Equal under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism

By Linda M. Grasso

Equal under the Sky is the first historical study of Georgia O’Keeffe’s complex involvement with, and influence on, US feminism from the 1910s to the 1970s. Utilizing understudied sources such as fan letters, archives of women’s organizations, transcripts of women’s radio shows, and programs from women’s colleges, Linda M. Grasso shows how and why feminism and O’Keeffe are inextricably connected in popular culture and scholarship. The women’s movements that impacted the creation and reception of O’Keeffe’s art, Grasso argues, explain why she is a national icon who is valued for more than her artistic practice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9780826358820

Linda M. Grasso

Linda M. Grasso is a professor of English at York College and of Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the author of The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women’s Literature in America, 1820–1860.

Book preview

Equal under the Sky

Equal under the Sky

Georgia O’Keeffe & Twentieth-Century Feminism

Linda M. Grasso

University of New Mexico Press | Albuquerque

© 2017 by the University of New Mexico Press

All rights reserved. Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

22  21  20  19  18  17   1  2  3  4  5  6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Grasso, Linda M., author.

Title: Equal under the sky : Georgia O’Keeffe and twentieth-century feminism / Linda M. Grasso.

Description: Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2017005436 (print) | LCCN 2017012734 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826358813 (printed case : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780826358820 (E-book)

Subjects: LCSH: O’Keeffe, Georgia, 1887–1986—Criticism and interpretation. | Feminism and art—United States—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC N6537.O39 (ebook) | LCC N6537.O39 G73 2017 (print) | DDC 759.13—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005436

Cover photograph: Georgia O’Keeffe, circa 1938 by Josephine B. Marks,

gelatin silver print, 2½ × 2 inches, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Designed by Catherine Leonardo

Chapter 4 was previously published by Linda M. Grasso as ‘You are no stranger to me’: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Fan Mail in Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 5 (2013): 24–40, guest edited by Barbara Ryan and Charles Johanningsmeier. © the Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. This article is used by permission of the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Excerpt from Housewife from All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton © 1962 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1990 by Linda G. Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Anne Sexton.

To artists, activists, and scholars for whom feminism is an inspiration

It seems to me very important to the idea of true democracy—to my country—and to the world eventually—that all men and women stand equal under the sky—

—GEORGIA O’KEEFFE to Eleanor Roosevelt, in a 1944 letter written as part of a National Woman’s Party campaign to win the First Lady’s support of a federal Equal Rights Amendment that would guarantee Equality of Rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Georgia O’Keeffe and Feminism

CHAPTER ONE

Living Feminism in the 1910s

CHAPTER TWO

The Artist Idea

CHAPTER THREE

Women in the Picture

CHAPTER FOUR

You Are No Stranger to Me: Women’s Fan Letters

CHAPTER FIVE

Georgia O’Keeffe’s Self-Portrait

CHAPTER SIX

Feminism as Politics and Art

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Illustrations

I.1.  New York World-Telegram headline, 1945

I.2.  USPS Georgia O’Keeffe stamp sheet, 1996

I.3.  Jeanette Winter, My Name Is Georgia, 1998

1.1.  Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Woman Painting), ca. 1907–1908

1.2.  Georgia O’Keeffe, ca. 1912–1914

1.3.  Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas, ca. 1912–1918

1.4.  New York City suffrage parade, 1915

1.5.  The Evening Telegram—New York, 1923

1.6.  Georgia O’Keeffe and Arthur Macmahon, ca. 1915

1.7.  Portrait of Stieglitz at 291, ca. 1910s

1.8.  Katharine Rhoades poem in 291, 1915

1.9.  The Masses, 1915

1.10.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ca. 1915

1.11.  Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1918

2.1.  and 2.2. Georgia O’Keeffe letter to Arthur Macmahon, 1915

2.3.  Art Institute of Chicago drawing class listings, 1905–1906

3.1.  Smith College Museum of Art exhibition catalog cover, 1949

3.2.  Elizabeth May Willis at Chatham Hall Institute, ca. 1919

3.3.  Chatham Episcopal Institute faculty, ca. 1907

3.4.  Kappa Delta Sorority sisters, Chatham Hall Institute, 1905

3.5.  Smith College Associated News, 1949

3.6.  Elizabeth Arden and Georgia O’Keeffe, 1937

3.7.  Young Women’s Hebrew Association art exhibition list, 1919

3.8.  Anne Tracy Morgan, ca. 1939

3.9.  American Woman’s Association clubhouse postcard, ca. 1920s–1930s

3.10.  AWA Bulletin, 1937

4.1.  Fan letter, 1968

4.2.  Fan letter, 1967

4.3.  Georgia O’Keeffe reading a women’s magazine, ca. 1960s

4.4.  Envelope of fan letter, 1960

5.1.  Mary Beth Edelson, Some Living American Women Artists/Last Supper, 1972

5.2.  Georgia O’Keeffe first-edition book cover, 1976

5.3.  Georgia O’Keeffe, Blue Lines X, 1916

5.4.  Perry Miller Adato and Georgia O’Keeffe, ca. 1977–1980

6.1.  New York World, 1930

6.2.  Equal Rights, 1942

6.3.  Georgia O’Keeffe letter to Nora Stanton Barney, 1943

6.4.  National Woman’s Party brochure, 1945

Acknowledgments

I had no idea when I started this project that it would lead me to a community of remarkable people, a wealth of scholarship in women’s history and the arts, and archives in several states. My study of Georgia O’Keeffe began in an American studies class at Brooklyn College when I wrote a paper comparing how O’Keeffe portrayed herself in her book Georgia O’Keeffe to how her biographer, Laurie Lisle, portrayed her in a Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. So my gratitude begins there. Thank you to Lillian Schlissel, a brilliant professor who taught me a great deal about American autobiography and encouraged me to pursue a scholarly life. Thank you to Laurie Lisle for researching and writing a richly detailed, insightful biography that remains foundational, and thank you to Georgia O’Keeffe for publishing a book about her life and art that I could buy in an affordable paperback edition in a Greenwich Village bookstore. Although I was not among the fans who wrote to O’Keeffe in the late 1970s, like many of them, I discovered her art and story through her 1976 book and Perry Miller Adato’s 1977 PBS documentary.

This study would not have been possible without the rich body of scholarship on O’Keeffe, women’s history, and feminist studies that undergirds it. I am deeply indebted to many scholars, among them Karen J. Blair, Sissela Bok, Nancy F. Cott, Sarah Greenough, Barbara Buhler Lynes, and Susan Smulyan, who answered my questions and suggested further research avenues to pursue. Donna Cassidy, Wanda Corn, Tirza True Latimer, Miles Orvell, Lois Rudnick, Kirsten Swinth, Lara Vapnek, Margaret Rose Vendryes, and Barbara Winslow all read project proposals, conference papers, or chapter drafts and provided tremendously helpful responses and guidance as the project evolved. Walter Goodman, Charles Johanningsmeier, James Machor, and Barbara Ryan offered valuable criticism and editorial suggestions on the fan mail chapter and Brendan Murphy and Emily Tobey gave me insightful feedback on the self-portrait chapter.

Early conversations with Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, Marc Edelman, Joseph Entin, Elizabeth Francis, Kevin Gaines, Langdon Hammer, Matthew Jacobson, Katherine Manthorne, Martha J. Nadell, and Laura Wexler helped me to formulate questions and expand my thinking. Two scholars gave me what I needed most at particularly difficult moments: Patricia Hills assured me that my perspective was welcome and Jonathan Silverman urged me to keep going and supplied me with a list of potential publishers. From the start, Lois Rudnick cheered me forward with her warmth and wisdom.

I am especially indebted to five scholars who have helped nurture this book into being. Bonnie S. Anderson and the members of my writer’s group, Nina Bannett, Nancy Berke, Carol Quirke, and Phyllis E. van Slyck, challenged me to ask the right questions, take a position without judging, and complicate feminism. They read and commented on multiple versions of project proposals, conference papers, and chapter drafts, gifting me with their attentiveness, knowledge, criticism, and suggestions.

I am also grateful to the people who responded to my queries, granted me interviews, and shared information. Shannon Lee Hays, a fan who wrote a series of letters to O’Keeffe when she was a teenager in the early 1980s, spoke to me at length about her youthful perception of O’Keeffe as an inspiring artist, mentor, and woman to whom she could relate. Alan Macmahon graciously sent me copies of unpublished correspondence between his father and O’Keeffe that helped me to delineate O’Keeffe’s feminist-modernist network in the 1910s. Perry Miller Adato spent hours talking to me about why and how she made the O’Keeffe documentary and shared her impressions of O’Keeffe’s relationship to feminism in the 1970s. Malcolm Varon, a photographer first hired by O’Keeffe in 1969, was an especially fruitful source of information. He worked with O’Keeffe when he made transparencies of her paintings for Georgia O’Keeffe. Mr. Varon and I met frequently to discuss O’Keeffe and my book in progress. He read drafts of chapters and helped me to think through arguments and paradoxes. Living in O’Keeffe’s home while he photographed her paintings, Mr. Varon provided me with a perspective of O’Keeffe’s values and politics I could not get from any other source.

Others were equally generous. Novelist Nicholson Baker helped me tremendously when, to my great disappointment, I discovered that the master microfilm copy of the 1930 newspaper that contained O’Keeffe’s debate with communist Michael Gold was missing. Whoever had made the microfilm had neglected to copy the Women’s Section where the article appeared. When I contacted Mr. Baker he was packing up his massive American Newspaper Repository to donate to Duke University. Even so, he managed to find the article, which is why it is an illustration in this book. I am grateful to Philip Yockey at the New York Public Library for directing me to Mr. Baker. William Black, the archivist at Chatham Hall where O’Keeffe was a student from 1903 to 1905, informed me about the school and sent me historical photographs that aided my understanding of the early women’s culture O’Keeffe was a part of in her formative years. Three of the photographs are reproduced here. More recently, art historian Amy Von Lintel kindly shared transcriptions of interviews with O’Keeffe’s students that she had made from audiotapes for her own research.

Many others gave freely of their time and utilized their expertise to help make this book possible. Kirsten Lovejoy, Patrick McGrath, Rebecca Paller, Daniel Phelps, and especially Michael Branson Smith helped me locate people and pictures as well as create digital files from archival sources. Robert Delap, Laura Fink-Green, and Jahongir Usmanov researched copyright issues and estate holders. Elizabeth Ehrnst and Kira Randolph at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum provided invaluable assistance with permissions and securing copies of photographs and artwork. Stephanie Golden and Lorraine Anton read drafts of the manuscript and offered suggestions that helped me clarify ideas and improve narrative continuity. Ziggy Snow copyedited the book with attentiveness and care. Elise McHugh, editor extraordinaire, believed in this project from the start and has remained steadfast in her commitment to seeing it in print.

The historical sleuthing this book required was greatly aided by the knowledge and expertise of archivists, librarians, and staff across the country. Many of the people who talked to me, responded to e-mail inquiries, combed through historical documents, and sent me materials are acknowledged in footnotes. I thank them all for their efforts and interest. Thank you, also, to everyone who assisted me at the Barnard College Archives, the Brooklyn Museum Library and Archives, the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Morgan Library and Museum Archives, the Schlesinger Library, the Sewall-Belmont House and Museum, and the South Caroliniana Library. I am particularly grateful to the public services assistants and curators at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, especially Karen Nangle and Nancy Kuhl, who welcomed me warmly and discussed this project with me so enthusiastically. A special thank-you to Janice E. Ruth at the Library of Congress, who provided invaluable research assistance, even staying after hours in the closed reading room to help me search additional databases.

I am grateful to the Institute for Southern Studies for funding my trip to the Anita Pollitzer Archive housed in the South Caroliniana Library, to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for an H. D. Fellowship that funded two months of research in residence, to the Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s union, for awarding me several grants that supported research at the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library, and to York College for granting me two research leaves that enabled me to devote my time exclusively to the project.

Administrators, colleagues, librarians, staff, and students at York College have contributed immeasurably to this book. I am especially grateful to President Marcia V. Keizs, former provost Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, and present provost Panayiotis Meleties for their encouragement, support, and unwavering belief in this project and in me. College librarians Junli Diao, John Drobnicki, Hope Young, Christina Miller, Anamika Megwalu, and Njoki Kinyatti helped me find obscure articles and citations, ordered materials, set up microfilm readers, and answered countless questions. Grace Avila and Vickitoy Meyers, as well as Elaine Beurnier at College of Staten Island, David Donabedian at Hunter College, and Donna Schultz at Queens College, always made it possible for me to have the books I needed. In the English Department, my colleagues Cynthia Haller, Phebe Kirkham, and Heather Robinson enabled me to continue researching and writing while I was chairing the department by assuming administrative responsibilities and carrying them out so well. I am also tremendously grateful to CadyAnn Parris-David and Sharon Beharry-Singh, who expertly oversee the department’s daily functioning. Discussions with students at both York College and the CUNY Graduate Center also benefited my work on this book. In classes devoted to studying O’Keeffe’s celebrity, my students helped me to see how much O’Keeffe’s art and story continue to resonate for women of all backgrounds and ages.

Finally, I thank my parents, Salvatore and Virginia Grasso, and all the members of my family who have showered me with love, supported my passion for scholarship, and inspired me to continue working, despite obstacles and setbacks. My brother, Salvatore F. Grasso, provided perspective and humor that kept me grounded and focused. My sister, Kim Carmelo, gifted me with flowers from her garden to put on my desk, a fitting symbol of her encouragement and love. And my youngest sister, Joy Grasso Krebs, ever the professional science educator, taught me all about floral reproduction so I could better understand O’Keeffe’s flower paintings. Spending time with my nieces Julia Krebs and Amelia Rieser and my nephews Andrew, Marcello, and Leonardo Carmelo and Ben Rieser has greatly nourished me as I’ve worked on this book. Sharing my life with Michael Rieser, my partner for over thirty years, I know firsthand what it means to live equal under the sky.

INTRODUCTION

Georgia O’Keeffe and Feminism

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE IS an ardent feminist, proclaimed Robert Coates in a 1929 New Yorker profile. Miss O’Keeffe, Noted Artist is a Feminist declared a 1945 New York World-Telegram headline. The feminist artist’s wide-ranging influence is a reminder of why her paintings resonate today, asserted a reviewer in a 2007 O: The Oprah Magazine article. You must remember to say O’Keeffe was a staunch feminist, an O’Keeffe scholar told a journalist who was writing a book about O’Keeffe that was published in 2012. Even the ultra-feminist O’Keeffe would marvel at how makeup products can create artful eyelid designs inspired by her iconic floral paintings, contended a reporter for Bustle, a new media site for and by women in 2015.¹ Does the label feminist have the same meanings for each of these speakers? And is the feminist Georgia O’Keeffe the same artist who allegedly slammed the door in Gloria Steinem’s face, made disparaging remarks about women who identified as women artists, and refused to cooperate with feminist artists, critics, and scholars who were creating female-centered artistic theories, practices, and histories in the 1970s?² What accounts for these contradictions and the reasons they are—and are not—part of US culture’s collective memories? In this book I question assumptions about O’Keeffe guided by the principle that feminism is a historical phenomenon that needs to be understood in context.

Feminism is an enduring influence on O’Keeffe’s legacy. Whether the artist is considered an insider or an outsider, a supporter or a detractor, she and feminism are inextricably entwined. Understanding why necessitates grounding O’Keeffe in US feminist history. Born in 1887 and dying in 1986, O’Keeffe lived during the flourishing of two twentieth-century feminist movements—first in the 1910s and then again in the 1970s. Embracing the first movement and disdaining the second, O’Keeffe sustained a relationship to feminism that was long, complicated, and ambivalent. In this study, I explore what feminism meant to O’Keeffe and how it influenced her self-creations, life choices, and art making. Concomitantly, I examine the culture’s relationship to feminism as it is revealed through discourses about O’Keeffe from the 1920s to the 1980s. Foregrounding feminist questions and employing feminist reading practices, in this book I dislodge O’Keeffe from art history contexts and reassess her art, life, letters, and reputation in a historical feminist framework. Feminism, I propose, is akin to a canvas upon which O’Keeffe, her contemporaries, and her commentators created art and opinions.

I.1. This 1945 New York World-Telegram headline declared Georgia O’Keeffe a feminist, but it was not a label she used to name herself. Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Utilizing studies of twentieth-century white women in the arts, professions, women’s clubs, and social change movements, I read O’Keeffe’s and her contemporaries’ words, images, and motivations through a historically informed lens. In the pages that follow, I map out a geography that I hope will enable new understandings of feminism’s complexities as they relate to O’Keeffe, her worlds, and our own. The story I plot here is about the efforts, risks, disappointments, and pleasures of individuals and communities seeking visibility, power, and justice for middle-class and elite white women. Conflict and contradiction, denial and affirmation, forgetting and remembering are major themes. O’Keeffe is the protagonist, the motivating force of the analysis. How and why she became a feminist icon tell us a great deal about feminism’s longevity in US history.

The most challenging aspect of this study has been addressing the shifting meanings of feminism throughout O’Keeffe’s lifetime. As a cluster of ideas and philosophy, feminism exists in attitudes, behaviors, cultures, and movements. Feminists agitate for change through political channels, as well as through cultural creations. Two premises undergird my understanding of twentieth-century US feminism. First, feminism emerges in the 1910s in tandem with modernism, thus one movement cannot be understood in isolation from the other. Feminism was inflected by modernism and modernism was inflected by feminism. Modernists championed rupture, innovation, and daring in art forms, styles, and perspectives. Feminists revolted against gender injustice using modernist thinking and aesthetics. Both modernists and feminists rejected traditional conventions and sought newness in personal expression, culture, and relationships.³

O’Keeffe first created herself as an artist when feminism and modernism were interlinked. In midlife, when O’Keeffe reread letters she had written in the 1910s, she marveled at her excitement over the out doors and just being alive—my working and working and always seeming to think that maybe it was foolish, she told a friend, —but I kept at it a bit madly because it was the only thing I wanted to do—it was like an urge to speak— Although she claimed she could not remember at all what she had read at the time, the books, magazines, and journals she regarded as a form of sustenance sustained her for a lifetime.⁴ Olive Schreiner’s influential polemic Woman and Labour (1911), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s crusading monthly the Forerunner (1909–1916), and Greenwich Village’s politically and aesthetically radical magazine The Masses (1911–1917) are among the publications O’Keeffe mentions reading in her correspondence from this period. Feminist-modernist cultures and activism in the 1910s enabled O’Keeffe to act on her urge to speak and find her own ways of seeing.

Second, twentieth-century feminism was simultaneously broad and specific. On the one hand, feminism was a universal cluster of ideas that advocated women’s worth and asserted that women should not be discriminated against on the basis of sex. On the other hand, the meanings women and men attributed to feminism differed based on their race, class, politics, and status within their communities, families, and US society. In a debate with Communist Michael Gold in 1930, O’Keeffe said she was interested in the oppression of women of all classes. But there is no evidence that she actualized this interest in feminist practices. She was not involved in activism that supported working-class women, women of color, and poor women’s rights and freedoms in the 1910s or in any other decade.⁵ The feminism she embraced and practiced ennobled individualism, self-expression, and professional achievement as ultimate forms of liberty. Arguably, however, O’Keeffe’s art could have inspired women and men of all races, classes, politics, and statuses to imagine worlds not governed by industrial logic, stultifying labor, and multiple discriminations. What O’Keeffe and her art meant to working-class, immigrant, and people-of-color communities remains an open question worthy of exploration.

Throughout this study, I employ the concept of feminist imaginings as a way of conveying my conviction that art making is a form of activism. O’Keeffe’s art emerged out of a feminist consciousness and it included self-creations as well as paintings. In the 1930 debate with Michael Gold, she acknowledged that her art was political, that it was intervening in discourses about oppression and inequities. I have no hesitancy in contending that my painting of a flower may be just as much a project of this age as a cartoon about the freedom of women—or the working class—or anything else, she said when arguing that the aesthetics of paintings in all forms transmit meanings.⁶ In the decades between feminist movements, O’Keeffe’s art was consumed by publics that were resisting, ignoring, maintaining, or reinventing feminist philosophies. The potential for audiences to see feminist messages of their own making in the artist and her art made O’Keeffe’s creations signs, transmitters, and motivators for feminisms of all kinds. The fan letters women wrote to O’Keeffe evince the power of her art to spur realizations that could have led those letter writers to change their lives.

O’Keeffe’s art constitutes a feminist practice, I argue, because nurturing the imagination is key to embarking on action. Southern working-class lesbian writer Dorothy Allison eloquently conveys this point. In her 1995 memoir, she recalls how imagination made it possible for her to conceive of possibilities outside the contours of her knowable life. Sometimes I became people I had seen on television or read about in books, went places I’d barely heard of, did things that no one I knew had ever done, particularly things that girls were not supposed to do. In the world as I remade it, nothing was forbidden; everything was possible.⁷ Threaded throughout this book are instances where I see O’Keeffe’s art inspiring contemplations of feminist possibilities well before the 1970s.

I.2. In this 1996 US Postal Service commemorative stamp sheet, O’Keeffe is represented as a nationally important artist who makes traditional female objects and values—flowers and friendship—visible and significant. Photograph by Malcolm Varon. © 2016 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / Artists Rights Society, New York.

O’Keeffe is an especially generative feminist subject because she continues to circulate as a feminist signifier in multiple domains. Frequent museum exhibitions showcase her work across the United States and, more recently, internationally; she and her art are the subject of numerous monographs and biographies; her image appears on posters and cookbook covers; her paintings are reproduced on postage stamps, calendars, and postcards; and magnetic Georgia O’Keeffe dolls occupy bookstore racks. Among the thousands of O’Keeffe-related videos on YouTube is a clip from the television show Breaking Bad (2008–2013), in which a postcoital, white heterosexual young couple banter about O’Keeffe’s vagina paintings.⁸ In both high and popular culture, O’Keeffe is a feminist icon who is disconnected from feminist history, activism, and politics.

Enmeshed in twenty-first-century culture visually, narratively, and digitally, O’Keeffe remains a canvas upon which different publics interpret and consume feminist messages. A critical component of O’Keeffe’s mass appeal is the way her personal mythologies map onto national US mythologies about democracy and freedom. This phenomenon is most evident in children’s books that perpetuate O’Keeffe’s iconic status for future generations. No less than an American president has granted O’Keeffe the position of representative artist. In his children’s book Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters, Barack Obama presents O’Keeffe as American creativity personified: She helped us see big beauty in what is small: the hardness of stone and the softness of feather. In this rendering, O’Keeffe is associated with bigness and smallness, hardness and softness, thus she incorporates both male and female signifiers. She is the ideal configuration of gendered democracy in a twenty-first-century vision of the United States as a country of principles, a country of citizens who are made up of people of every kind.⁹

Jeanette Winter’s children’s book is yet another example. Basing her fanciful depiction of the artist on O’Keeffe’s own 1976 mythologized self-portrait, Winter presents O’Keeffe as an artistic crusader doing things other people don’t do. Painting in her own way and painting what she saw BIG, so people would see what she saw, the artist is a female Emersonian/Whitmanesque figure whose life and art symbolically encode cherished American values: originality, independence, and the questing urge.¹⁰ In this book and others, O’Keeffe is the female exception, the role model, the proof of possibility. She is the achieving woman who surpasses the male mentor and enabler; a tower of strength and endurance, living a long life in a self-created home in the desert—that symbolic place in which women bypass male structures and cultural expectations. As the embodiment of female liberation, O’Keeffe transmits America’s most cherished myths about itself: her resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and tenacity are quintessentially American qualities.

I.3 Jeanette Winter’s children’s book depicts O’Keeffe as a female Emersonian/Whitmanesque figure whose life and art symbolically encode cherished American values: originality, independence, and the questing urge. Illustration from My Name Is Georgia: A Portrait by Jeanette Winter. © 1998 Jeanette Winter. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

O’Keeffe is considered one of the "most dazzling, if not the most dazzling female icons of the twentieth century" because she represents a protean fantasy of women’s power that accords with US mythologies of transformation, success, and celebrity.¹¹ In a society that valorizes youthful female beauty, O’Keeffe is sexually alluring at the same time that she offers a new model of female aging: she grows old gracefully, maintaining her vitality; she never colors or cuts her hair short; she never capitulates to social expectations regarding gender or age. O’Keeffe continues to be a New Woman as an old woman. Indeed, part of her mythic power resides in her capacity to remake herself as a new old woman. As such, she is timeless, enduring, fearless, just like Whitman’s transcendent American. In a society that deems wealth and fame the pinnacle of the pursuit of happiness, O’Keeffe is rich, famous: Many people know her name, at least something about her life story, and can identify a flower painting. Or perhaps they have virtually or literally visited the museum that bears her name and permanently houses her art, the first in the country to be dedicated to an internationally-known woman artist.¹²

In this book, I offer an approach to decoding O’Keeffe’s multivalent feminist messages, agency, and ambivalence. Situating O’Keeffe in the long history of twentieth-century feminism, I show how she acquired a modernist-feminist sensibility and vocabulary, engaged ideas about independence, sexuality, and professional achievement in her life choices and art making, and inconsistently related to women as a collectivity. Feminism played a significant role in shaping O’Keeffe, the cultures in which she lived, and the discourses that memorialized her as an American icon. In the twenty-first century, younger generations are remaking feminist philosophies that once again incorporate individual self-expression as a politics.¹³ That O’Keeffe still endures as the fodder for and symbol of a wide range of imaginings says something about her power as an icon and about feminism’s power as a movement for social justice.

Equal under the Sky elucidates the history that shaped O’Keeffe, her commentators, and her audiences. In this study, I differentiate among three twentieth-century feminist historical formations: the origin of modern feminism in the early twentieth century, the absorption and marginalization of feminism from the 1920s through the 1950s, and the public revitalization of feminism in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Delineating the multiple meanings of twentieth-century feminism makes it possible to see continuities as well as discontinuities in the thinking, practices, and political activism of each period.

In the early twentieth century, when O’Keeffe was in her twenties and thirties, some feminists focused on attaining women’s full citizenship rights as individual, achieving human beings. To me feminism means that woman wants to develop her own womanhood, an activist proposed in 1914. It means that she wants to push on to the finest, fullest, freest expression of herself. She wants to be an individual.¹⁴ In the 1970s, when O’Keeffe was in her eighties, a new generation of young women participated in reinvigorating a feminist movement using tactics as brash and irreverent in their time as had suffragists in the 1910s when some activists marched in parades, picketed the White House, were arrested and force-fed, and engaged in theatrical pageantry in bus and train tours across the country. "The only hope of a new feminist movement is some kind of only now barely emerging politics of revolutionary feminism," Robin Morgan declared in the introduction to Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement, published in 1970.¹⁵

That feminism was revolutionary was not a new concept in the 1970s. Feminism means revolution, and I am a revolutionist, Frances Perkins proclaimed in 1914.¹⁶ Yet O’Keeffe’s understanding of feminism differed from that of 1970s feminists because it was shaped by a different notion of what constituted feminist revolution for middle-class and elite white women. For a particular group of 1970s feminists, the politics of revolutionary feminism was premised on the idea that women shared the same gender identity, suffered the same gender oppression, and could work collectively to change their condition. O’Keeffe, however, like those of her generational cohort, believed that to be an individual who transcended gender identity was the ultimate achievement of gender freedom. For Morgan and her contemporaries, the opposite was true: To be an individual disconnected from gender identity meant that women were separate, alone, and unaware of their shared oppression.

Confusion about the history of feminism sustains certain kinds of narratives about O’Keeffe and obscures others. When scholars Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard characterize the 1950s and 1960s as prefeminist in an introduction to the US feminist art movement, for example, they reinforce the notion that feminism was nonexistent before the 1970s. In this case and many others, feminism is presented as having a truncated, enervated history. It began in the 1970s, was incorporated into scholarship in the 1980s, and now exists as a post- phenomenon. This conception of feminism erases from history the early twentieth-century feminist culture that shaped O’Keeffe. Feminism is a movement, a member of the Feminist Alliance declared in 1914, which demands the removal of all social, political, and other discriminations which are based on sex, and the award of all rights and duties in all fields on the basis of individual capacity alone.¹⁷

The opposite tendency in which feminism is regarded as ideologies and practices that exist regardless of time period is equally problematic because it elides historical specificity. In this rendering, feminism is not exclusive to the late twentieth century. On the contrary, it is a label used to refer to advocates of women’s rights and freedoms from the fifteenth century on. Feminism is thus retrospectively applied to earlier eras, before the word was invented and became common currency in the United States. This conception obliterates feminism’s distinctive ties to modernism and dismisses as irrelevant feminism’s emergence during an era of revolutionary political, artistic, and industrial ferment in the first decade of the twentieth century. Lost, then, is awareness that US feminism is a modern formation in which adherents addressed gender issues deeply affected by a modernist sensibility. For O’Keeffe and her contemporaries, modernism and feminism were inseparable. What made O’Keeffe truly modern, Robert Coates asserted in 1929, was her ardent feminism.

Complicating this history is that some women disclaimed the label feminist because they objected to positions taken by those who called themselves feminists or were considered feminists by others. This was true of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the most influential feminist theorist of the early twentieth century, whose essays, stories, and poetry O’Keeffe read in Gilman’s monthly magazine the Forerunner. Gilman disavowed the term feminist because it was associated with her rival, the Swedish feminist theorist Ellen Key, who advocated a brand of feminism that Gilman abhorred. Key’s feminism was rooted in the idea that women’s biological difference from men was a source of strength, whereas Gilman’s feminism stressed that women’s shared humanity with men made them men’s equals. To Gilman, Key was a feminine feminist, while she herself was a humanist feminist. Other women, such as the philanthropist Anne Tracy Morgan, the daughter of financier John Pierpont Morgan, rejected the label for herself and the women’s clubs she led and funded because the term was associated with political radicalism and subversion of capitalism.¹⁸

At the heart of the issue was that the label feminist was controversial and unstable. Public arguments about the meanings of feminist and feminism reveal a competition over interpretation among different political factions. Some men and women on the right worked to discredit feminism because they believed it threatened conventional power relations, whereas some men and women on the left worked to discredit it because they believed it represented bourgeois indulgence. That the words were so controversial evince their power as ideologies. While some women attempted to redefine what feminism meant according to their own principles, others believed they could not control how the term would be interpreted and refused to use it. For prominent women like O’Keeffe to identity as feminist was professionally risky and potentially stereotyping.

These historical realities require considering what women did to advance feminist causes, the values they espoused, and the locations they chose, rather than relying exclusively on how they named themselves, or did not, as in O’Keeffe’s case. Critics and journalists called O’Keeffe a feminist and continue to do so, but there is no evidence thus far that she used the label herself. Does this mean she was not a feminist? I propose asking a different question: Why might she have chosen not to use the label and what does her decision tell us about her choices and concerns? For a celebrated figure like O’Keeffe whose history is shrouded in enigma, complicated by contradictions, and obscured by mythologies, it is especially important to consider multiple indicators. Throughout this book, I have endeavored to make meaning of O’Keeffe’s feminism by analyzing not only what she said but also what she did within particular historical contexts.

Equal under the Sky would not have been possible without the rich body of scholarship inaugurated by Barbara Buhler Lynes’s groundbreaking 1989 reception study of O’Keeffe’s early work, O’Keeffe, Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916–1929. In this book, Lynes