Throughout time art production was a male activity taught in various academies. The experience for women was different because a private teacher generally taught them at home. They lacked the opportunity to learn art in a broader context and thus lacked the opportunity to produce a wider array of genre. For example, if women did produce paintings, it was not necessarily oil on canvas, because it was not easily accessible at home, or easily self-taught. Artwork produced by women was then perceived as a craft rather than a fine art and not taken as seriously by the public as was their male counterparts. (p. 8)
It has often been said that in art women cannot create: they can only assimilate and reproduce. In one sense this is true both of Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt, the two principal figures in this tiny feminine group. The first was profoundly influenced by her brother-in-law Manet, the second by her teacher Degas. Marie Bracquemond and Eva Gonzalès married husbands in the practice of their art. But these women introduced into the stern methods of the early Impressionists a feminine gaiety and charm which were reflected upon the canvases of their “confrères”and produced a certain change of attitude.” (p. 77)
Rosa Bonheur gave to woman a position equal to that of a man. She won for herself unanimous admiration, based not on the singularity of her life, not on looseness of morals, not on social triumphs, not on friends at Court, but on her robust, virile, observant and well-considered talent, which in its turn was based on a primary study of anatomy and osteology, developed by a continuous observation of the constitution and the life of the animal world. (p. 181)