes is A Physical and Moral Discourse Which Shows the Importance of Getting Rid of One’s Prejudices—and sarcastic, in the case of his third work, On the Excellence of Men: Against the Equality of Sexes. But the books were short and to the point. They were “the most radically egalitarian texts published in Europe before the French Revolution,” in the words of Siep Stuurman, the author of François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality (2004). “Poulain is the first thinker in modern Europe to build his entire social philosophy on a universalist concept of equality.” And his vision of equality began with women.
 
I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016. I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hillary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling—never mind that most American women were just trying to get by. I wasn’t struggling to get by, but I wasn’t soaring either. Motherhood had slowed down my journalism career, because I had a bad case of what D. W. Winnicott called “maternal preoccupation,” which felt like—and was—love infused with professional insecurity. Enabled by savings and a supportive husband, I had taken refuge in the world of mothers’ groups, playdates, and sippy cups. As my children grew older, I ran a speakers’ series at their school and became an expert in New York City’s labyrinthine public-high-school admissions process. I let writing deadlines float into the ether. At social gatherings, I offered up vague descriptions of a book project that was under contract, but not progressing.
 
The only feminist writers who made me feel better about myself were those who, rather than being obsessed with professional ascent, set out to challenge prevailing attitudes toward care. A good society, they said, should not dump the care formerly provided by family members on others or just not address the problem at all. A good society should make a point of prizing that family care—even paying for it, so that outsourcing needn’t be a necessity, but can be a choice.
 
My hero became the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, who for decades had been writing with gentle sorrow about the “depersonalization of our bonds with others,” about parents missing out on their children’s childhoods, about grown children who can’t afford the time or opportunity costs of tending to the helpless parents who once did the same for them.
 
Feminism had suffered an “abduction” by capitalism, Hochschild explained. Women got to work long and hard as they staggered under family responsibilities without paid leave or universal child care. From the library, I learned that a slew of largely forgotten feminists had feared this very outcome. Yes, women’s entry into the workforce would grant much-needed independence, but it would not inevitably improve their lives. A group of Black mothers who were influential members of the National Welfare Rights Organization made this point forcefully. “There are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one,” wrote Johnnie Tillmon, then the NWRO’s leader, in 1972. But why, she asked, should a 45-year-old woman like her “work all day in a laundry ironing shirts at 90-some cents an hour?” Raising kids at home—with the help of the motherhood subsidy that was welfare—was less oppressive than some of the alternatives. Members of the International Wages for Housework Campaign, a Marxist feminist organization active in the ’70s and still around today, argued that traditional housewifery amounted to theft of service, but they, too, worried that feminism was falling for “the myth of liberation through work,” by which they meant proletarian labor.
 
 
The rise of the service sector, the decline of unions, the loss of benefits, and the advent of variable scheduling have made blue- (or pink-) collar work as daunting for men and women in recent decades as it was for Tillmon. Women still outnumber men in low-wage jobs (those that pay $11 an hour or less). Close to 80 percent of U.S. workers still have no paid family leave. Hard-pressed working mothers who can afford it typically turn to low-wage-earning women caregivers for help. This reinforces gender stereotypes that assign nurturing to the powerless. On the top you have, as Hochschild puts it, “order-barking, fast-paced entrepreneurs,” and on the bottom, “emotionally attuned, human-paced mediators.”
 
And then came the pandemic shutdowns. There are currently nearly 2 million fewer women in the workforce than before the arrival of COVID-19. Many of those women left jobs to care for housebound children. Working women’s annual earnings plummet after a single year off from work; so, of course, do future earnings and chances of promotion. Freedoms and opportunities that had seemed entrenched vanished overnight. Meanwhile, the entire nation discovered its dependence on caregivers, now understood as everyone who keeps us fed and watered—meatpackers, warehouse pickers, checkout clerks, baristas, and more—in addition to those who nurture and nurse us. As the months passed, Poulain, with his insistence on putting care work on the same footing as all other kinds, seemed less like a historical curiosity and more like a man for our time. He had roughed out the blueprint of a world to come, in which the gendered hierarchy of labor would be turned on its head. The new reality of 2020 and 2021 allowed me to gauge just how original he was, and how relevant he remains.
 
Poulain’s main insight has lost none of its subversiveness. The subjugation of women, he writes, is humanity’s first and most consequential injustice. When men usurped the rights and freedoms of the people dearest to them—their wives, mothers, sisters—they unleashed on the world “greed, ambition, vanity, extravagance, idleness, condescension, cruelty, tyranny, deceit, schisms, wars.”
 
Poulain illustrates his points with a “historical conjecture” in the form of a state-of-nature narrative. This is a counterfactual, designed to force readers to imagine a society utterly unlike theirs. “At the beginning of the world,” he writes, “there was no government, no learning, no employment, no established religion.” He goes on: “Both men and women, who were naive and innocent, contributed equally to the tasks of tilling and hunting as savages do today. A man went about his business and a woman hers; the person who made the greatest contribution was the most respected.” Naturally, women got pregnant and had to stop tilling or hunting. But mothers suffered no penalties for “the indisposition of pregnancy and its aftermath,” because reproduction equaled production, and children were contributions indeed. “The help of their husbands became absolutely essential to them,” Poulain writes, but husbands didn’t assume that they should be treated as lords in return. Wives’ attention to the family’s well-being was no less essential than husbands’. They leaned on each other: “Dependence was not considered irksome.”
 

 
Over time, however, families multiplied and began to compete for resources. In the scrabble of all against all, Poulain continues, physical prowess became more important than fertility. Husbands began to dominate their wives and reduce them to servants. Having bested women, men “imagined they were superior in all respects.” They swooped down upon neighboring tribes, confiscated land and possessions, and ruled tyrannically over the people they subjugated. The mutuality that had defined family life “disappeared at the moment of this invasion.”
 
In contrast to Thomas Hobbes’s characterization of the state of nature as “nasty, brutish, and short,” Poulain’s origin story is an alternative Garden of Eden, complete with Adam, Eve, and the fall. In his version, it was Adam, not Eve, who ended the idyll, with violence. Exile from the garden was the shift from family-based communitarianism to a political economy based on private property, which to Poulain was basically theft. As for the state, Poulain dismissed it as the codification of crime, an institution meant to safeguard stolen wealth and ensure that men would continue to profit: “All laws seem to have been made to keep men in their present position of power.”
 
 
 
Perhaps Poulain sounds like a character in a fairy tale, the genius too far ahead of his time, the prophet shouting into the wind. But he really was a prophet. “If his ideas seem at first sight marginal,” Stuurman writes, that’s because Poulain pushed “the limits of the thinkable.” Moreover, he helped erase his own name, first by publishing anonymously, then by downplaying his authorship of his books. He wasn’t humble, exactly; he seems to have been disappointed that his books didn’t get more attention. He might be said to have undercut his own authority, writing that everything men say about women “should be suspect, because they are both judges and litigants.” Or maybe he was afraid of being ridiculed, which he was, including by some female readers. That his conservative king, Louis XIV, had a certain scorn for “learned ladies” (the title of a satire by a royal favorite, Molière) and a robust network of spies may have also argued for keeping a low profile.
 
Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface. In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Piéron pulled Poulain’s dusty books off the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since its pages were uncut). Piéron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy. In a pioneering essay, he described the experience of reading Poulain: “Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673.”
 
It took another half century for Poulain’s name to begin circulating, and then only in academia. Look hard and you’ll find a footnote here, a mention there, usually in works about other feminists or in histories of feminism. You can count the books about him on two hands. Enroll in a doctoral program in gender or women’s studies and you may actually read him, and maybe you’ll find the experience as disorienting as I did. In 2010, a historian wrote that Poulain “seems to crash through his times to offer us nothing less than the full-blown agenda of feminism in our own era.” I’m not so sure. The more closely I’ve considered Poulain, the more he and his work make the agenda of feminism in our own era look far from full-blown.
 
Poulain was born into a world beset by anxieties about where women fit in. (Of what era could that not be said?) The increase in trade and the growth of cities were loosening old constraints, and daughters and wives with means were learning to read and write. An outpouring of pamphlets and books revived an old dispute dating back to the 15th century, la querelle des femmes—“the quarrel over women.” At issue in the debate about female inferiority were, among other topics, their intellect, or lack thereof, and their morality, or lack thereof. La querelle had its formulas: Gallant men overpraised women, then disparaged them, then offered the poor creatures their protection. Female authors objected to their defamation, pointing to the Didos of legend and to Queen Elizabeth.
 
Poulain broke away from this script. He wanted the freedom “to think of things in themselves,” as a feminist many centuries after him, Virginia Woolf, put it in A Room of One’s Own. That, and the freedom to think for oneself. The man who gave Poulain those freedoms was René Descartes, who died in 1650, when Poulain was 3, and whose works had been banned by the Church and kept out of universities. When a friend invited Poulain to a lecture on the philosopher in the 1660s, he was hooked. That was “the happiest moment in the world,” he wrote. Descartes, too, had abandoned his academic studies as soon as he could, and grasped, he wrote, that he should not “believe too firmly what I learned only from example and custom.” All knowledge taken on faith paled in comparison to “the simple and natural reasonings of a man of good sense.”
 
 
These days, the notion that you can clear your mind of bias sounds naive, but luckily, Poulain was naive. He applied the Cartesian method to himself and concluded that “all my knowledge was of no use whatsoever in the world, except to make a living in a profession which I did not wish to follow.” That revelation freed him—forced him—to see the world from the Martian perspective, as it were. Descartes laid new foundations for the sciences and philosophy. Poulain trained his newfound innocence on human relations. What he saw was prejudice masquerading as the natural order of things. And the oldest and most entrenched prejudice was against women and their work.
 
Poulain leapfrogs so far over conventional timelines that he lends himself to a parlor game: What contemporary categories can we shoehorn him into? Let the historians disapprove. The comparisons deliver a useful jolt, exposing an unexpectedly long lineage for views we hail as quintessentially postmodern.
 
Poulain is a cultural relativist. He grasps that European supremacism is belief, not fact. He scoffs at Europeans who swan around thinking they are better than everyone else. He is so aware of the irrationality of norms that he wonders why we feel shame about excretion. “There is no imperfection or baseness about relieving the body,” he writes, meaning that no custom is more or less advanced than any other: “All ways of doing it are equal.” Poulain could have been a feminist art historian. He doesn’t rank the supposedly major arts above the so-called minor arts, especially those traditionally created by women, such as tapestries and other kinds of needlework. “It takes skill to keep the proportions on a canvas, to work the silk or wool evenly,” he observes. “One has to have mastered countless different techniques of needlework to be competent at it.” Poulain is Foucauldian. Power is performative, he says, a chimera of gesture and costume: “Decorations were invented to distinguish certain people, and signs of respect were created to enhance perceived differences.”
 
Above all, Poulain is, well, a Marxist feminist. He rejects the gendering of the public and the private—men in the streets and on the job, women in the home—that was in the process of being imposed by early capitalism. He sees a new order supplanting an older one in which the home would serve as its own little factory and husbands and wives would work shoulder to shoulder (unless, of course, they belonged to the nobility). To Poulain’s dismay, the home has become a workplace where the housewife toils alone.
 
He doesn’t try to determine the price of parenthood in the marketplace of labor (he isn’t an economist), but he grasps that it has value—more than many male professions. “We could do without princes, soldiers, and tradesmen,” he argues, “but we cannot do without women in our childhood.” Therefore, women’s nurturing work should be elevated, not debased. “We offer great rewards to a man who can tame a tiger, admire those who can train horses, monkeys, and elephants, and praise to the skies the author of some modest work,” he writes. “Yet we neglect women who have spent years and years nourishing and educating children.”
 

He shares a trait with my role model, Hochschild, in that he acknowledges women’s emotional labor as labor. Running households, raising children, and (I would add, though he is not explicit about this) exercising the discipline and self-control required to adhere to acceptable codes of female behavior and keep exacting husbands happy—the enterprise requires the managerial skills of a general: “Military art makes no higher demands than the other arts women are capable of, except that it is tougher, noisier, and does more harm.”
 
To Poulain’s further credit, he avoids the angel-in-the-house syndrome that would constrain women in the Victorian era. Women can mother, but, he asserts, they can do everything else as well. After all, Cartesians separate mind and body, from which it follows that, as Poulain writes, “the mind has no sex.” Women are as good as men at every endeavor that doesn’t require brute strength. “A most minute anatomical study reveals no difference,” he writes, addressing his male readers. “A woman’s brain is exactly the same as ours.” In his second book, On the Education of Ladies (1674), Poulain prescribes scientific training for women—for everyone, in fact. His notion of science privileges women, though, because when he says scientific, he means evidence-based, and he sees women as natural scientists—not because they are born that way, but because in his day and among members of his class, women interacted more intimately with the material world than men did.
 
He predicts that, given the proper training (by which he means the empirical kind he didn’t get), women could be as good as men in law, government, the clergy, and medicine, and might surpass them—especially in medicine. Women understand bodies: “Is it not women who take care of the poor and sick of the parish, who visit the prisons and help in the hospitals?” Medical schools were closed to women, of course—which had the benefit, in Poulain’s view, of sparing them the arcane curriculum that had students reading ancient authors such as Hippocrates. Women’s “observations about medical practice are so accurate and so precisely reasoned, that they often make all the notebooks of the faculty superfluous.”
 
So much that Poulain espoused we now endorse. And yet, as I went down rabbit holes trying to find out what happened to him, I worried that his ideas were still too utopian. He wanted to undo assumptions about gender and work that have been set in stone for millennia—unconscious presuppositions that, to judge from the fact that women still work the second shift, have yet to budge. His egalitarianism was total and uncompromising. Are we actually now primed to listen to him in ways that his peers hadn’t been?
 
Here’s what my perambulations through the stacks taught me: Poulain never really went away. He himself sank into near-total obscurity, first as a parish priest shunted from one unprepossessing town to another; he then left the clergy or was forced out on account of his problematic ideas—the record is unclear—at the age of 41. After that, he converted to Calvinism, fled anti-Protestant France, and spent most of the rest of his life teaching French and classics in Geneva.
 
But his ideas run like a secret, subterranean river beneath the history of revolutionary thought. His inconspicuousness gave license to publishers and authors to plunder his books and arguments without attribution. This raiding started a few years after first publication and continued into the 18th century. Entire passages were lifted from On the Equality of the Two Sexes by the pseudonymous 18th-century feminist “Sophia,” in her Woman Not Inferior to Man, which was reissued in London several times over the course of 40 years, and even translated back into French. I wonder whether Poulain would have been peeved at the French Enlightenment philosophers who actually did know his name and borrowed from him without mentioning it. I think he would have been highly annoyed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose attack on exploitative social relations helped spur two revolutions, the American and the French. Rousseau almost certainly read Poulain early in his career while conducting research for a magnum opus on the history of women on behalf of a beautiful noblewoman, Louise Marie-Madeleine Dupin. (Rousseau fell in love with Dupin and she shrewdly made him her assistant.) She was one of the few writers of the time to identify Poulain as a major influence, but she never finished her book, so hardly anyone read her until Rousseau scholars recently began rooting around in her papers.
 
Set Poulain’s Equality and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality side by side, and the similarities will seem too numerous for coincidence. Rousseau appears to have helped himself to Poulain’s ideas, imagery, modes of argument—sometimes entire phrases. But here’s the catch: Even as he outlines his version of an egalitarian polity, Rousseau all but kicks women out of it. Political activity is for men only. A woman’s job is to raise future citizens.
 
I feel sure, however, that Poulain would have been pleased by how Simone de Beauvoir made use of him in The Second Sex (1949)—if a little disappointed too. Beauvoir knew his work well and cited him by name. She could have introduced Poulain to 20th-century feminists. She didn’t, though, because she never acknowledged the extent of his originality. She gave him one of the book’s two epigraphs. But the gesture was double-edged. She quotes, or rather misquotes slightly, his self-effacing observation that everything men say about women should be viewed with suspicion. I read this nod in his direction as a soft appropriation. Beauvoir was asserting her right as a woman to make this man’s thoughts her own.
 
Fair enough. Beauvoir was the more expansive thinker and better stylist: dialectical; subtle; fluent in biology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, political theory, existentialism, phenomenology, and so on. She salutes him as “the leading feminist of the time” (perhaps not the highest bar), and in five sentences explains his hypothesis that men use their strength to arrange society to their benefit, and women acquiesce by habit. But her book contains more echoes of his ideas, such as how women internalize their own subjugation. Perhaps these echoes reflect nothing more than the sad fact that women’s lot hadn’t changed all that much over the three intervening centuries, but I like to think that she’s in explicit dialogue with him. She’s the student who surpasses her teacher. The Second Sex became one of feminism’s foundational texts because Beauvoir had Poulain, plus her immense erudition, plus, of course, her own experiences as a woman.
 
Beauvoir owes her most memorable insight to Poulain: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.” The aphorism sticks in the mind, whereas Poulain’s articulation of the same idea is wordy and forgettable: “The difference in behavior we observe between men and women springs from the education they receive.” Still, he elaborates vividly; a girl “is made afraid of everything, told that ghosts lurk in any part of the house where she might be alone.” Are women vain? Consider “all the glances, all the comments about the importance of beauty [that] absorb her mind completely, and the compliments she receives about it [that] are her sole source of joy.” Beauvoir takes these thoughts and gives them psychological depth. A girl strikes poses in front of the mirror, applying makeup and wriggling into constraining clothes, Beauvoir writes, and as the girl does this, she becomes a self divided, seeing herself as a man would see her. Poulain depicts the influence of family and home. Beauvoir has the panoramic perspective of a modern sociologist. Girls learn to be fearful not just from parents or governesses but from institutions—schools, sporting clubs, workplaces—that discourage adventure and exploration.

 
And yet Beauvoir leaves out the part of Poulain’s feminism that strikes me as so timely today. She doesn’t have many good things to say about motherhood. On the contrary: Maternity—the passions leading up to it, the life changes that it demands—mostly makes her cringe. If Poulain scants the broader social dimension of psychological conditioning, she’s positively revolted by the biological dimension. Love leads to dependence, and dependence abases, she writes with some bitterness in her chapter on “The Woman in Love.” Later, nurture ensnares. If women want equality, they must not “subordinate existence to life, the human being to its animality.” What she is saying in her existentialism-ese is that “existence” (that is, freedom) must be chosen over “life”—that is, allowing oneself to be mired in the repetitive processes of nature. The brilliant and prolific Beauvoir had no intention of getting stuck in those. Housework, undone as soon as it is done, doesn’t build toward “the creation of anything durable.” Motherhood at least yields something of lasting value, but—she adds—let women beware of becoming attached to pregnancy and nursing, lest they reduce themselves to “fowls with high egg-production.”
 
That phrase stings, although I understand why she wrote it. Like many feminists who came before and after her, Beauvoir had good reason to run as far as she could from everything women of her generation were supposed to run toward. Domesticity, for Beauvoir, would have been tantamount to having her mind pickled and stored in a pantry. I get that. Even now, “motherhood as experience and institution,” in Adrienne Rich’s words, constrains and subordinates, despite having become a choice, not a fate. Indeed, that motherhood is chosen rather than forced upon one makes my own choices feel more fraught, not less. In any case, Poulain, who wrestled with the discipline of a Church he disliked, would have known what it meant to live under the threat of intellectual extinction. But the destiny he feared didn’t involve dusting and cooking and tending babies (a priest only had to baptize them). So Poulain could give reproduction its due.
 
“Dependence was not considered irksome”: That thought of his is still more uncommon than it should be. Life is dependence all the way down. If we haven’t absorbed this by now, we’ve learned nothing in the past year and a half. Children depend on adults, parents depend on communities and—in enlightened countries—on social policies, and all of us depend on “essential” and “frontline” workers. But Americans were raised to prize self-sufficiency, and we don’t find it easy to face the specter of our interconnectedness. My spike of shame when people ask what I do is both typical and ridiculous. What’s wonderful about Poulain is that he gives me cover. No, he does more than that. He gives me hope. I’m comforted by his refusal to accept that caregiving demeans the caregiver, or that leaning on others is pathetic.
 
I find his fearlessness inspiring. At the height of Louis XIV’s authoritarian and patriarchal rule, this single, childless 26-year-old defended nurture and interdependence against a revulsion that was by then almost instinctive. I wonder what his readers, most of them male, made of these sentences: “God desired to produce human beings dependent upon each other” and “Both sexes are necessary to produce together their offspring.” Reproduction is the “highest purpose in the world,” and so “it is hard to understand how those who maintain that men are nobler than women justify their arguments as far as children are concerned.” Is it because mothers work harder than fathers that women rank lower than men?
 
That is not a rhetorical question. In 17th-century France, only the lower orders did physical labor; thus anyone doing physical labor occupied a lower order. Plus ça change! Poulain doesn’t buy that, of course. Just because women’s “effort is greater than ours” doesn’t mean men should “use this against them to bring scorn upon them,” he writes. In a subtle hint that we must reconceive care work as civilization-building equal in stature to any other kind, he pairs “mothers and fathers toiling to bring up their children”—the italics are mine—with “good princes working at governing their subjects or magistrates seeking to mete out justice.” Who among his peers could have imagined a world that placed parenting on the same social rung as ruling and judging? I would guess none of them. And who among us can fully envision that world even now? Poulain will be vindicated only when we understand that anything less is simply illogical.
 
 
 
I Found the Feminism I Was Looking For in the Lost Writings of a 17th-Century Priest. By Judith Shulevitz. The Atlantic,  July 28, 2021.

 

More information  : Stanford Encyclopedia of Philiosophy

Women of the Bauhaus

2019 marks the centenary of the founding of a small, experimental German applied arts school, whose name has since become synonymous with modernist design the world over. Bauhaus design is characterized by the use of industrial materials such as concrete, glass, and tubular metal, geometric forms and primary colours, and an emphasis on functionality and mechanized production processes. Even though it was in operation for only 14 years and underwent several changes of leadership and location, this short-lived, semi-nomadic school continues to exert a disproportionately enduring, global and arguably dogmatic influence on the way design is instructed, practiced and understood.

Also disproportionate, unfortunately, is the way in which the work of the male artists and designers who taught and studied at the Bauhaus have been celebrated over their female counterparts. Marcel Breuer’s Wassily Chair, Herbert Bayer’s Universal Alphabet, Josef Hartwig’s chess set, William Wagenfeld’s electric table lamp, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Chair, have all attained canonical status as exemplars of modernist design, while the work of their classmates – such as Benita Otte’s kitchen design, Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain’s airplane cup, Ilse Fehling’s stage design, or Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s Small Ship Building Game – is much lesser-known. Although the faces and bodies of the women of the Bauhaus may be somewhat familiar to us through carefully staged photographs in which they pose sculpturally on staircases and balconies, sporting uncomfortable-looking geometric outfits and angular haircuts, what they actually produced in the workshops has received much less attention.

In recent years, historians and curators have sought to redress this imbalance by focusing on the women who taught and studied at the Bauhaus, not as caricatured continuations of its architectural aesthetic, nor as appendages of their husbands or lovers, but for the ways they shaped and disseminated its philosophy through their ground-breaking work, mostly in textile design, weaving, stage and costume design, and ceramics. Among the growing number of corrective histories are Sigrid Weltge Wortmann’s Women's Work: Textile Art from the Bauhaus (1993), Pat Kirkham’s edited catalogue, Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000 (2002), Ulrike Müller, Ingrid Radewaldt, and Sandra Kemker’s Bauhaus Women: Art, Handicraft, Design (2009), and MoMA’s 2014 exhibition, ‘Designing Modern Women 1890–1990’, which was curated by Juliet Kinchin.

Several of the commemorative exhibitions, events and publications planned for the coming months will also attempt to recover the legacies of Bauhaus-trained women on their own terms. Among them is a retrospective of the textile artist Anni Albers, which opens at London's Tate Modern on 11 October (after travelling from Kunstsammlung NRW, Dusseldorf); it will feature some of her innovative geometric tapestries, curtain fabrics, rugs, and woven room dividers.

In many respects, the Bauhaus was socially progressive. It wanted to contribute to the rebuilding of society in the aftermath of World War One – to find a new way of living through design that was both avant-garde and accessible. The school’s first director, the architect Walter Gropius, outlined his utopian thinking – which followed firmly in the footsteps of William Morris’ Arts and Crafts movement – in a manifesto in which he conflated multidisciplinary education with social equality. Bringing all the arts in closer pedagogical, conceptual and practical alignment, and galvanized in the service of architecture rather than art, would help to overcome what Gropius termed the ‘arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists’. His conceptual repositioning of the gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art’, with the architectural enterprise at its centre, would, in Gropius’ view, help facilitate the creation of ‘the new building of the future that will unite every discipline, architecture and sculpture and painting, all in a single form which will one day rise heavenwards from the hands of a million workers as the crystalline symbol of a new and coming faith’.

Despite this ideologically enlightened rhetoric, and the fact that the new school actively recruited both sexes, for the women who did end up studying at the Bauhaus, participation in the creation of this future-facing gestamtkunstwerk was only partial and, for the most part, ‘arrogant barriers’ remained firmly in place. Despite numerous shifts in instructors, infrastructure and pedagogical emphasis, the Bauhaus leadership was united in its believed that design processes and materials were somehow inherently gendered. While the male students could explore, among others, mural or glass painting, printing, sculpture, furniture design, graphic design, stage design and metalwork; women were usually steered toward the weaving or ceramics workshops.

A key element of the Bauhaus curriculum was the unifying first semester of preliminary study (directed by Swiss-born artist Johannes Itten and after 1923 by the Hungarian Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy), which introduced students to materials, textures, drawing techniques, colours and elementary geometric forms. And yet, a separate course was taught to women students, whom it was believed were unsuited to engaging with three-dimensional design.

As irritating as this manifestation of prevailing societal attitudes of the time must have been, the female students of the Bauhaus seized their opportunities to develop their creative practices wherever they found them. Once the German painter and sculptor Marianne Brandt had succeeded in her campaign to pursue her apprenticeship in the metal workshop, she designed one of the most commercially successful objects to come out of the school – the best-selling Kandem adjustable bedside table lamp. In 1928, after Moholy-Nagy stepped down, she took his place as head of the metal workshop. After a year in the position, Brandt left the Bauhaus to become director of the design department for the metalware company Ruppelwerk Metallwarenfabrik GmbH. She went on to produce some of the century’s most innovative and elegant tableware and lamps based on pure geometric forms and made from silver and brass, as well as more affordable materials such as chrome, aluminium and glass.

Similarly, Gunta Stölzl, who became head of the weaving workshop and whose abstract textile hangings were featured on walls throughout the school, embraced textiles as a medium ripe for sustained investigation. Later in life she reflected that: ‘We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance, suitable for a new style of life. Huge potential for experimentation lay before us. It was essential to define our imaginary world, to shape our experiences through material, rhythm, proportion, colour and form.’ Having visited factories to learn about industrial fibre and dyeing technology, she experimented with the integration of industrial materials such as cellophane, fibreglass and metal, with reversible fabrics and the use of fabric in acoustics.

Stölzl’s enthusiasm for both the industrial application of textile design and the incorporation of industrial elements in her designs inspired many of her students. These included the Dutch textile designer Kitty van der Mijll Dekker, whose work as a student and later as a commercial designer and teacher is representative of this mission to push to the limit the technical and material potential of weaving as a discipline. Van der Mijll Dekker experimented with new materials such as cellophane, iron yarn, raffia and synthetic yarns, suitable for industrial production. Her beautiful 1934 Relief Rug – the varied density and depth of its knots and weaves subtly reinforced by its two shades of white wool – was displayed as a model of modern weaving at World’s Fairs in Brussels and Paris and at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. More emblematic of the modernist project to create design products that were beautiful, mass producible and affordable, however, is her strikingly geometric Dobby-woven linen tea towel from 1939. Upon graduation from the Bauhaus, van der Mijll Dekker was hired by the Eindhoven-based weaving mill EJF van Dissel & Zonen. Her assignment was to develop modern household textiles such as bedding, table linen, and tea towels. Her checked towel designs in Bauhausian primary colours, which were hard-wearing, colour-fast and easy to wash, became household staples across the Netherlands and were recently re-issued by the Textile Museum in Tilburg. Technically innovative, visually bold, but fundamentally pragmatic, van der Mijll Dekker was just one of the women of the Bauhaus who helped to disseminate modernist design principles one tea-towel at a time.

Women of the Bauhaus, By Alice Twemlow.  Frieze  , September 3 , 2018.

Women are often edited out of the history of the Bauhaus, says Catherine Slessor, in this Opinion as part of our Bauhaus 100 series. But the role of female Bauhauslers in shaping the course of modern design is at last being addressed.

The young women of the Bauhaus seem like typical art students, when you see them in pictures. With their cropped hair and clashing clothes, they could be straight out of a prospectus for any current European art school.

But until the school's founding, German women who wanted to pursue an art education received it at home, dispensed by tutors. At the Bauhaus they were free to join courses conflating multi-disciplinary teaching with social equality, conceived as part of a fundamental reshaping of society following the first world war.

Superficially, the received image of female Bauhauslers is one of freewheeling, radical modernity, junking the literal and metaphorical corset of compliant femininity to savour the progressive pleasures of rational dress, vegetarianism, saxophone playing and photography.

Yet despite declarations of gender parity – its founder Walter Gropius insisted that there would be "no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex" when the Bauhaus opened in 1919 – the "beautiful sex" was still tacitly confined to certain "appropriate" subjects such as weaving, ceramics and toy making.

Architecture was off the curriculum, as Gropius believed women incapable of thinking in three dimensions. He was not alone in this assertion. Around the same time the female Bauhaus students were assembling on the staircase for a photocall, Charlotte Perriand was being rebuffed by Le Corbusier with a withering "we don't embroider cushions here".

Gropius's objectification of women was typical of its time, evinced by a tangled love life involving a prolonged crush on and ultimately doomed marriage to Alma Mahler, wife of the composer. Gropius became besotted, stalking the Mahler residence, and the affair drove Gustav Mahler onto Freud's couch.

In 1923 Gropius married his second wife Ise, co-author of many of his texts, but his apparently emancipatory views were undercut by a mushy medievalism with its roots in the English Arts and Crafts movement that ultimately sought to keep women in their place.

Meanwhile, in the Bauhaus weaving studios, its nascent designers got on with creating modern textiles for fashion houses and industrial production. They included Anni Albers, now subject of a long overdue retrospective currently showing at London's Tate Modern; Benita Koche-Otte, an influential teacher and designer, whose fabrics remain in production; Gertrud Arndt, who originally aspired to study architecture, but whose rugs ended up on the floor of Gropius's office, and Gunta Stözl, who designed a series of coverings for Marcel Breuer's chairs.

Hounded by Nazi sympathisers when she married a Jewish fellow student, Stötzl left Germany in 1931 to set up a successful hand-weaving business in Zurich. She died in 1983. Her investigations into the potential of industrial fibres and dyeing technologies were accompanied by the appropriation of unorthodox new materials, including cellophane and fibreglass.

"We wanted to create living things with contemporary relevance, suitable for a new style of life", she later wrote. "Huge potential for experimentation lay before us. It was essential to define our imaginary world, to shape our experiences through rhythm, proportion, colour and form."

Gertrud Arndt's influence also extended beyond the loom, through her photographic practice. As a self-taught photographer, she began by shooting buildings and urban landscapes, as well as documenting construction sites for her architect husband. But she is better known for her powerful and disquieting Maskenportäts (Mask Portraits), which questioned the notion of female identity and formed a precursor to the work of later contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle.

The early years of the Bauhaus were underscored by wrangling between Gropius and Johannes Itten, who was ousted in 1923 in favour of László Moholy-Nagy. At this point, things loosened up a bit. Painter and sculptor Marianne Brandt convinced Moholy-Nagy to allow her to pursue an apprenticeship in metalwork, a hitherto verboten discipline for women.

She went on to become one of Germany's foremost industrial designers, creating the best-selling Kandem bedside lamp, one of the most commercially successful objects to emerge from the Bauhaus. As design director of Ruppelwerk Metallwarenfabrik, she produced seductive tableware and lamps based on pure geometric forms in materials such as sliver, brass, chrome and aluminium.

From tea sets to task lights, Brandt's designs encapsulate a refinement and modernity no less radical than that of her male counterparts.

Gender stereotyping and reconciling the demands of family life were not the only obstacles to professional success. The Bauhaus's pioneering programmes and political leanings came under scrutiny from the Nazis, who eventually closed the school in 1933, accusing it of links with the Communist Party and printing anti-Nazi propaganda.

Trajectories of lives and careers were abruptly destabilised by the rise of fascism across Europe and the struggle to escape. Some, notably Anni Albers, made it to America with husband Josef, securing teaching posts at Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

Here, Albers perfected her distinctive weaving techniques, designing fabrics for Knoll and becoming the first female textile artist to have a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1949.

Others remained in Europe and were subject to the calamitous fortunes of war. Benita Koch-Ott and her husband were banned from teaching in Germany and fled to Prague. Toy maker Alma Siedhoff-Buscher, one of the few women to switch from weaving to the male-dominated wood sculpture department, was killed in a bombing raid in 1944.

The fate of Otti Berger, another textile designer, is even more harrowing. While waiting for a US visa in order to join Moholy-Nagy's New Bauhaus in Chicago, she went to visit her mother in Croatia and was arrested by the Nazis. In 2005, Soviet archives revealed that Berger, who was Jewish, had died at Auschwitz in 1944.

Invariably, Bauhaus histories tend to be disproportionately dominated by male protagonists, with women receiving scant credit, perhaps best epitomised by the experience of Lucia Moholy, who was married to László Moholy-Nagy between 1921 and 1929.

As a photographer, her work helped to cultivate the image of the Bauhaus, documenting its buildings, students and teachers and experimenting with different photographic techniques. When she fled Germany in 1933, leaving everything behind, her collection of glass negatives was appropriated by Gropius who used them without credit in subsequent books and exhibitions.

After decades of legal wrangling, she finally managed to retrieve a fraction of her work in the 1960s, but was, to a large extent, edited out of Bauhaus history, a situation that seemed entirely acceptable to both Gropius and her former husband.

Such casually demeaning treatment is now being redressed by a renewed emphasis on the contribution made by the women who studied, taught and fought to be recognised. In recent years, historians and curators have sought to re-situate female Bauhauslers in their own right, rather than as marital appendages or collaborators, through the conduits of scholarship, books and exhibitions. By focusing on how they shaped both the school’s evolution and the course of modern design, a compelling new narrative emerges, illuminating the experiences and legacies of long overshadowed lives.

"Bauhaus histories tend to be disproportionately dominated by male protagonists"  By Catherine Slessor , Dezeen ,  20 November 2018  |

Admirers of the famed Bauhaus movement celebrate the centenary of the most progressive art school of the 20th century, publisher Taschen and author Patrick Rössler are telling the stories behind the oft-forgotten, but ultimately pivotal, female students and educators of the era in a new book. While the institution presented women in art and design with unprecedented opportunities to explore their fields and be acknowledged as legitimate professionals, it is too often forgotten that they were simultaneously battling unreasonable family expectations, the ambiguous and contradictory attitudes of the faculty and administration, outdated social conventions, and, ultimately, the political repression of the Nazi regime. Here are five Bauhaus women you might not have heard of, but should get to know.

 Like many women of her generation, German textile artist Gunta Stölzl’s career featured unexpected turns that saw her transition from studying decorative painting, glass painting, ceramics, art history and style at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich from 1914 to 1916, to working as a Red Cross nurse during the first world war. In 1919, having briefly re-enrolled at the Munich institution, Stölzl began studying at Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar. Completing her studies in 1925, she was immediately positioned as a master of the weaving workshop, and subsequently became the department’s director. Stölzl is remembered as the only female Bauhaus master, placing her at the centre of many discussions surrounding the school’s controversial and sometimes conflicting views on gender equality.

 When Stölzl left her role as director of the Bauhaus weaving workshop in the autumn of 1931, she suggested that Croatian designer Otti Berger should take her place. Despite actively fulfilling the requirements for some time, she was never formally appointed and the position was eventually given to Lilly Reich, with Berger as her deputy. Less than a year later, the Croatian designer left the Bauhaus to open her own studio. Despite much success post-Bauhaus, the artist’s career was cut short in 1936 when she was banned from working in Germany due to her Jewish origins. Having failed to join her creative peers – including fiancée Ludwig Hilberseimer – in the US, struggling with her mother’s illness and being forced to accept an inability to find work in the UK, Berger was forced to return to her hometown of Zmajevac. Tragically, the designer and her family were deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in April of 1944, where she was murdered.

Irena Blühová is one of very few Bauhaus alumni to have engaged with the activism-led art of social photography. Prior to joining the school in 1931 she worked as a secretarial assistant and later a bank clerk. From 1922 until 1926 she studied – while also working at the bank – at the languages- and science-focused Realgymnasium in Bratislava. She soon found an outlet for these interests in photography, taking her first tourist photos and starting a number of series that were published in recognised journals. Discovering the Bauhaus and its specialisation in architecture, typography, photography and advertising through a magazine article, Blühová attended after a preliminary course with Josef Albers and studied at the school for one year. Following a successful career as a photojournalist, Blühová worked in the illegal anti-fascist movement from 1941 until 1945, and from 1945 to 1948 was co-founder and director of the publishing house Pravda.

Daughter of a Bremerhaven architect, Elisabeth Kadow (née Jäger) began an apprenticeship at the Weimar Bauhaus school, aged 18, under the guidance of tapestry artist Irma Goecke. Celebrated for her achievements while studying textile technology in Berlin and Dortmund, she was offered a role as a specialist teacher in the field, in Dortmund. By 1939, she joined Georg Muche as a master’s apprentice at the Textilengineurschule (textile engineering school) in Krefeld. In 1940 the weaver, painter and graphic artist married Gerhard Kadow and started teaching a fashion class, later progressing to artistic print design at the Higher Technical College for Textile Industry. When Muche eventually retired from education in 1958, Kadow took over the leadership of the master class for textile art and her international reputation grew immeasurably. Until 1971, Kadow led the entire design department of the textile engineering school and, upon leaving the school, she devoted herself to design work, armed with a lifetime of inspiration taken from textile art. She created elaborate embroidery and, working in collaboration with Nürnberger Gobelinmanufaktur and the weaver Johann Peter Heek, produced outstanding artistic tapestries.

Recognising her design prowess from an early stage, Bauhaus professor, painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy championed Marianne Brandt’s groundbreaking presence at the school as she broke rank among gender stereotypes, thriving in the male domain of the metal workshop. Brandt’s objects for everyday use are still hallmarks of the Dessau Bauhaus and she is celebrated not only as a pioneer in metalwork, but as a leading female figure in an aggressively masculine industry. Despite her successes and the fact that she far out-performed the majority of her peers, Brandt is rarely mentioned in the same breath as her much-discussed male colleagues.

The Extraordinary Forgotten Women at the Heart of the Bauhaus Movement. By  Milly Burroughs.

AnotherMagazine, March 29, 2019.

Anni Albers  revered experimentation. During her early days studying under  Paul Klee  at the Bauhaus  school, in the 1920s, she set out to expand the scope of weaving by using new, daring methods and materials. “I heard [Klee] speak and he said take a line for a walk,” she once recalled to Nicholas Fox Weber, director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. “And I thought, ‘I will take thread everywhere I can.’”

In her textile  practice, Albers ecstatically mingled organic and synthetic fibers; loom-weaving and hand-weaving; representation and abstraction; art and utility. The resulting lively, bristling compositions revolutionized weaving and helped shape the burgeoning traditions of abstraction.

Albers also advocated for artistic experimentation in her role as a teacher, both at the Bauhaus and, later, at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. To stimulate the creative process of her students, she’d ask them “to imagine that it was the 10th century, and they were on the coast of Peru,” she once told Fox Weber. In her view, the materials that washed up on beaches—seaweed, sand, branches, shells, even fish skeletons—could spark ideas for inventive weavings and unique abstract compositions.

After Albers died in 1994, she left behind writings, lectures, and interviews rife with ideas on how to stoke and sustain creativity. Below, we extract advice from the innovative, endlessly curious 20th-century artist’s theories.

Lesson #1: Embrace accidents

Albers discovered her calling—weaving—by accident. She intended to pursue painting or  glass  when she arrived at the Bauhaus in 1922, in her early twenties. Unfortunately, the school was not as gender-equal as advertised; at the time, women were only allowed to study textiles, pottery, and bookbinding. She reluctantly chose weaving: “My beginning was far from what I had hoped for: fate put into my hands limp threads! Threads to build a future?” she recalled to Fox Weber. Ever resourceful, Albers soon enthusiastically embraced the medium. “Circumstances held me to threads and they won me over,” she wrote in a 1982 essay, “Material as Metaphor.” “I learned to listen to them and to speak their language. I learned the process of handling them.”

Albers became a deft and inventive weaver, advocating for the power of accidents in the creative process. “How do we choose our specific material, our means of communication? ‘Accidentally,’” she wrote in the same essay. “Something speaks to us, a sound, a touch, hardness or softness, it catches us and asks us to be formed.”

As Albers told her students, she believed that accepting accidents could lead to an unexpected, new direction for an artwork, and could open new avenues of artistic thought. “Students worry about choosing their way,” she continued. “I always tell them, ‘you can go anywhere from anywhere.’” Both accident and its cousin, improvisation, spurred innovation in Albers’s own textiles, too. “Improvised weavings…provided a fund of means from which later clearly ordered compositions were developed, textiles of a quite unusual kind,” she wrote in a 1938 essay, “Weaving at the Bauhaus,” of her early days at the school, when she began to develop her practice of irregular geometric abstraction. “A new style started on its way.”

Lesson #2: Bring play into the artmaking process

Albers also celebrated the role of play in the creative process. She believed that a spontaneous and experimental approach to hues, patterns, and materials inspired meaningful work. In a 1941 article, “Handweaving Today: Textile work at Black Mountain College,” she proposed that artists start works with “a playful beginning, unresponsive to any demand of usefulness, an enjoyment of colors, forms, surface contrasts and harmonies—a tactile sensuousness.”

In the environment of the Bauhaus, Albers recalled, “uninhibited play with materials resulted in amazing objects, striking in their newness of conception in regard to use of color and compositional elements.” This method, in which all mediums and processes were game, was especially valuable to beginners who were developing their own aesthetic. Albers believed it also built self-confidence in young artists: “Courage is an important factor in any creative effort,” she wrote in “Weaving at the Bauhaus.” “It can be most active when knowledge in too early a stage does not narrow the vision.”

In her own practice, Albers embraced play through injecting spontaneity and creativity into the highly technical process of weaving, where the loom dictated many aesthetic decisions. She experimented with unorthodox metal threads, for instance, and often improvised shapes and compositions as she wove, rather than religiously following a pattern. Albers even nodded directly to her reverence of play in the title of one work, Play of Squares (1955). The textile shows a labyrinth of white and deep-brown squares, organized seemingly haphazardly—without a predictable, overarching formula. Scholar Virginia Gardner Troy pointed out in a 1999 essay that the piece “evokes an ambiguous arrangement of words and letters (a play of words) or of musical notes (a play of sounds).” The spirit of playfulness also led Albers to experiment with other mediums, like printmaking and jewelry

, where she fashioned imaginative wearable art from everyday objects like bottle caps, strainers, and paperclips.

Albers also saw playfulness in the work of her artist heroes. In her famous instructional book On Weaving (1965), she described the textiles made by Peruvian weavers (whom she referred to as her “greatest teachers”) as “infinite phantasy within the world of threads, conveying strength or playfulness, mystery or the reality of their surroundings, endlessly varied in presentation and construction, even though bound to a code of basic concepts.”

Lesson #3: Listen to your chosen material

Albers felt strongly that textiles should reveal, rather than obscure, their structure. As Fox Weber pointed out in a 2017 essay, “she designed and executed her work according to the belief that fibers and their interlocking should be appreciated in their raw state.” Indeed, the geometric shapes and undulating lines that surge through Albers’s woven compositions reflect the weft and warp of the weaving process, and highlight the texture of the varied, knotty threads.

Essential to her approach was a respect for raw materials, and Albers continually encouraged her students to “listen” to whatever substance they’d chosen to work with. “To restore to the designer the experience of direct experience of a medium, is, I think, the task today,” she mused in the 1947 essay “Design Anonymous and Timeless.” “It means taking, for instance, the working material into the hand, learning by working it of its obedience and its resistance, its potency and its weakness, its charm and dullness.” In other words, extensive time should be spent getting to know your material: touching it, considering it, and understanding its properties so that it can be used creatively and to its full potential.

“The material itself is full of suggestions for its use if we approach it unaggressively, receptively,” Albers continued. “It is a source of unending stimulation and advises us in most unexpected manner.” Later, in her 1982 essay “Material as Metaphor,” she connected the act of listening to artistic innovation and success. “The more subtly we are tuned to our medium, the more inventive our actions will become,” she wrote. “Not listening to it ends in failure.”

For Albers, close observation and use of raw materials would also help her work stand the test of time. “The more we avoid standing in the way of the material and in the way of tools and machines,” she wrote in “Design Anonymous and Timeless,” “the better chance there is that our work will not be dated, will not bear the stamp of too limited a period of time and be old fashioned some day instead of antique.”

Lesson #4: Experiment with new technologies

Albers also advocated for the use of new machines and technologies—as long as respect for raw materials was maintained. “Not only the materials themselves which we come to know in a craft, are our teachers,” she advised in “Design Anonymous and Timeless.” “The tools, or the more mechanized tools, our machines, are our guides, too.”

It’s through new technologies (like a machine loom as opposed to a hand loom or foot-powered loom, for instance) that one can learn more about a material, and therefore expand its use and experiment with it in new ways. “We learn from them of the interaction of material and its use,” Albers continued, “how a material can change its character when used in a certain construction and how in turn the construction is affected by the material, how we can support the characteristics of material or suppress them, depending on the form of construction we use.”

Albers applied this concept to all mediums: “In architecture this may mean the difference of roman and gothic style, in weaving the same difference on a minute scale, the difference of satin and taffeta—the same material in different construction,” she wrote.

Embracing new technologies was another instance of Albers’s endless hunger for artistic experimentation, which drove both her deeply influential practice and her teachings.

 Anni Albers on How to Be an Artist. By Alexxa Gotthardt. Artsy , April 3 , 2019. 

“I’ll never finish taking off all these masks,” wrote Claude Cahun in 1930. The performative self-portrait, and the filmic and photographic investigation into the “masquerade of femininity” which often accompanies it, is a theme that runs through artists’ oeuvres from that of Cahun and Maya Deren to Cindy Sherman. Indeed, while Cahun was writing poems and photographing herself wearing masks in Paris, former Bauhaus student Gertrud Arndt was also addressing the façade of femininity in Weimar Germany, where she staged portraits of herself under the series title Maskenselbstporträts – a term which translates to “masked-self-portraits”. Dressing in lace, veils, scarves and flowers – the lexicon of fetish – Arndt’s self-representations unmistakably invoked an excess of gendered identities, a series of disguises: the femme fatale, the good girl, the fun-loving flapper, the respectable lady, the serious and stoical widow, the new woman.

A few weeks ago, in the height of summer, I skipped work and took the train from my office in Berlin to the small nearby town of Dessau. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision; I wanted to visit the Bauhaus building that was designed by Walter Gropius in 1925 to house his vision of a utopian art university. Up on the second floor of the chequered school, wrapped in its iconic glass curtain, an exhibition space is currently presenting a show entitled Big Plans: Modern Figures, Visionaries, and Inventors. It features the work of modernism’s Bauhauslers – both its students and professors – until January 6, 2017, and it’s here that I saw six black and white photographs framed in a row like a strip from a Photobooth. Each self-portrait of Arndt showed the same woman, but pulling a different face.

Arndt mimics, mimes, performs and parodies the signs representing 'woman': like her contemporaries Cahun and Marta Astfalck-Vietz, these pictures articulate the early conceptualisation of the argument that there is no such thing as the woman, only her representations. In one photograph Ardnt puts her feet above her head playfully, like bunny ears; in another, she crosses her eyes quizzically; in the next, she peeks coyly from behind a veil in a slip that slips off her shoulder; in a fourth her eyes are shut and she wears flowers in her hair, like blue Ophelia. By deftly collecting the signifiers of femininity and erotic allure, these ‘masks’ make explicit reference to the myths of the new woman, and reference the ensuing entrapment or control of women.

When Arndt arrived at the school of art and design in 1923, at the age of 20, she had already spent three years working as an architect’s apprentice in Erfurt, and had her heart set on studying architecture. It was there that she began taking pictures of buildings in the town, capturing various speckled surfaces. There was no chance that she’d be allowed into the architecture class in Dessau however; instead, Arndt was inevitably steered into the weaving workshop, the supposedly more “feminine” subject that dealt with soft cloth, patterns and self-fashioning, not sharp steel, mighty structure and the lofty, all-encompassing “total art” of architecture. Men shaped the environment; women decorated it.

Once she had graduated and married fellow student Alfred Arndt, who she settled with in Dessau when he became a professor at the Bauhaus school, Arndt’s focus shifted to focus on her self-taught photography, drawing on techniques she’d learnt during her foundation year with the professor and photographer Lázlo Moholy-Nagy. Yet cloth would still feature heavily in her art, as she draped herself in veil and lace and stood against patterned fabrics for pictures. In some of these mask portraits, layers of fabric mesh into one another so that everything seems to be one and the same—background, clothes, shroud, and face all becoming one surface. Enveloping fabric becomes a second skin, suggesting the fabrication of self in a culture relentlessly obsessed with surface. It was a subversive move: she used the only medium she’d been allowed to study as a woman to reveal the restrictive fashioning of the feminine.

It was in 1933, living in Dessau, that Arndt took all 43 of her ‘mask’ self-portraits. While in some she plays with feminine archetypes of history and in the history of art (in one particular portrait, her hair cascades upwards and her breasts are exposed in the unmistakable guise of Klimt), other pictures present Arndt in the glamorous garb of the Weimar period’s modern “new woman”. She wears the cropped hair, flapper hat and provocative wide-eyed stare of Louise Brooks; some ‘masked’ selves look like silent movie stills, others are mostly flesh like the bodies of the Tiller girls. Arndt performed all the performing women of Weimar culture. In 1932, however, after the Bauhaus closed, the Arndt family moved to Probstzella in Eastern Germany. Three years after World War II they moved again to Darmstadt, and she more or less stopped taking photographs altogether.

The “masquerade of femininity”, the idea of the biological individual and the cultural person not being one and the same, has by now been widely explored in art. To look at Arndt’s work is to see that there were other histories beyond the myth of the Bauhaus, other experimenters looking at the theme of female masquerade before Sherman’s popular examples, others determining and thinking about gender as mask before Judith Butler gave this reality theoretical shape and weight.

It often takes a break in convention to find other narratives and persons of persona. For me, it took a break in the self I know best to go off dreaming and exploring Dessau one afternoon, in order to discover Arndt for myself.

The Many Disguises of Bauhaus Photographer Gertrud Arndt.  By Madeleine Morley.  Another Magazine , August 17, 2016.