La Querelle des Femmes

In 2015, I was on a panel at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design titled “Do We Need Exhibitions Just for Women?” As I remember, most of the participants agreed that we did, though some expressed concerns about ghettoization or weariness at having a conversation they’d had many times before. As the youngest participant, I understood their frustration, but I had no doubt that the answer was an emphatic yes. It seemed obvious that as long as we had gender inequality, we also needed correctives.Asking myself the same question today, I’m still inclined to answer in the affirmative, but with markedly less gusto. Over the last decade I’ve witnessed the ways that progress can seem linear only to suddenly loop back on itself. Women face increased misogyny and discrimination in many places, including the US. Even in the art world, the situation is retrograde: a 2022 report by the journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin found that only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14.9 percent of exhibitions at thirty-one American museums were devoted to women, despite them accounting for almost half of the country’s working artists.The catalog of “The Woman Question, 1550–2025,” a recent exhibition...