The Rebel: A Visual Representation of First-Wave Feminism in the Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston

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Full illustration copyright citations

Figure 1. Landseer, Sir Edwin. Windsor Castle in Modern Times, 1840–1843. Oil on canvas.

Royal Collection Trust, London. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of Royal Collection Trust. https://www.rct.uk/collection/406903/windsor-castle-in-modern-times-queen-victoria-prince-albert-and-victoria-princess. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 2. Cassatt, Mary. Emmie and Her Child, 1889. Oil on canvas. Wichita Art Museum,

Wichita, Kansas. Artwork in the public domain; image courtesy of the Wichita Museum of Fine Arts. https://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=8492. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 3. Morisot, Berthe. The Cherry Tree, 1891. Oil on canvas. Musée Marmottan Monet,

France. Artwork in the public domain; image available from: the Athenaeum, http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=1772. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 4. Stettheimer, Florine. My Birthday Eyegey, 1929. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Artwork in the public domain; image available from: the Athenaeum, http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/detail.php?ID=74377. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 5. Bonheur, Rosa. Crouching Lion, 1872. Oil on canvas. Orlando Museum of Art:

J. Hyde Crawford and Anthony Tortora, Orlando, Florida. Artwork in the public domain. Photo by Eric Philcox. http://omart.org/artwork/detail/exhibitions/j_hyde_crawford_and_anthony_tortora_collection/1/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 6. Beaux, Cecilia. Sir David Beatty, 1920. Oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art

Museum, Washington, DC. Artwork in public domain; image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Renwick Gallery. https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/admiral-sir-david-beatty-lord-beatty-1633. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 7. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. The Rebel or Self-Portrait (as New Woman) [Frances

Benjamin Johnston, full-length portrait, seated in front of fireplace, facing left, holding cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the other, in her Washington, DC studio], 1896. Photographic print. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fbj/item/98502934/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 8. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. Mammoth Cave, Edmondson Co., Ky: Standing Rocks,

ca. 1890. Digital file from B&W film copy negative. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fbj/item/2005680827/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 9. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. Frances Benjamin Johnston having tea with Elbert

Hubbard (far right) and lecture manager James Burton Pond (center) at her studio in Washington, DC ca. 1900, printed later. Photographic print. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fbj/item/2001697175/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 10. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. Frances Benjamin Johnston, full-length self-portrait

dressed as a man with false moustache, posed with bicycle, facing left, ca. 1890–1900. Photographic print mounted on layered paper board. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fbj/item/2001697163/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 11. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. Frances Benjamin Johnston (right), full-length self-

portrait dressed as a man with false moustache, posed with two unidentified women, one of whom is also dressed as a man, ca. 1890. Photographic print. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC 20540, USA. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/fbj/item/2001697167/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Figure 12. Johnston, Frances Benjamin. Photograph of Edgemont, Keene Vicinity, Albemarle

County, Virginia, 1935. Photograph. Photograph in the public domain; image courtesy of Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017889891/. Accessed 30 May 2019.

Notes

¹ Frances Benjamin Johnston’s 1896 photograph The Rebel has also been referred to by an alternative title, Self-Portrait (as New Woman).

² For more insight into Johnston’s Southern architecture and garden photography, see Sam Watters’s Gardens For a Beautiful America 1895–1935 (2012), as well as Elizabeth M. Gushee, “Travels Through the Old South” (2008).

³ A concept pervading well into the second half of the century, critiques that emerged from the period are full of charges forged against early artists such as Elizabeth Thomson (1846–1933) and Rosa Bohneur (1822–1899) who were scolded by contemporary critics for not “painting like women.”

⁴ Whitney Chadwick notes that the growing commitment to the emancipation of women was propelled by contemporary reformers, such as John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor, Robert Owen, and the Chartists in England as well as the Transcendentalists and American Fourierites in the United States. Likewise, movements such as Abolition, Temperance, and Suffrage profoundly influenced the lives of middle- and upper-class women aspiring to attain professional careers in the arts.

⁵ The era of the New or Modern Woman began to emerge in Western culture by the end of the nineteenth century as notions of female autonomy, equal rights to education, sexual liberation, and economic independence began to circulate, which conflicted intensely with the traditional values of Victorian society. Setting the foundation for twentieth-century feminism, New Women flouted convention and undermined the ideals of Victorian femininity with their most progressive principles advocating radical individualism, female professionalization, education, sexual liberation, political enfranchisement, and increased autonomy and presence in the public sphere. For more information on the New Woman’s Movement see Jean V. Matthews The Rise of the New Woman and Martha H. Patterson, Beyond the Gibson Girl.

⁶ According to US census figures, the number of women who joined the echelon of professional artists rose from ten percent to fifty percent of student enrollment and employment between 1870 and 1890. By 1848, schools of design began to offer women formal instruction and employment in the decorative and industrial arts. By the 1860s, women began to enter traditional art academies and attain professional training in painting and drawing. As of 1890, approximately 11,000 women artists, sculptors, and teachers were practicing their trade on a professional level. Kirsten Swinth, however, hedges that the progressive and encouraging growth in numbers “show neither the specific and cultural battles women fought nor how the growing numbers of women artists changed the structure and dynamics of the profession” (3–5).

⁷ To identify the competing factions of first-wave feminism, the designated terms “sameness” versus “difference” feminism are used informally in this article to underscore the ideological opposition at the foundation of these two dominant branches.

⁸ Johnston wrote articles for a number or papers and magazines in the Washington, DC area, some of which include the Demorest’s, The Ladies Home Journal, and the Illustrated American, as well as non-DC-based papers such as Harper’s Weekly, McClure’s, and the Cosmopolitan.

⁹ Berch also notes that the fact that Frances was given both her mother’s first name and her family name also indicates a commitment to progressive and feminist ideals (12).

¹⁰ Many women artists traveled to Paris in order to attain formal art training as, in the 1880s, there were very few art schools in the United States where a woman could enroll in classes. Barred from the Royal Academy and the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the more modern Julien ateliers were comprised of a homogenous mix of transational students, although women were still expected to pay twice the tuition costs as men.

¹¹ Johnston wrote a proceeding article titled “The Mammoth Cave by Flashlight” (June 1982), in which she discussed the process of how she was able to light an underground cave without causing a disaster. A photographer who had previously tried shooting in the cave has used “four ounces of explosive powder for a single exposure. Johnston finished her whole shoot, about twenty photos, using a total of twelve ounces” (Berch 18).

¹² Berch discusses the pitfalls of a postmodernist approach when analyzing Johnston’s work, which focuses more on the reader/viewer and not on the author/artist of the work (2). For a postmodernist perspective, see Laura Wexler, “Black and White and Color” (1988). More recently, scholars such as Victoria Olsen have noted the significance of Johnston’s oeuvre of self-portraits which range from the smoking and drinking modern woman of 1896 to the more elegant and refined persona of an upper-middle class dignitary. A possible commentary on the polarity of Victorian female identity, Olsen suggests that “while we might assume that women of Johnston’s time were forced to choose one role or the other [the Victorian or the Modern Woman], she made a career out of playing many (much as contemporary, role-playing photographer Cindy Sherman would do a century later)” (10).  However, more than an exploratory play on the gender roles available to women during the era, I believe that Johnston’s complex oeuvre of photographs provides fundamental insight into the artist's own personal brand of feminism which fell between the polarity of sameness and difference ideology.

¹³ Johnston’s portraits were widely exhibited and praised throughout the United States and Europe. In addition to being an active exhibitor, photo-journalist and illustrator, Johnston was also a sought-after photographic juror (in 1899, she was asked to serve on the panel at the second Philadelphia Salon of Photography held at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the first photographic jury to be made entirely of photographers) as well as a lecturer and author of horticulture and architecture.

¹⁴ Riding a high wheel bicycle was viewed as being risqué for women and thus a high wheel tricycle was eventually developed specifically for female use. However, considered a liberating device for women, Susan B. Anthony once explained: “Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel … the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood” (Ojibwa).

¹⁵ Ardently believing that the essentially feminine was both an intrinsic part of female experience and artistic expression, in a letter to Bertha Palmer dated in October of 1892, Cassatt commented on the ideology of “difference” feminism that resonated within her work: “I have tried to express the modern woman in the fashions of our day … the sweetness of childhood, the charm of womanhood, if I have not conveyed some sense of that charm, in one word if I have not been absolutely feminine, then I have failed” (qtd. in Barter et al. 96).

¹⁶ While photographing institutes for racial minorities in order to bring attention to the need for liberal education and social reform, unlike her contemporary Jacob Riis, Johnston was commissioned either privately or through the government for her projects and was financially compensated for them.

¹⁷ While many men working during the period made a career out of and became renowned for their portraiture (such as John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, etc.), the direct translation of reality and the lack of artistic genius associated with it was deemed a more suitable subject-matter for women artists. “Let men conceive of great architectural projects, monumental sculpture, and the most elevated form of painting, as well as those forms of graphic arts which demand a lofty and ideal conception of art. … Let women occupy themselves with those types of art which they have always preferred, such as pastels, portraits, and miniatures” (L. Legrange qtd. in Nochlin 109).