Women Reading: A 19th Century Rebellion

Paintings of women reading were a huge act of rebellion in the 19th century. Women were expected

to be decorative and transparent, but artists like Renoir and Degas showed them using

their bodies to create a secret space. They’d turn their backs,

hiding the book and their thoughts from the viewer. This was seen as transgressive because

it suggested a private inner world you couldn't access. Degas even depicted a naked woman totally

absorbed in her book, making her intellectual privacy the focus, not her body.

It was a radical statement that a woman's mind was her own secret space.