You may have noticed that I’ve been sharing the stories of women artists and illustrators over the last few months. I didn’t set out to look for them, but one woman led to another. Like women warriors, women journalists and women inventors, even women artists who were well known and successful in their time are left out of the historical account.[1] Women illustrators have suffered the additional indignity of being left out of texts devoted to recovering forgotten women artists because of the perceived distinction between fine arts and illustration.

I almost didn’t write a post about Alice Barber Stephens (1858-1932) because in many ways her story is similar to that of other women artists working at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries.[2] Then a couple of details about her life and her work caught my imagination.

Here we go!

Stephens began attending the Philadelphia School of Design for Women[3] one day a week when she was seven (!) and became a full time student when she was fifteen, studying wood engraving as well as taking classes in painting and drawing. The school was the first of a number of women’s design schools that were established in industrial cities in the northeastern United States in the 1850s and the 1860s with the purpose of training women to support themselves.[4] The school succeeded in the case of Stephens. She began working as a professional engraver while still a student, which allowed her to help pay for her tuition.

Eager to learn more, she enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)[5] in 1876, the first year that the school admitted women. Opening the doors to women didn’t mean they got the same education as their male peers. Women were not allowed to take life-drawing classes using nude models, which was seen as the foundation of serious art education. Stephens and her fellow women students petitioned for the right to attend life-drawing classes and won, sort of. Instead of opening the men’s life classes to women, the academy offered separate women’s life-drawing classes. As is so often the case, separate was not equal. The women’s life classes offered female nudes and decorously draped male models. Life classes for male students used both male and female nudes. No drapes required.

Stephens’s first published illustration, Female Life Class (1879), appeared in a Scribner’s magazine article about their victory.

Like many other American artists of the time, Stephens spent some time in Paris studying at one of the academies, but she made her living as a commercial artist. She worked for several years as a full-time engraver for Scribners but by 1885 she had pivoted to supporting herself with illustrations, first pen and ink drawings and later paintings in watercolor and oils. Her work appeared in popular magazines such as Century, Harpers, Scribners, and The Ladies Home Journal, often illustrating the domestic genre stories that were typical in magazines in the period. She also illustrated books, many by well known authors such as Louisa May Alcott,[6] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sarah Orne Jewett.[7] In 1895, The Philadelphia Inquirer claimed “there is scarcely any American illustrator better known today.”

One illustration of hers particularly caught my attention. Titled “The Woman in Business,” it was one of six full-page illustrations by Stephens, collectively titled “The American Woman” that ran in The Ladies Home Journal throughout 1897. The paintings depicted (white, middle-class) women in a variety of settings. “The Woman in Business” was the fifth in the series. Set at a sales counter in Wannamaker’s department store, it is unusual in that it portrays a well-to-do woman of the leisure class in contrast to the working class women squeezed into a narrow space on the other side of the counter

Stephens also taught at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women at the invitation of the school’s principal, Emily Sartain. Together they expanded the curriculum to include more than the practical instruction on which the school was founded. Among other things, Stephens taught a popular life-drawing class—the first offered at the school of design. Along with Sartain and Cecilia Beaux, she founded the Plastic Club, a response to the exclusively male Philadelphia Sketch Club which, like other arts organizations of the time, did not allow women to join. The club provided women with a space to exhibit their work and a network of friends and allies. She organized and participated in all-women’s art exhibitions—important at a time when women were often left out of larger exhibitions.

In 1890, she married a classmate, Charles Hallowell Stephens. Unlike many middle class women of the period, she continued working not only after her marriage, but after the birth of their son, accepting commissions until she was no longer able to paint.

[1] My copy of H.W. Jansen’s History of Art, the Big Fat Art History Book that dominated introductory art history classes for the last fifty years, did not include a single woman artist. Not even Mary Cassatt or Georgia O’Keefe. According to Bridget Quinn, later editions include a whopping sixteen women.

[2] Though perhaps that similarity is part of the bigger story that these women aren’t individual exceptions but are part of a solid cohort of overlooked women in a specific field. According to art historian Kelsey Frady Malone, women made up at least one-third of the artists whose work was regularly published in the illustrated press during the golden age of illustration.

[3] An institution that we’ve seen before. Grace Drayton  was a student there.

[4] It also had the related purpose of creating a cadre of home-grown designers for the American textile industry, which at this time depended heavily on imported French designs. As I have mentioned before, I am absolutely fascinated by these schools.

[5] Another school which has appeared in these posts before, and may well appear again. Cecelia Beaux and Louis Glackens also studied there.

[6] As soon as I read this, I hurried downstairs to see if Stephens had illustrated any of the editions of Alcott that I own. Nope.

[7] If you don’t travel in the world of forgotten/recovered women writers, you may not be familiar with Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) She was a big deal in the nineteenth century. Today she is considered a foundational figure in American literary regionalism.