“Eighteenth-century European, metropolitan society developed an elaborate ideal of femininity, constituted by notions of private, domestic virtues, and culturally regulated through literature, conduct books and other media. Within the discourses governing female behaviour, dominant gaze polities were more rigorously defined along gendered lines. The ideal woman could not direct a prolonged, searching look at a man without impropriety. That is, women who did not conform to such cultural limits were excluded from polite society, and considered either uncultured, unnaturally powerful or immoral.”
In this time period women’s “real” work was serving their families. They had to bother about cooking, housekeeping and taking care of their children. It was not an accepted behaviour for women to work besides their family. Especially art world was one field where women could hardly enter and succeed at that time. In the middle of the century, there were only third as many women artists as men, and only seven percent of this meagre amount had received any official commission and any Salon medal, and none of them had ever received the Legion of Honor. Women were expected to drop their career and give up their serious commitment to art, at the behest of love and marriage. (Even today there is the pressure of the society that women always have to choose between success which often goes with solitude and companionship at the price of dropping their career.)
There is a mid-nineteenth