Judith Slaying Holofernes, a painting by Artemisia Gentileschi circa 1612.

TRIGGER WARNING: This piece discusses rape, racism, and abuse. Read at your own discretion.

Creativity is its own kind of magic. Creative minds can elevate humanity to heights it never knew were possible. It lifts us up past our narrow definitions of what can and can’t be done. When creativity is used to create art and inspire beauty, we as a species become better for it.

But what if humanity’s inherent creativity was stifled? What if all of that beauty, all the incredible innovation we’re capable of, was locked away and kept from us?

Unfortunately, this has been the case more often than not. All of us have the potential to be creative, but for most of our collective history it is only the privileged few who were given the right to exercise that creativity in any meaningful way.

One of the greatest tragedies of our time is all of the lost work that could have added to our lives - if only its creators had been given the opportunity to do what they were born to do.

Women, more than any other demographic, have been the most deeply deprived in the world of creative expression.

It is a testament to the feminine will that any of past women’s art and innovation have made it into our 21st century lives. The odds were most certainly stacked against them. But when creative women faced barriers, many of them refused to give up - instead they found their own ways of living authentically, and thanks to them we live in a richer, more beautiful world.

This article is an exploration and a celebration of that legacy, as well as the pain and struggle it took to create.

Here’s a look at history’s bold, female creatives - the real wonder women - and the challenges they had to overcome in order to become the artists they were meant to be.

One Story Among The Untold

It’s 1593, and Artemisia is the daughter of a master painter from Naples, Italy, named Orazio Gentileschi. Each day she is allowed to watch her father work and create incredible art. As she grows, so does her own creative hunger. She dreams of being a painter, too.

But this is 16th century Italy and she is female. Her life is already mapped out for her - by the church, by her society, and by the men who legally and functionally own the few choices she is allowed to make.

She will be a dutiful daughter and help her mother run the home until, at age 15 or so, her father chooses a husband for her. Then she will submit to her spouse, catering to his needs and obeying his will as both a wife and, in just a short time, a mother. It is very likely that she will die before her twenty-ninth birthday due to complications during childbirth. Very little of her name and life will live on after she is gone.

Artemisia realizes this early on, and it makes her more determined to escape the roadmap her culture has written out for her. Luckily for her, her father is an unconventional man. He decides to train and educate her in the visual arts.

Artemisia is incredibly talented from the moment she picks up a paintbrush. Her religious paintings are lifelike and complex, and as she gains skill her work only becomes more evocative. She pours her heart and soul onto each canvas and brings scenes from the Christian past to brilliant life. Her faith is a constant source of inspiration.

One day she is told to work with her father’s colleague and receive tutoring from him. His name is Agostino Tassi. Like all men from his background, Agostino was given a roadmap much different from that of girls like Artemisia.

He is a man; he is superior according to the church and his community. Women were created on his behalf. When Artemisia seeks his guidance as an artist, all he sees is a vulnerable object whose place in his world is both unnatural and deserving of punishment.

He rapes her and leaves her furious, traumatized, and alone.

At that time - as in many others - it was unthinkable for a rape victim to report her crime. It was even less conceivable that she would pursue her attacker in a court of law. In a man’s world, who would listen to her small, female truth?

Artemisia did it anyway.

The court’s response was to torture her with thumbscrews during Tassi’s trial in order to “verify the truth” and test her ability to continue pursuing justice. After further details of Tassi’s life emerged - such as his plan to murder his wife, his longstanding sexual affair with his sister-in-law, and his plot to steal a number of Orazio’s paintings - he was sentenced to exile. The sentence was never carried out.

Susanna And The Elders, a painting by Artemisia circa 1610

Artemisia’s paintings changed after that day and became unique for their blatant positioning of women in places of power and vengeance. Paintings like “Salome With The Head Of Saint John the Baptist” and “Judith Slaying Holofernes” depict strong, steely-eyed girls and women seeking retribution against men who have, usually, wronged them terribly.

Even women whose morality is decidedly in question gained stature and beauty in Artemisia’s work.

It’s often thought that Artemisia was expressing not only her pain and anger at having been attacked early in her career, but also her later frustrations as a traditional wife and mother. Painting was her way of unleashing the collective heart and soul shared by so many women of her time and beyond.

Her story is a perfect illustration of the ferocity and resilience that makes creative women so powerful - especially in those situations where power is furthest from their grasp.

Women Creatives & Three Universal Barriers

Whatever a creative woman’s background, race, culture, or creed, three major challenges have always stood in the way of her artistic potential. Even now, the same three hurdles stand as insurmountable walls against the dreams of women and girls all over the world.

These barriers are the expectation of sacrifice, the burden of forced motherhood, and the unrelenting and often violent oppression of the collective patriarchy.

For all but the wealthiest and most privileged women, a plethora of other challenges often melded seamlessly with the three universal barriers. Poverty, racial oppression, religious expectations, and other limitations like class or geography created further odds that were perpetually stacked against the average female creative.

Most of these women will never be known. Their creativity was either fettered to the point of non-expression, punished so severely it became buried beyond recognition, or lost and wasted with no work to mark the fact that it ever existed. This has been the overwhelming lot of female creatives in every era of human history.

And yet, there are exceptions to every rule - as well as rule-breakers ready to become those exceptions if they’re given the slightest chance. From the lives of these women, we are given a glimpse of lost potential - and incredible talent - that is as inspiring as it is bittersweet.

We see, in some small measure, both the innate grace and hard-won power of female creatives - as well as the breathtaking void that marks the place a vast majority of them might have come to occupy if not for their circumstances.

To consider how much empty space there is in the realm of creative womens’ legacy is to mourn a loss that is unimaginable in its implications. For this reason it is perhaps better to allow the women who did manage to beat the odds to stand in for their silent sisters. Beyond the unoccupied emptiness, their legacy is every woman’s legacy.

The barriers that silenced (and continue to silence) so many women artists are often expressed in subtle ways. It’s rare to hear them overtly expressed, as historically they have most often taken the form of innate, unquestioned assumptions that follow a girl from birth to death.

Judith And Her Maidservant, Artemisia Gentileschi circa 1625

The expectation of sacrifice means that many women have given up even the deepest dreams and desires for the sake of their families, their faiths, and their communities. Few were given any other perspective with which to question this need for self-sacrifice and its implications.

Motherhood, with all the joy it brings to so many women, is more often a burden than a blessing when looked at from a wide-angle perspective. In many cultures of the past and in many (if not most) that remain, motherhood is not a choice women make for themselves. It is instead a role that is assigned them from the moment they emerge from their own mother’s wombs - it is the assumption that if you are female, you will eventually become a mother. It’s only a matter of when.

If you survived childbirth - which historically became less likely with each passing year and which remains incredibly dangerous in many countries today - your life would be neatly divided between your children and your husband. Oftentimes your husband’s extended family was thrown into the mix as well, demanding further concessions from already overburdened mothers.

Finally, the patriarchy itself has stood as a nebulous, impossibly complex force against the potential of women since the dawn of agriculture and quite possibly before that. With superior strength - at first physically and then, in time, socially - men with a thirst for power and an intense jealousy complex have sought to hold back, imprison, and otherwise control women from every possible angle.

It is this third, most insidious enemy that gave rise to the others, and it is the modern forms of patriarchy that most severely curtail creative women today.

With so little say in how their time, energy, and bodies were used, creative women were up against near-impossible hurdles when it came to creating and innovating with any regularity.

Mixed in with these factors was the overwhelming lack of education both basic and artistic that was imposed on most women the world over. Then, there was the constant specter of abuse, whose commonness can only be assumed and shuddered at when one considers the near-complete impunity most male (and many privileged female) abusers enjoyed and still enjoy in nations that remain intensely hierarchical.

From both within and without, the creative woman has been harmed, restrained, suppressed, dehumanized, and beaten down by forces far beyond her control. This is the legacy that had to be overcome by those women who went on to prevail and achieve artistic expression.

The Pervasive Myth Of The Male Underdog vs. The Lackluster Female

When we look at the stories of “underdog” male artists versus their few-and-far-between female counterparts, certain patterns emerge. Shared barriers such as class or race or poverty were not nearly as insurmountable for the male rags-to-riches heroes. This statement is not mere conjecture.

Here is just a brief examination of some of the near-mythical underdog stories often used to compare and invalidate the struggles of creative women:

Giotto, the humble “shepherd-turned-artist,” was “discovered” by the well-known (and wealthy) painter Cimabue and tutored (as well as funded) extensively by him for years
Picasso was funded and supported by his artist father who, incidentally, was a professor at the all-male Barcelona university that would eventually allow Pablo to take their entrance exams early - they accepted him and his education at the institution helped launch his career
Vincent Van Gogh was supported throughout his life by his well-connected, art-dealer brother, Theo Van Gogh, who also encouraged him to be a painter from an early age - later, during Vincent’s battle with mental illness, Theo paid for his brother’s treatment and recovery at a respected hospital
Michelangelo was scouted and taken in by the famous artist Domenico Ghirlandaio, who later paid him a significant salary at a younger age than most artists could dream of - this was thanks to the persuasion of Michelangelo’s father, who supported his son and encouraged him continuously.

If the definition of an underdog is one who has no support and rises to the top by their own effort and volition, most artists would not hold the title. Very few people, male or otherwise, are able to achieve great accomplishments without a large and powerful network of supporters behind them.

Not only were women highly unlikely to get the kind of support enjoyed by a Picasso or Michelangelo, but the male allies that provided that support to other men were often actively hostile to women seeking the same opportunities.

A saving grace for the male creative was frequently just another hurdle for his female peers.

And yet the myths surrounding the underdog narrative persist, especially when critics seek to undermine, deny, or otherwise invalidate the work and struggles of creative women. Common examples of this denial and their underlying - not to mention sexist - assumptions are as follows.

“If [insert male Great Artist] could do it, why couldn’t women?”
- Assumption: women don’t work hard enough or intelligently enough to achieve artistic success
“Art isn’t about someone’s gender - if it’s good, it’ll become famous.”
- Assumption: obviously creative women just weren’t producing any “good” work and that’s why so few of them are known
“Women artists have chosen to give up their work for their families.”
- Assumption 1: women are inherently self-sacrificing and will (read: should) “naturally” choose others over themselves
- Assumption 2: outward “choices” can’t be coerced, so wives, mothers, and daughters alone are responsible for giving up on their art.

There are plenty of other denials and assumptions in this vein, but listing them all would take up the space of an entire book. Suffice it to say that these sorts of statements are of the same ilk as those espoused by racists and other privileged ignorants in every corner of the academic and layperson’s world.

Jael And Sisera, Artemisia Gentileschi circa 1620

The historically-validated fact of the matter is that women were far less likely to be given any kind of support from the men in their lives, whether it be in the form of encouragement, education, money, or help with mitigating circumstances as in the case of Van Gogh. They would instead be more likely to find scorn and disapproval waiting for them if they dared to seek a path that deviated from the mother-wife norm in any way.

Maybe creative men can be underdogs - but creative women aren’t even given that label. Instead, their title is most often mundane silence and eventual obscurity.

The Legacy Of Bold Exceptions

When Bessie Smith was born poor, black, and female in the Jim Crow south of the 1890s, no one would have expected her to see any real success in life. Every possible hurdle was placed in front of her from the moment she first opened her eyes.

By 1926 she had become a record-breaking musician and was dubbed the undisputed “Queen of the Blues” for her incredible style and inimitable presence. In the course of her career, Miss Smith fought off members of the KKK, defied gender norms by dressing in men’s clothes, getting into fistfights, and embracing her bisexuality (which was illegal at the time) by openly pursuing relationships with both men and women.

Bessie bore the scars of her life as a true underdog and struggled with alcoholism and abuse throughout her life. Her husband, Jack Gee, was both controlling and violent. He did little to advance her success but was able to take a great deal of credit for it without being questioned. Eventually he was unfaithful to his wife, and later he legally and physically took their son away from her.

As a woman, Bessie Smith was at once breathtakingly powerful and extremely vulnerable. These qualities were only brought further to bear by the fact that Miss Smith was African-American. Her tragic death was surrounded by rumors of prejudice and the refusal of white hospitals to take her in after she was mortally wounded in a car accident.

Even with all of these barriers, Smith remains known not as a mother or wife, but as an artist. She struggled, bled, cried, and fought for that title her whole life - and her male colleagues were perpetually amazed at her determination to persevere despite all the forces fighting against her.

Most women during her time, especially those constrained by her circumstances, did not persevere. Not because of any personal failings - they simply did not have the luck, tools, or energy necessary to succeed in a world that was systematically and categorically set against them.

Creative women as we know them are a testament to the power of bold exceptions to immovable rules. The fact that they are so far from the norm is a poignant reminder that the playing field has never, in all of its long and blood-soaked history, been equal for artistic women. It’s never even come close.

As a whole, we’ve succeeded anyway.

Bathsheba, by Artemisia Gentileschi - date unknown.

Creative Women And Their Superpowers

All of us living as creative women carry some small part of the legacy our sisters left to us. Whether known or silent, successful or obscure, the female artists that came before us imbued our work with more greatness than it would ever have had on its own.

Whenever we dare to create, boldly and with the same fierce devotion all artists seem to share, we are marking ourselves as part of a collective past and a shared future. By celebrating creative women’s beating of the darkest odds, we amplify the effect their light-bringing stories can have on the modern world.

Women artists are possessed of a singular strength. It is a strength born of defiance, of fury, and of an unrelenting determination to persevere and express all the creative beauty that belongs to us. That strength is our superpower.

It makes us women of wonder, and the world is finally opening its eyes and realizing that we aren’t going anywhere. That we have always been here, whether silently and tragically or loudly and boldly. The time has come for us to make up for the silence of the past - and to welcome a bright and beautiful future together.

The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Fem Word organization. Any content provided by our authors are based on their opinions and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Women Of Wonder: The Bold Legacy Of Female Creatives In A Male-Dominated World