Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Sarah Hagglund
Sarah Hagglund is a Boston-based art historian and currently works in the Division of European and American Art at the Harvard Art Museums. She received her BA in History and Anthropology from Kent State University and her MA in the History of Art and Architecture from Boston University. Her research focuses on 17th-century Italian women artists and women art collectors, and in 2021 she was named a Portz Scholar for her work on the subject. More broadly, Sarah’s love for uncovering the stories of women of the past has led her to be interviewed on the What’sHerName podcast,and she recently worked with a local tour company, Hub Town Tours, to help research and develop a women’s suffrage walking tour of Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. Before she joined the Harvard Art Museums, she previously held positions at the Gibson House Museum and the Kent State University Museum.
Take it away, Sarah!
When did you first become interested in women artists of the Italian Baroque era? What sparked that interest?
It wasn’t until my junior year of college that I really became fascinated with the Italian Baroque, and particularly looking at women artists of that period. I had often written my term papers in my other history and art history classes on a specific woman or about gender more broadly, but in the fall of my junior year, I had the opportunity to take a mixed undergraduate/graduate level course focused solely on Italian Baroque Art. The course covered the greats of the period—Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Velasquez, among others—and I was immediately captivated by the Baroque style and have been ever since (thank you Dr. Medicus). However, I remember really struggling to come up with a topic for my term paper as the class drew to a close. I knew I wanted to focus on a woman artist and so I started with a simple google search and eventually stumbled upon the name Elisabetta Sirani.
At this point, the only woman artist of the period I had known was Artemisia Gentileschi, and so after finding Sirani’s name, I dove head-first into researching her. Little did I know at the time, I would very quickly become enamored with her art and her story. Sirani was a prolific artist in Bologna during the 17th century and would financially support her family through her art practice before she even turned the age of 20. She taught other women, including her sisters, to paint and draw, and she was known for working so fast that she became a local spectacle that drew in visiting dignitaries and wealthy patrons. Tragically, she died at age 27, likely due to stomach ulcers brought on by overwork, but she left behind a substantial oeuvre that often portrays historical and biblical stories of women with strength and nuance. Her painting, Portia Wounding Her Thigh, immediately struck me when I first saw it on my computer screen, and her work would later go on to inspire my undergraduate thesis focused on women’s cultural production in the city of Bologna in the 17th century.
Why do you think so many of these women have been left out of traditional art histories?
In my opinion, one of the biggest contributing factors to women being left out of our traditional art histories is survival bias. The art that survives today is only a minuscule fraction of all of the art that has been made in human history, and yet, that fraction is what is mostly informing our current understanding of the past. Over time, names have been lost to history, but so has the art made by their hands, and I think women artists were particularly vulnerable to this phenomenon. The art forms that many women would have had access to, such as lace making or embroidery, are not only more susceptible to decay over time because they are made from organic materials, but they were also not always valued as an art form and therefore were not as well protected.
Moreover, women artists who painted or made sculpture in the early modern period, were still often limited to specific genres that were deemed “appropriate” for women such as portraiture or devotional imagery. These genres were more susceptible to being removed from their original contexts which results in information loss over time. One example of this is Sirani herself and particularly the women artists she taught. In 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte had captured Bologna, and damaged or looted several convents and churches. Because many of the paintings made by women artists during the centuries prior dealt mostly with religious subjects—as was “appropriate”—they were disproportionately affected by these kinds of events, making some women artists all but disappear from the art historical record.
Additionally, an important factor to consider as to why women were (and sometimes still are) left out of art history narratives, is the bias of early scholars themselves. It is not just lack of documentation, but also a lack of willingness to uncover more about the women that might have been mentioned in the early sources. This is a symptom so many marginalized communities face when trying to uncover and forefront their stories: people, moments in history, and important nuance were forgotten or intentionally overlooked simply because they were not seen as valuable to the already determined historical narrative. This too applies to art history, where often art made by the Old Masters (aka male European artists from the 14th-18th centuries) was valued more highly and as a result, informed not only the taste of the art market, but also the direction of scholarship. Although the field is continuing to progress, we are still left with the legacies of a biased foundation. [Pamela butting it: this is an idea I’m going to come back to!]
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
As I have mentioned, the stories, the art, and the documentation we have about the lives of past women are deeply fragmented. To me, this is the very thing that I find not only most challenging, but also most exciting about researching historical women. Rarely do the traditional written sources provide a full picture; we instead have to turn to other additional avenues, such as social histories, art, and material culture to bolster our understanding of women’s stories of the past and the worlds they navigated. In Joan Kelly-Gadol’s seminal essay from 1976, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” she posed and explored this question as a way to challenge the historical timeline built around the male experience and highlight the fact that it may not align with what women were experiencing at the same time. If the historical context itself was created by centering male stories, when researching women, we not only have to try and piece together information, but often we must confront the preconceived notions about a period of time or a series of events that prevent more diverse stories from being explored. This excites me because it means there is still so much left to uncover, but it does make it hard at times to really access the nuance around a past woman’s life. And in that way, I think this is what has always drawn me to women artists in particular, because there is something extremely powerful about being in a room in front of a work of art made by a woman centuries ago that we may know nothing about, and yet, the work of art can still resonate with women today.
Portia Wounding Her Thigh. Portia Catonis was the wife of Brutus. According to Plutarch, she came upon her husband while he was thinking about the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. He would not share his concerns with Portia, for fear that she would reveal the plot under torture. To prove her ability to withstand physical pain, Portia wounded herself and then suffered in silence for a day proving to her husband that she could keep her secrets.
A question from Sarah: As someone who is still developing her career, I would love to know if there is anything you wish you would have known or anything that still to this day surprises you about studying women of the past and then publishing their stories?
I’m going to come at this from a slightly angle, and tell you two things I wish I had understood earlier
1. Take the opportunities when they come if they interest you. Even when they are outside your academic field. (It sounds like you’ve already figured this one out.)
2. Find your people, in real life and on-line, and nurture your connections to them.
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Interested in learning more about Sarah and her work? Listen to her episode on the What’s Her Name podcast.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with historian Stacy Cordery
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
Several years ago, My Own True Love and I visited the headwaters of the Mississippi at Lake Itasca State Park, in Minnesota, as part of our multi-part road trip along the Great River Road. There we learned that Henry Rowe Schoolcraft “discovered” and named the headwaters of the Mississippi.* We also learned that Schoolcraft developed a reputation as an expert on Ojibwe language and culture, with the “help” of his wife, Jane Johnston, an educated woman of Ojibwe and Scots-Irish heritage. (Quotation marks are mine, and loaded with opinions.) I tucked that away as something worth looking into later.
Schoolcraft, and consequently Johnston, recently popped up in the context of something I am researching.** Apparently later is now.
Poet and writer Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (1800-1842) is considered the first major Native American woman writer in English. She was born into a prominent family in Sault Ste Marie in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, an area where Native American, Canadian, and American cultures intertwined. She navigated between (at least) three linguistic and cultural worlds long before she met Henry: the Ojibwe culture, language and kinship network of her mother, her father’s Scots-Irish heritage (and love of Shakespeare),*** and the polyglot lingua franca of the region.
Henry arrived in Sault Ste Marie as an Indian Affairs agent in 1822 and boarded with the Johnston family. He and Jane married soon after.
Jane and her family members collected, transcribed, and translated stories from the Ojibwe tradition and those of other Native American peoples, including creation stories and tales about the origins of various plants and animals in the time before man. Henry reused some of these legends in his own writing, earning a reputation as an ethnographer in the process. One of his poems inspired Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha.
Jane was often separated from Henry while he traveled for his territorial duties and in his role as a literary lion. Lonely, and later anguished when her children were sent away to attend an eastern boarding school, she wrote poetry in both English and Ojibwe, sometimes using both languages in a single poem, that explore themes of loss, loneliness and alienation. Her poetry was never published in her life time, with the exception of a few pieces included in a handwritten magazine she published with her husband.
In time she became addicted to laudanum, which doctors prescribed with a liberal hand to women during the period. She died suddenly at 42 while Henry was away in England.
Her work was published posthumously in 2007, in a collection titled The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky, edited by Robert Dale Parker.
*You can read my rant on the subject of both the “discovery” and the re-naming of the lake as an inherently colonial project in my post on that visit.
**Nope. Still no hints.
***She even spent some time in Ireland.
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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with art historian Sarah Hagglund.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Ruth Scheuing
Ruth Scheuing is an artist who works in textiles, with a focus on how textiles communicate through patterns, as language and mythology and how they reflect women’s history as well as global trade. Her work often explores new technologies, such as computerized Jacquard looms and GPS (Geographical Positioning System) technology, Google Earth and Satellites.
Recent exhibitions include: Contextile Biennale 2024, Guimaraes, Portugal; I wanted to go on a Spacewalk but had nothing to wear, 2022, in North Vancouver; Ancient Women in Textiles 2019 and Women’s Work 2018 at the Italian Culture Center in Vancouver; and Connecting Threads 2018 and Silkroads 2010 at the Surrey Art Gallery; the Canadian Craft Biennale in Burlington, Ontario; Countermapping for the PUSH Festival, 2010 Vancouver,and ‘Dreamland’ at the Textile Museum of Canada in Toronto.
Upcoming exhibitions include the Biennale Internationale du lin de Portneuf, Quebec, Canada, June 16 – Oct 5, 2025, and The Medusa: An Archetype in Contemporary Mythology at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver, Canada in August 2025.
Published writings include “Penelope or the Unraveling of History” as part of New Feminist Criticism: Critical Strategies, edited by Katy Deepwell, published by Manchester University Press and co-editing with Ingrid Bachmann ‘material matters: the Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles’, published by YYZ, Toronto in 1999; to be reissued in an updated version 2025. She is included in Art Textiles of the World: Canada, a Telos publication of 2009, received the Chalmers Award in Crafts in 1996 ,and the Vancouver Mayor’s Award in 2010. She taught in the Textile Arts Program at Capilano University from 1994-2014 and she has been a member of TSA (textile Society of America) since 2000.
Her studio, founded as TAD (Textile Arts Department) in 2014, focuses on making a Digital AVL Jac3 Jacquard loom available to the community. It is located on Granville Island in Vancouver and is part of ‘The Salish Blanket Company’, led by the Musqueam weavers, mother and daughter Debra and Aleen Sparrow.
Take it away, Ruth!
What path led you to create weavings based on Ada Lovelace? And how did Lovelace’s work influence your weaving as a whole?
When I first heard about Ada Lovelace, I had the opportunity to learn Jacquard weaving in 1997 and I read several biographies about Ada Lovelace and my first weaving had her image and her famous sentence “The Analytical Engine Weaves Algebraic Patterns, Just as the Jacquard Loom Weaves Flowers and Leaves” …. Ada had translated a text by Manabrea about Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, an early version of a computer, in 1843. Her notes took up more space than the original text and contained the above quote and the first instance of written software. Ada’s way of thinking about computers already included artistic approaches and certainly brought the importance of textiles and floral patterns to the forefront.
I became fascinated by the early Jacquard looms, developed in 1804 by Joseph Marie Jacquard, who used punched cards for a complex patterned weaving. Napoleon funded this new technology to fill his empty war chest and to compete with the demands for weavings with elaborate ‘Flowers and Leaves’ brought back from Asia during the 18th century. It provided me with an excellent reason for giving floral patterns new meaning. It also highlights unintended developments in technology.
I have also worked on a historical Jacquard loom, that uses punched cards and researched the archive of Honey Hooser, a local handweaver, who brought a Jacquard head for her loom in the 1950’s from England, which I helped restore in 2014. Later I also punched a new pattern on a set of cards using a laser cutter.
How does your work explore the questions of traditional boundaries between women’s work and technology?
While the making of textiles is often seen as an ancient way of working by hand, textiles are also at the forefront of technological change and have long played an important economic and social role and still do so today with global markets. They reflect cultures, colonial relationships, cause trade wars and labour protests. When industrial spinning and weaving was introduced in the 19th century in the UK, it left us the term ‘luddite’. The recently published Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchand goes into details of these worker protests and how they also reflect current issues with AI adoption in the workplace today.
My relationship with ‘Flowers and Leaves’ evolved over time, influenced by backyard gardening and hiking in local mountains, as well as historical ornate textiles from the Rococo period in the 18th century. I am interested in examining how nature came to be used as ‘decoration’ and associated with the ‘feminine’. Definitions of ‘nature’ reveal a range of contradictory meanings. Nature often suggests that which is separate from human activity and is used to project desires seemingly unattainable, thus “nature becomes romanticized, patronized and forever the passive recipient of our desires” (Kate Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the non-Human). Donna Haraway in the Cyborg Manifesto proposes more fluid boundaries between humans, animals and machines. She suggests: “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are Cyborg”(Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature).
Most of my current work is done by combining imagery from a variety of sources, which I then weave by hand on a digital Jacquard loom. This allows me to create my art works with my hands, supported by new technologies.
Your Flying Women pieces explore the experiences of two historical women, Sarah Henley and Sophie Blanchard. Can you tell us their stories and what path led you to these flying women?
I heard a story on the radio, about a woman, who jumped off a bridge and survived the fall due to the parachuting of her hooped skirt and had an immediate image in my head of how she would float down. When I googled it, I found it to be the true story of Sarah Henley, who in 1862 jumped off a bridge, but survived the fall and lived to an old age.
When a group of us saw a newspaper headline ‘I wanted to go on a spacewalk, but had nothing to wear’, about a NASA space mission, that lacked spacesuits in women’s sizes, it became the title for a four-woman show in 2023. I explored Sarah Henley’s story and wanted to show how fashion shapes women’s actions in ways that is not always predictable. When looking for more stories about women flying, I became fascinated by Sophie Blanchard, who was the first woman balloonist in the early 1800’s. ( Jean-Marie Jacquard invented the Jacquard loom in 1801.) She performed more than 60 ascents as a solo balloonist after the ballooning death of her husband Jean-Pierre Blanchard. She performed during official functions for Napoleon, who promoted her as “Aeronaut of the Official Festivals” and Louis XVIII in 1814, who promoted her to “Official Aeronaut of the Restoration”. She was killed in 1819 when her balloon caught fire, by fireworks she had launched from her balloon in the air. Sophie was said to be a shy and petite women, but with a flair for drama, who chose fashionable dresses for these tours in the air at freezing temperatures.
While researching this show, I was excited to find many mythological women who had wings. Many were goddesses and celebrated, but others were depicted as monsters and feared. They include Isis, Eris, Nike, Inanna and Lilith, Eos, the Goddess of the Dawn and the more sinister Harpys, Sirens and Furies (or Erinyes) who were feared. Often different versions of stories existed in historical sources. The story of Medusa is compelling: Athena transformed her into a monster after Poseidon assaulted her in Athena’s temple. The mortal Medusa was given wings together with her immortal Gorgon sisters. I want to explore all the stories of these powerful female figures who held power over men. At the same time these images of Flying Women symbolized freedom.
Mythology had been the focus of my early in the 90’s, where my focus was on weaving related stories particularly Arachne. She challenged Athena to a weaving contest, where she wove many dubious situations of Greek Gods seducing women. Athena was furious and transformed Arachne into a spider; Arachne could still weave but no longer tell stories. This transformation is described in Ovid’s ‘metamorphoses’ and a famous print from 1860 by Dore, shows how Dante finds Arachne in Purgatory as half woman, half spider, an image I found quite disturbing. So with my new interest with the monstrous I wanted to create a more heroic hybrid form of a spider/woman based on a Drider, in 2018, found in contemporary Dungeons & Dragons culture.
Sophie Blanchard Aeronaut III. 2023. Jacquard weaving.
A question from Ruth: As a historian, how do you see a role for historical fiction, particularly related to myths? There is lots of it out there and one finds it under headings like science fiction.
I have gone on record more than once as believing that historical fiction can be a valuable entryway into historical interest, especially when, as Megan Marshall puts it in a recent essay in the New York Times, such books “don’t seek to pass for biographies, in which the play of the author’s imagination with people of the past takes center stage, and questions of verisimilitude recede.” Certainly historical fiction of many kinds played an important role in developing my own interest in history.
Myth is different creature for me, both as an inspiration for fiction (or weaving) and as an occasional historical source.
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Interested in learning more about Ruth and her work?
Attend one of her group exhibitions in 2025:
“Eos-Goddess of the Dawn” at the Biennale Internationale du lin in Portneuf, Quebec, Canada June 16 – Oct 5, 2025 https://biennaledulin.com/
The Medusa: An Archetype in Contemporary Mythology at the Italian Cultural Centre / in Vancouver, Canada, August 2025.
Visit her website: https://www.ruthscheuing.com/
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Tomorrow will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. Then we’ll be back on Monday with three questions and an answer with art historian Sarah Hagglund