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Norman Rockwell, though recognizable to many Americans, has often been ignored by the ‘fine arts’ world. His work has been dismissed as kitsch by many, and it can certainly be seen as overtly and sometimes painfully patriotic at times. Its iconography and messages are often obvious and there is a mass appeal to them that leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many snobs. If there were a conservative mouthpiece in the American art world in the 20th century, many would have likely assumed it to be Rockwell, who presented what we now see as traditional family settings from a ‘simpler’ time. When examining Rockwell’s treatment and portrayal of women, though, it seems that there is more at work than an overly patriotic painter of kitsch family settings. Rockwell often painted images with young women who transcended gender stereotypes and were often happy doing so, while other works illustrated the sombre internalization of such gender roles in both boys and girls. Aside from simply challenging and lampooning gender roles, Rockwell also painted pictures of strong women, often in the workplace, pulling them out of the domestic sphere and showing the importance of the contributions they made. In examining Rockwell’s oeuvre, it becomes clear that his work, though it used a democratic iconography that was easily accessible to the masses, did more than kowtow patriarchal traditions: Rockwell made an effort to present women in diverse empowering roles that transcended patriarchal gender prescriptions and gave them a voice.

Rockwell was not shy about presenting ‘tomboys’ in his paintings, and in doing so frequently presented images of young girls that challenged patriarchal stereotypes. Few do this as overly as his painting Girl With Black Eye. In the painting is a young girl in a kilt with a white dress shirt. She is the antithesis of ‘prim and proper’ or ‘ladylike’. Her sleeves have been rolled up, her shirt is untucked, and she has no interest in maintaining a prescribed appearance. She has a black eye, and a bandage on her knee (likely form prior experience suggesting a pattern of behaviour). Most interestingly, she is also wearing a smile. This smile is in sharp contrast to Girl At Mirror, which features a young girl embracing the ‘ladylike’ image and looks quite sombre in the process. This girl, with the black eye, who has defined her own style, is quite happy. The bruise shows also that she is a girl of action, not of words, placing her in sharp contrast with the patriarchal stereotype of ‘talkative femininity’ and putting her squarely in the masculine realm where action is prized. Behind her is the principal, sitting at his desk. The smile on the girl’s face suggests that his authority and threat of punishment does not influence her in the least and even in the face of penalty, she remain defiant and happy.

Girl Returning Home From Camp, and Girl With White Dress serve to reinforce the notion that not all girls are innately feminine. Like Girl With Black Eye, Girl Returning From Camp has a bandage on her knee. On her lap is a jar which appears to have an insect collection inside, and at her feet is a turtle and a knapsack. Her hat and boyish appearance all seem to suggest that this girl does not embrace conventional notion of femininity. Indeed, it if weren’t for the title, it would not be clear that this is a girl at all. Girl With White Dress serves as an interesting juxtaposition that demonstrate how fluid gender roles can be. In it, a young woman stands in a pair of jeans and a plaid, flannel shirt. She is holding a white dress in front of her as she stands before a mirror. If one were to look strictly at the image in the mirror, there would be no hint of the tomboy. But looking from behind her, it is clear that she is more comfortable in ‘masculine’ attire. The juxtaposition, though, demonstrates that she can shift from one gender to the other quite easily. While some may view the girls in Girl With Black Eye and Girl Returning Home From Camp as anomalous girls whose for some reason are more masculine than feminine, Girl With White Dress demonstrates how a girl who looks quite stunning with a ‘feminine’ wardrobe can be just as comfortable in jeans and a shirt, suggesting that the transition from one gender role to the other is not so drastic.

In terms of presenting the pains of internalizing patriarchal gender roles, there is perhaps no painting by Rockwell that expresses this more succinctly than Girl At Mirror. Feminist criticism often speaks to how patriarchal societies teach women to be willfully submissive by forcing gender roles onto them through hegemonic institutions. One of these institutions is the media. For decades, magazines have served to present women with unobtainable representations of beauty, frequently causing women, and more frighteningly young girls, to develop negative self-body images. This seems like a topical conversation today with conversations about terms like ‘plus-size’ models, but Rockwell had picked up on this in the early 1950’s. Girl At Mirror captures the pain cause by these unrealistic prescriptions of beauty. In the painting, a young girl sits on a stool before a mirror. On her lap is a magazine turned to a page with a beautiful woman. The young girl is trying to imitate the pose as she looks into the mirror. Near her feet is a comb and what looks like a lipstick case, and some other make-up accessories. It is hard to tell the age of the girl. She is perhaps seven, or maybe as old as twelve. She is however looking at a magazine with a woman’s image. The standard is impossible for her to achieve at this age, but she is trying, and in the process, unwittingly sexualizing herself with the make-up. The fact that she is unable to achieve this is no doubt the cause of the somber look on her face, showing the viewer that she has internalized this pain. It is doubly important that in this scene the girl is alone. This is not the typical Rockwell painting. There are no groups of girls in a dressing room helping each other put on lipstick and eyeliner. There is only one solitary girl, and she is alone. The sombre solitude illuminates the struggle that many young girls go to whilst trying to conform with patriarchal gender prescriptions.

There are two sides to this, and Rockwell presents the other in his painting The Bodybuilder. When speaking about patriarchal gender prescriptions, it is important to note than young boys can be equally victimized by the expectation put out in the media In The Bodybuilder, Rockwell shows a boy, perhaps fourteen, but not much older, standing before a poster of a muscular man. In each hand is a small dumbbell the boy is trying to lift as he gazes up the poster of a generic weightlifter. Below the image is a caption that reads “BE A MAN”. The boy is scrawny at best, he wears glasses (often associated with intellect), and on the chair behind him are several books. The boy’s innate interest obviously rest with academics if the iconography Rockwell has included is to be trusted. Instead of studying, though, he is trying to obtain an unrealistic goal. The caption ‘BE A MAN’, misleads the young man and encourages him to define masculinity through brute strength. Like the young girl, this boy is trying to fulfill patriarchal gender expectations and abandons his own identity in the process. With young boy and girls both exposed to idealized images of beauty in magazines, they not only develop unrealistic expectations for themselves, but for each other as well. This will not only destroy their confidence, but taint their relationships as their romantic expectations will be as poisoned as their own self-body image.

Gender prescriptions often go beyond attire and appearance, and attempt to dictate behaviour and ability. Women, for instance, are considered nurturing and innately maternal. Rockwell’s painting Babysitter, though, suggests otherwise. In the painting there is a young girl with a screaming baby on her lap. Given the title, the viewer can assume that she is a babysitter. The infant on her lap seems quite out of control and is pulling on the babysitter’s hair. The room is in disarray. There is a magazine and a clock on the floor, along with some toys, and a blanket is draped over the arm of a chair. In the babysitter’s hand is a book titled Baby Sitting. The fact that the girl is so ill-equipped for the task and is so obviously failing at it, suggests that the idea the women are innately good with children is nothing more than a myth. This is reinforced by the fact that, rather than innately knowing how to take care of a child, the babysitter needs to learn how to babysit by reading a book on the subject. The stereotype that women enjoy such work and have a natural predisposition to it is further debunked by the fact that the babysitter looks miserable whilst performing her duties. Clearly not all women are naturally inclined to take care of babies, and likewise do not all enjoy infants. Rockwell’s Babysitter tears such stereotypes apart with crisp and concise accuracy.

There are jobs which women can do well, and many of them fall outside of the roles traditionally held by women. In his paintings Rosie the Riveter and Liberty Girl, Rockwell paints two strong female figures and throws the weight of the nation on their backs during war time. Rosie the Riveter was Rockwell’s re-imagining of the iconic promotional poster featuring a woman in overalls. Rockwell’s image, though, is more forceful than the original. Rosie has a mammoth riveter on her lap, a piece of equipment that is clearly heavy, and one which she clearly handles with ease, so much so that she can eat a sandwich at the same time (if she’s going to be making anybody a sandwich, it will be herself). The American flag is overtly flapping in the background, making an clear link to the war effort and thereby linking women like Rosie to the success of America in the war effort. In hindsight, this backdrop looks too patriotic (because ‘Merica), but when one remembers that this was during WWII and America was in the process of kicking Nazi ass, such overt patriotism is almost forgivable. Liberty Girl is equally patriotic, and painted in the same context, and like Rosie, she proves to be able to bear the burden of the war effort. She is carrying a water canister, a hoe and a rake (each likely used for a ‘Victory Garden’, which were implemented to ease the burden or rationing), and also carries a wrench in one hand. This suggests that she is handling repairs of some sort as well, traditionally a ‘masculine’ occupation. These to images, in concert, certainly demonstrate the integral role women played during wartime, and illustrates that they were more than capable of not only stepping outside of traditionally feminine occupations, but excelling at the masculine occupations they adopted out of necessity during WWII.

Given that women had proven so essential to the war effort, it seemed that there was little doubt that they were deserving of vote they had finally received in 1919 with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. In his painting Election Day, Rockwell suggested that women were not only going to use their voice, but they had their own voice to express. The painting depicts a married couple sitting across from each other at the breakfast table. The husband is leaning across the table, yelling at his wife, and vigorously pointing toward his preferred candidate. The wife sits stoically across from her husband, her arms defiantly crossed, her face poise, her lips pursed and silent. One of the arguments against women’s suffrage was that because men were supposed to be the ‘head of the household’, married men would dictate to their wives how they would vote and that such men would get two votes, while single men would only get one. Rockwell tears that argument to shreds with this painting, ripping down the stereotype of subservient housewife who has her opinions dictated to her by her husband. She clearly has her own mind. What is even more interesting about the painting is the interactions. Irrationality and hysterical behaviour were often attributed to the feminine realm under patriarchal gender roles, but in this instance it is quite clear that it is the husband who is behaving irrationally and indulging in hysteria (oh where has his uterus wandered to?). The woman, on the other hand, is firm, confident, and stoic in her stand: all qualities attributed to the masculine realm. Rockwell not only demonstrates that women are capable of developing and representing their own opinions, but also demonstrates that when engaging in political debates at the breakfast table, they are more capable of acting rationally than their male counter parts in some instances.

Though Rockwell’s work may seem antiquated, excessively patriotic and conservatively traditional, such a viewing of his work is perhaps an unfairly cruel judgement rooted an anachronistic thinking that project contemporary perspectives onto works with a drastically different social context. When examined in the context of the era in which he worked, Rockwell’s work was not as conservative as it now looks. In terms of form, Rockwell was less progressive than some modernist and post-modernist painters at the time (though works like The Critic and The Connoisseur demonstrate an understanding of such trends in art), but the content of his work was extremely progressive. While others challenged tradition through form and method, Rockwell challenged conventional thought through conventional content. As was clear by his later works that participated in conversations on civil rights (The Problem We All Live With, Negro In the Suburbs, and Southern Justice), Rockwell was greatly concerned with social issues and was a progressive thinker. While other artists focused on the polemics of esoteric academic conversations, Rockwell chose to use his skills to speak to the masses on social issues through the use of a democratic iconography that gave many people access to his work and ideas. It is through this approach that Rockwell challenged, lampooned, satirized, dunked, critiqued and helped to tear down patriarchal gender roles. Though women certainly do not need a man to speak on their behalf, it is important that masculine voices include feminist conversations in their work. Rockwell had a large audience, perhaps larger than any other painter of his generation, and he used that to help transcend patriarchal gender roles and portray a diverse number of women in a multiplicity of roles. Paintings like Teacher’s Birthday, Sales Girl: X-man Eve, and Rosie the Riveter, collectively offer a varied representation of women. They take the women out of the domestic sphere, and place them in the public sphere. Even women Rockwell portrays in the domestic sphere are active, either debating politics as the wife in Election Day, or make a choice in terms of gender roles, as the girl in Girl With White Dress does. Though they may have been problematic in some instances, Rockwell’s efforts were clearly working toward what might fairly be called a feminist agenda, and if not that, they were at the very least a step in the right direction.

If you enjoy the work of Norman Rockwell, be sure to check out this critical analysis as well, and if you enjoyed this post, be sure to get an update on future posts by following me on Twitter @LiteraryRambler.