Junctures in Women's Leadership: The Arts

Junctures in Women’s Leadership

The Arts

Case Studies in Women’s Leadership

Mary K. Trigg, Series Editor

The books in this series explore decisions women leaders make in a variety of fields. Using the case study method, the editors and authors of each volume focus on strategies employed by the women profiled as they face important leadership challenges in business, various social movements, the arts, the health industry, and other sectors. The goal of the series is to broaden our conceptions of what constitutes successful leadership in these changing times.

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements, edited by Mary K. Trigg and Alison R. Bernstein

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business, edited by Lisa Hetfield and Dana M. Britton

Junctures in Women’s Leadership: The Arts, by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin

Junctures in Women’s Leadership

The Arts

Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Brodsky, Judith K., author. | Olin, Ferris, author.

Title: Junctures in women’s leadership : the arts / Judith K. Brodsky, Ferris Olin.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2018. | Series: Junctures: case studies in women’s leadership | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058965 | ISBN 9780813588278 (hardback) | ISBN 9780813576251 (paperback) | ISBN 9780813576268 (epub) | ISBN 9780813576275 (web pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership in women. | Women executives in the arts. | Women in art. | BISAC: ART / History / Contemporary (1945–). | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Women’s Studies. | BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Leadership. | Non-Profit Organizations | PERFORMING ARTS / Business Aspects. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory. | ART / Individual Artists, arts professionals, women entrepreneurs in the arts / Essays.

Classification: LCC HQ1236.B746 2018 | DDC 704.9/424—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058965

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2018 by Judith K. Brodsky and Ferris Olin

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Contents

Foreword to the Series

New Foreword to the Series

Preface

Bertha Honoré Palmer

A New Woman?

Louise Rosenfield Noun

Feminist, Scholar, Art Collector, Curator, Social Activist, Philanthropist

Samella Sanders Lewis

Making Visible the Cultural Legacy of the African Diaspora

Julia Miles

Women’s Project Theater: Forty Years of Making the Case for Inclusivity in the Professional Theater World

Míriam Colón

Opening the Theater World for Diverse Audiences

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

A Tireless Political Activist

Bernice Steinbaum

Advancing Women Artists toward Parity in the Marketplace

Anne d’Harnoncourt

Showing That Women Can Run Major Cultural Institutions Successfully

Martha Wilson

Courageous Leadership in Innovation and Activism

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar

Urban Bush Women: The Power of Dance to Promote Cultural Inclusivity and Community Engagement

Kim Berman

Art as a Tool for Social Transformation

Gilane Tawadros

Breaking the Hegemony of Western Culture

Veomanee Douangdala and Joanne Smith

Ock Pop Tok: Social Entrepreneurship in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Authors

Foreword to the Series

Junctures: Case Studies in Women’s Leadership Series

Throughout history, women have always been leaders in their societies and communities. Whether the leadership role was up-front such as hereditary queens and clan mothers, as elected officials, or as business executives and founders of organizations, women have participated at the highest levels of decision-making. Yet, up through most of the twentieth century, we seldom associated the word leader with women. I might even argue that the noun leader is one of the most masculinized words in the English language. When we thought of leaders, our minds seldom conjured up a woman.

Fortunately, there has been a recent shift in our thinking, our images, and our imaginations. In the United States, credit may go to those women in the public eye like Gloria Steinem, Oprah Winfrey, Cecile Richards, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, who have blazed new trails in politics, media, and statecraft. Now leadership is beginning to look more gender neutral. That said, it is important to remember that, in many parts of the world, women leaders, including prominent feminists, have risen to power more rapidly than seems to be the case here. I think of Gro Bundtland in Norway, Helen Clarke in New Zealand, Michelle Bachelet in Chile, and others. These leaders certainly raise new and interesting questions about linking feminism with powerful political leadership. We in the United States also have Sheryl Sandberg to thank for using the word feminist in the same sentence as leadership.

Despite progress in the past few decades, women have not reached any kind of rough parity with men in terms of positional leadership—that is, the form of leadership that is appointed or elected and recognized as powerful and influential in coeducational public life. Women continue to be dramatically underrepresented in all major domains of leadership from politics to Fortune 500 companies, to labor unions, to academic administration, and even in fields where they are the majority, like in health care professions, teaching, or the arts. Scholars like Deborah Rhode and Nannerl O. Keohane note that at the rate the United States is going, there will not be a convergence toward parity for an additional three centuries. Given the need for outstanding leadership at all levels and sectors of society, and given the huge waste of talent that exists when so many capable women are not encouraged to move into senior leadership positions, we cannot afford to wait for parity even three decades, let alone three centuries!

If we wish to accelerate the process of gender parity in producing leaders in the twenty-first century, what steps might we take, and what role can academia play in helping to increase the pool and percentage of women leaders? Historically, women’s colleges, according to pioneering research by Elizabeth Tidball and others, graduated disproportionate numbers of women leaders up through the 1970s. More recently, business schools, which were largely male bastions, have educated a share of women leaders.

Today, in interdisciplinary fields such as women’s and gender studies, examining the concept of leadership and teaching women students to be more effective leaders in a given profession or context is highly contested. For example, Ms. magazine noted in 2011, Only a handful of the more than 650 women’s studies programs at colleges and universities provide practical and theoretical knowledge necessary for the next generation to make a significant impact on their communities and world as leaders. Many feminists and women scholars have negative associations with traditional ideas of leadership, arguing that the concept is elitist, individualistic, and hierarchical and justifies putting work ahead of family and parenting. Moreover, traditional leadership studies often have failed to take account of structural and contextual frameworks of unequal power and privilege, especially around gender and race. And yet approaching the study of leadership with a gender-sensitive lens is crucial if we are to make more progress toward a fairer and more just distribution of power and opportunity for women and men alike.

Which brings us to the genesis of this series, Junctures: Case Studies in Women’s Leadership. The volumes in the series are designed to provide insights into the decision-making process undertaken by women leaders, both well-known and deserving to be better known. The case studies run the gamut from current affairs to past history. The Rutgers Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) consortium, a group of nine separate units at the university, including Douglass Residential College, the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, and the Center for American Women in Politics, is sponsoring this series as a way to provide new pedagogical tools for understanding leadership that has been exercised by women. Each volume will consist of a dozen or so case studies of leaders in a specific field of endeavor. The focus is not on the woman leader per se but rather on the context that surrounded her decision, the factors she considered in making the decision, and the aftermath of the decision. Also, even though the series is focused on decision-making by women leaders, it is not designed to demonstrate that all decisions were good ones or yielded the results expected.

The series does not promote the notion that there are biologically determined differences between women’s and men’s decision-making practices. There is no such thing as a women’s approach to leadership. Nothing universally characterizes women’s approaches to leadership as opposed to men’s. Neither gender is genetically wired to be one kind of leader as opposed to another. That kind of biologically determined, reductionist thinking has no place in this series. Nor does the series suggest that women make decisions according to a single set of women’s values or issues, though there is some evidence to suggest that once women reach a critical mass of decision makers, they tend to elevate issues of family and human welfare more than men do. This evidence, collected by the Rutgers University’s Center for American Women in Politics, also suggests that women are more likely to seek compromise across rigid ideologies than are men in the same position.

Our series of case studies on women in leadership is not designed to prove that simply electing or appointing women to leadership positions will miraculously improve the standard-of-living outcomes for all people. Few of us believe that. On the other hand, it is important to examine some questions that are fundamental to understanding the values and practices of women leaders who, against the odds, have risen to shape the worlds in which we all live. The series employs the case study method because it provides a concrete, real-life example of a woman leader in action. We hope the case studies will prompt many questions, not the least of which is, What fresh perspectives and expanded insights do women bring to leadership decisions? And, more theoretical and controversial, is there a feminist model of leadership?

In conclusion, the IWL is delighted to bring these studies to the attention of faculty, students, and leaders across a wide range of disciplines and professional fields. We believe it will contribute to accelerating the progress of women toward a more genuinely gender-equal power structure in which both men and women share the responsibility for forging a better and more just world for generations to come.

Alison R. Bernstein

Director, Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) Consortium

Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies

Rutgers University / New Brunswick

April 2015

New Foreword to the Series

Junctures: Case Studies in Women’s Leadership

The last time I saw Alison Bernstein was at a book launch party for the first two volumes in the Junctures: Case Studies in Women’s Leadership series, in the late spring of 2016. Sadly, on June 30 of that year, Alison—director of the Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL), professor of history and women’s and gender studies at Rutgers, and original editor of the Junctures series, which is sponsored by the IWL—died. The first volume, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements, which she and I coedited, was published one month before Alison’s death. (The second volume, which focuses on women’s leadership in business, was published simultaneously.) The day before she died, I was visiting the progressive, independent City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and saw our newly published Junctures volume on the shelf. I texted Alison a photograph of the book because I knew it would please her. Her former colleagues at the Ford Foundation—where she served first as a program officer, later as director of the Education and Culture program, and then as vice president for Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom and its successor program Education, Creativity, and Free Expression—described Alison as a powerful voice for justice and a ferocious defender of and advocate for the rights of women and girls.¹ In its illumination of women leading change across a range of contexts, including social movements, business, the arts, higher education, public health, science, politics, and media, the Junctures series carries these feminist and egalitarian impulses forward. It carries them forward as well in its advocacy of gender parity and its message that for women to take their full place as leaders, our expectations and stereotypes about leadership must change.

The Junctures series seeks to redress the underrepresentation of women in leadership positions and suggest a different kind of future. Although quick to denounce a women’s approach to leadership, Alison did note that research indicates that once women reach a critical mass of decision makers, they tend to elevate issues of family and human welfare more than men do. In addition, the Junctures series suggests that when women wield power and hold decision-making positions, they transform organizations, ideas, industries, institutions, culture, and leadership itself.² Women’s lived experiences are distinct from men’s, and their lives collide with history in unique ways. Moreover, the diversity of experience among women further enriches their perspectives. This influences how they lead: for example, women broaden art and museum collections to include more work by women and by artists from diverse backgrounds. This is not insignificant. The arts volume makes a persuasive case for the necessity of women artists and arts professionals in leadership positions to advance gender parity in the arts. Women leaders make a difference, its authors conclude.³ Similarly, the editors of the business volume determine that from their [women leading change in business] experiences come unique business ideas and the passion to address women’s needs and interests.⁴ Each volume, in its way, illustrates this.

The Junctures series aims to capture women’s leadership in action and at pivotal junctures or moments of decision-making. Its goal is to broaden our conceptions of what constitutes successful leadership in these changing times. Our approach is intersectional: we consider gender, race, class, ethnicity, and physical and social location and how they influence access to, and the practice of, leadership. We wander through time and historical contexts and consider multiple ways of leading. Authors and editors of each volume conducted multiple interviews with living subjects, which makes this compendium a contribution to academic scholarship on women’s leadership. Collectively, the volumes contemplate the ways that gender conventions have influenced how some women have practiced leadership, the pain and impetus of gender and/or racial discrimination and exclusion, and the challenges some women leaders have faced as mothers and primary caretakers of home and children.

We use the format of the case study broadly. Each essay or case study is organized into a Background section, which describes the protagonist’s rise to leadership and lays out a decision-making juncture or problem, and a Resolution section, which traces the ways the leader resolved the problem or juncture, as well as her legacy. Each volume considers what prepared these particular women for leadership, highlights personal strategies and qualities, and investigates the ways that family, education, mentors, personal injustice, interaction with social movements, and pivotal moments in history shaped these protagonists’ approaches and contributions as leaders in varied contexts. We have sought to cast a wide net and gather examples from the United States as well as around the world (the first three volumes include case studies from Kenya, Nicaragua, South Africa [2], the United Kingdom, and Laos). Necessarily volume authors have had to make difficult decisions about whom to include and exclude. Our goal is to offer a rich abundance of diverse examples of women’s leadership and the difference it makes rather than a comprehensive theory about women’s leadership or even what feminist leadership might entail. We seek to prompt questions as well as provide answers.

Alison and I stated in the preface to the social movements volume that some of the qualities that fuel leadership include courage, creativity, passion and perseverance.⁵ Alison Bernstein exemplified all of these qualities. She was wild, clear, and shameless, Ken Wilson, Alison’s former colleague at the Ford Foundation, wrote of her.⁶ The same could be said of many of the audacious and brave changemakers in this series. The Institute for Women’s Leadership sends their stories out into the world to document and preserve them and to educate and inspire faculty, students, and leaders across a range of fields and disciplines. We hope these volumes will inform those who aspire to leadership and apprise those who practice it. Leadership has the potential to forge gender and racial equity, to bring about innovative solutions, and to advance social justice.

Mary K. Trigg

Faculty Director of Leadership Programs and Research, Institute for Women’s Leadership (IWL) Consortium

Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Women’s and Gender Studies

Rutgers University / New Brunswick

October 2017

Notes

1. Ford Foundation, Remembering Alison Bernstein, https://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/remembering-alison-bernstein/. The quotes are from Margaret Hempel.

2. Lisa Hetfield and Dana M. Britton, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Business (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016), xi.

3. See preface.

4. Hetfield and Britton, Junctures: Business, xiii.

5. Mary K. Trigg and Alison R. Bernstein, Junctures in Women’s Leadership: Social Movements (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2016), xii. This insight is drawn from Linda Gordon, Social Movements, Leadership, and Democracy: Toward More Utopian Mistakes, Journal of Women’s History 14, no. 2 (2002): 104.

6. Ford Foundation, Remembering Alison Bernstein.

Preface

These case studies show how belief in the importance of the arts and a commitment to feminist principles of social justice (even if some of the women in our case studies may not have called themselves feminists) led women leaders to transform global culture by dedicating their lives and careers to abolishing the misconception that white men are the only worthy cultural creators and providing access to the arts for diverse audiences. Other women may have been leaders in various arts disciplines, but we believe the most significant ones were inspired simultaneously by their deep love for the art disciplines in which they were active participants and by their commitment to engaging in the quest for inclusivity of race, gender, and class among the creators in their fields and their audiences. They proved that women leaders make a difference.

We have presented the case studies in chronological order by birthdate to show how women leaders persevered and how their concerns shifted to reflect the global social, political, and economic changes taking place during the 125 years covered by these case studies, ranging from Bertha Honoré Palmer, who was born in 1849 and whose leadership activities occurred starting in the 1890s, to Veomanee Douangdala and Joanne Smith, both born in 1976, who became cultural entrepreneurs in the early years of the twenty-first century. Their interests and careers reflect the movements that arose during this period to protest discrimination and achieve social justice for all, particularly the American and European first and second waves of feminism in the last half of the nineteenth century and in the 1960s, respectively.

These movements go back to the late eighteenth century. The most well-known early tract on feminism was The Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the first wave of feminism arose in the United States and England focusing on voting rights; as a result, (white) women were enfranchised when a constitutional amendment was passed in 1920. The second wave of feminism, also predominantly white, arose in the early 1960s with the publication of books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and the establishment of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and other associations.

The 1970s spawned movements like the feminist art movement which began simultaneously in several locations—the East and West Coasts of the United States and Europe. Feminist artists at that time burst onto the art scene with work that contained blatantly political messages and also broke through the Modernist aesthetic with revolutionary stylistic innovations such as the inclusion of the decorative arts associated with women and women’s life experiences. On the art history front, Linda Nochlin published the essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? in 1971, pointing out that the great artists of the past were all men, since women were not considered capable of making important art. Therefore, Nochlin concluded, instead of being an objective discipline, art history was gendered and biased.¹ On the creative front, also in 1971, Miriam Schapiro and Judy Chicago formulated the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts to develop an aesthetic based on women’s experience. In London, Mary Kelly included her baby’s diapers in her 1976 radical exhibition Post-partum at London’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Artists in New York mounted large-scale street protests against museums that mounted exhibitions without women artists. Women artists themselves mounted citywide art festivals such as Philadelphia Focuses on Women in the Visual Arts. Exhibitions devoted to resuscitating the history of women artists, starting with Women Artists, 1550–1950 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), curated by Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, took place. Women artists founded cooperative galleries across the country, and through their research, activist organizations like the Women’s Caucus for Art, which consisted of women artists, art historians, and curators who belonged to the College Art Association, cited discrimination in the employment of women in art and art history departments and museums.

Our assignment in this book was to cover women leaders in both the visual and performing arts. We have included leaders and founders of institutions, women challenging sexist and racist stereotypes through their arts practices, and diversity in geography, ethnicity, class, age, and historical context. These women leaders include eight who are Caucasian, two who are African American, and one each who are Asian, Latina, and Native American. Class diversity ranges from Bertha Honoré Palmer, who used her upper-class, wealthy social status to persuade the federal government to recognize the contributions of women for the first time, to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who grew up in foster homes on the impoverished Salish-Kootenai Indian Reservation.

This volume may seem heavier in case studies of leaders in the visual arts, but it was important to include institutions like museums, which are the sites where the arts and the public often intersect. As will be evident in reading these case studies, the upheaval took place in the performing as well as the visual arts. Furthermore, women emerged as leaders in the arts in other countries as well as the United States; therefore we have included women leaders from the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Laos as examples.

There are many more women we would have liked to include, such as Nancy Hanks, the founding director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Zelda Fichandler, cofounder of the Arena Stage in Washington, DC, the first racially integrated public theater company; Mary Schmidt Campbell, the founding director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch; Lourdes Lopez, the director of the Miami City Ballet, the first Latina woman to head a major classical ballet company; the Guerrilla Girls, whose research and posters make public the discrimination against women artists; and Marin Alsop, the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first woman to head a major American orchestra and also the first openly lesbian woman in such an important musical leadership position.

The documentation of these women is important in itself. Our own experience in conducting the research for this book and struggling to find the information confirmed the studies showing that women’s accomplishments and strategies too often go unrecorded or are denigrated. Thus we are glad to help in preserving their history.

Our initial case studies detail two women caught between the traditional construct of women as wives and mothers and the new woman who could operate in the male sphere of business and government. Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849–1918), a Chicago socialite, at first a signifier of her husband’s success, bedecked in the latest fashions and fabulous jewels, transformed herself into a strong leader who persuaded the United States Congress to fund a building dedicated to women’s accomplishments in the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and later became the developer of the city of Sarasota, Florida. Yet she refused to identify as a new woman.

Louise Noun (1908–2002) was born half a century later than Bertha Palmer, but like Palmer, she was born into a white upper class social milieu with a traditional construction of women’s roles. Even in Palmer’s time, however, wealthy women were permitted to move into the world through philanthropy, and Noun became a philanthropic leader in the city of Des Moines, Iowa. However, unlike Palmer, Noun came into adulthood after women had received the vote (the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920) and was a founding member of the Iowa chapter of NOW. At sixty-three, she gave up her volunteer activities and devoted the rest of her life to building the first art collection in the United States of women artists. Eventually, she donated her collection to several museums, thus providing the initial opportunity for the American public to see that women could be artists.

Samella Lewis, Míriam Colón, and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith worked to bring people of color into the cultural mainstream by founding new institutions and engaging in educational activities. Lewis founded the African American Museum in Los Angeles and an art history journal, the International Review of African American Art, to document the art of the African diaspora. Colón, one of the few Latina actresses to succeed in the theater and film world, founded the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater to bring live performances into the New York City barrios, whose residents could not afford to buy tickets to Broadway plays. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith organized collaboratives and exhibitions with other Native American artists and lectured ceaselessly to promote recognition of Native American art and culture in the mainstream.

Julia Miles left a prestigious position as a producer and director to found Women’s Project Theater, an organization to help achieve gender parity in the theater. Bernice Steinbaum, Anne d’Harnoncourt, and Martha Wilson used their leadership to transform existing institutions—Steinbaum to transform the art market for the benefit of women and artists of color, d’Harnoncourt to open the museum to more diverse populations, and Wilson to overcome government censorship and create and preserve new art forms.

The youngest women who are our subjects reflect the globalism of the last few decades, the dissolution of both physical and cultural borders, and acceptance of other civilizations as being of equal value to white European culture: Jawole Willa Jo Zollar created a dance company based on the mix of African dance with the everyday experience of African Americans; Kim Berman, striving for the parity and sustainability of blacks in South Africa, founded Artist Proof Studio (APS) to serve black artists; and Gilane Tawadros, who emigrated with her family from Egypt to England, was the founding director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA), an innovative institution with a mission to overthrow the hegemony of white, European art by focusing globally. Under Tawadros’s leadership, InIVA became a major force in eliminating racism in the international art world. Veomanee Douangdala and Joanne Smith linked the women textile artists of Laos with world markets for economic viability to preserve the Laotian weaving tradition.

The stories of these women leaders show how the arts inspire and how crucial they are to social change. When President Obama presented the National Arts Medal to Míriam Colón, he noted that the honorees all had an urgent inner force, some need to express the truth that they experience, which help us understand ourselves in ways that we might not otherwise recognize. That statement describes the motivation of our subjects.² As Samella Lewis pointed out, art keeps people from killing each other.³ These case studies show very clearly that the arts communicate social justice. The arts also offer us the experience of beauty. As Lewis says, art collecting is her nourishment.⁴ In describing Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d’Harnoncourt, her colleague William Viola commented, She was absolutely and completely convinced of the power of art to change lives. This was the passionate belief that motivated her at all times.⁵

There is a commitment among many in this volume to make art accessible to diverse populations, not just the elite, as Míriam Colón did in creating the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, and to use art to communicate about one’s own culture or identity. Smith encapsulates this point: I am an American Indian and this gives me a particular kind of perspective. I am an advocate of our issues, but I am also a woman. I feel solidarity with African American, Asian, and Latino artists.⁶

We are also struck by how much the lives and careers of the women in our case studies reflect our own lives and careers, starting with common characteristics in our backgrounds. All had childhood experiences in which parents or other close family or friends believed in causes beyond themselves, treasured creativity, pushed independent thinking and action, and were aware of sexism and racism. Although they had lived in apartheid South Africa for generations, Kim Berman’s family opposed the apartheid system. Louise Noun’s mother, an inveterate volunteer for civic good, promoted the settlement house and suffrage movements. Her grandmother had funded a program to educate colored children (as African Americans were referred to in polite white company at that time) in the segregated South. Jawole Willa Jo Zollar’s father, who was in the real estate business, tried to integrate black families into white neighborhoods. Author Judith Brodsky’s father, as one of the first Jewish scholars to receive tenure in the Ivy League, brought her up to believe in opportunity for all. Ferris Olin’s independent thinking and curiosity were accepted and fostered by her parents, who never tired of her inquisitiveness.

A second shared characteristic was devotion to culture on the part of the families of the women in our case studies. Since Anne d’Harnoncourt’s father was