Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 by Kathleen D. McCarthy (review)

234 Canadian Reviewof American Studies ginating in London is copied in Boston or Philadelphia. Our sense of deja vu is further strained when sentences, and sometimes paragraphs, are t~en from chapters , especially their conclusions, and served up almost word for word in the introduction. In his zeal to clarify every detail, Olson also overdoes the obvious. After explaining, for example, that in a particular cartoon (229), "The ROYAL HUNT,or a PROSPECT of the YEAR 1782," Lord Sandwich is presented with a fiddle in his hands, is it necessary to tell us that Nero "fiddled while Rome burned"? If the modem reader needs this information, how could the illiterate colonist be expected to know it? Ultimately, the question must be asked: Does this study illuminate what common people were thinking, or modify the Bailyn thesis that the colonis.ts rebelled because they thought that a plot existed to deprive them of their liberties? Since Olson's intention is to discuss pictorial images, he deals only sparingly, and mainly in the third chapter, with symbols in written communication. A suspicion lingers that many of the images, especially the political cartoons, were aimed at the same literate audience that read the papers and pamphlets. In the end, the answer to the question must be, th~ revision is interesting but not proven. A. R. Riggs McGill University •• + ••• Kathleen D.McCarthy. Women's Culture:Ameri.can PhilanthropyandArt, 1830-1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. xvii + 324 and bibliography. As we call for a recognition of multicultural diversity in our society, we have much to learn from Kathleen McCarthy, associate professor of history and director of the Center for the Study of Philanthropy at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York. She has made a career of examining the roots of elite culture, writing Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849-1929 (1982), editing Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy and Power (1990), and now producing Women and Culture. The latest work documents the considerable effort women made to broaden the definitions of fine art which powerful men developed between 1830and 1930,and demonstrates the limited success they saw for their trouble. BookReviews 235 The women McCarthy has studied are generally rich, white, Anglo-Saxon aristocrats from major cities of the Northeastern United States, who have distinguished themselves as philanthropists in the visual arts. She divides them into three categories. The Separatists, ghettoized, did not penetrate the male-dominated world ofprofessional artists clubs in the antebellum era, such as the Artists Union. These women included Candace Wheeler, who founded the Decorative Arts Movement to provide employment for destitute craftswomen, and founders of salons, women's art schools, and programs to train women and exhibit their work. These reformers, McCarthy argues, made little impact on the professional art world, their goals dismissed as irrelevant by the mainstream. The Assimilationists she describes are the womenwho engaged with the major museums and artists, aspatrons. Catherine Lorillard Wolfe, Ann Harkness, Olivia Sage and Louisine Havemeyer are among the major donors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art she examines, who devoted considerable money, effort, and good taste to building major collections which they contributed. Their largesse lent significant importance to the institution but their contributions were trivialized and they made no stamp on the museum. Instead, they subsidized the ambitions of the male-centred institution. Finally, the author turns to three early-twentieth-century Individualists, who elected to shape their own major institutions: Isabella Stewart Gardner, who established Fenway Court in Boston, AbbyAldrich Rockefeller, who developed the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the sculptor who recognized the strength of American art with the Whitney Museum. These women, regarded by their families and theprofessional art world as eccentric, simply had enough money and dete1TI1ination to ignore the obstacles and do as they pleased. All three approaches, McCarthy obseIVes,were equally ineffective in cracking the male-dominated art establishment. None of the routes possible to the most rich and powerful women in America granted them legitimacy in the eyes of male tastemakers. McCarthy has unearthed wonderful women who have not been giventheir deserved attention in print...