50 Years of Women at ASECS

My personal history with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) has coincided with the growing prominence of women in the organization and the emergence of a strong coterie of art historians. The first ASECS Annual Meeting that I attended was in 1983 in New York. Although ASECS was conceived as an interdisciplinary society and art historian Barbara Stafford was on the Executive Board, Art History was virtually non-existent at the Society's meetings. My name does not appear in the program for that year because I was a late addition to a two-part interdisciplinary panel on "Visitors to Eighteenth-Century Rome." My paper on "Greuze's Italian Sojourn, 1755–57" was published in expanded form in Volume 14 of Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture (1985). There were fifty-two panels in 1983, as opposed to almost two hundred in 2019. Art History was a bit better represented at the 1984 ASECS Annual Meeting in Boston where Kim Sloan, Barbara Stafford, Robert Neuman, and I presented papers, and Tom Crow chaired a session on "Uses of Antiquity."

The mid–1980s were watershed years when ASECS began to diversify and take a more visual and theoretical turn, reflecting the expanding field of eighteenth-century studies. At the 1985 Annual Meeting in Toronto, there were multiple sessions devoted to the visual arts: "French Prints," "Cityscapes," "Social Ideals and Criticism in the Visual Arts," "Walpole and the Gothic Revival," and a plenary lecture on the gardens at Stowe—as well as musical and theatrical divertissements. I participated in a panel on "Jacques-Louis David and Parallels with the Oath of the Horatii," with James Leith as commentator. Having the opportunity to present my research in that venue with senior scholars was an important academic milestone for me. The 1986 Annual Meeting in Williamsburg included special visits and workshops and a rich array of interdisciplinary panels on topics including "Prisons and Asylums," "Images of Madness in Arts and Letters," "Baroque Art and Literature in the Hispanic World," "Visual Interpretations of Eighteenth-Century Life," "Images of Women in French Art," and "Automata," with many more art historians (primarily women) participating, including Pat Crown, Elise Goodman-Soelner, Reed Benhamou, Barbara Stafford, Jane Kromm, Judith Stanton, and myself. I presented a paper on the "Rococo Revisited through Postmodern Eyes" in a cross-disciplinary session, "The Tie that Binds: Eighteenth-Century Arts Alive Today," that critically reconsidered eighteenth-century art, music, and literature in relation to the present, indicative of a growing interest in demarginalizing and revitalizing the eighteenth century by recognizing its continuing influence.

ASECS continued to expand its offerings, as evidenced in the splendid 1989 New Orleans Annual Meeting, which had ninety-six seminars. The meeting's theme, "Reflections on the Revolution," was prominent in a wealth of offerings on topics ranging from Revolutionary dress to medicine during the Revolution, to the Clifford Lecture on "The Literary Revolution of 1789," delivered by Robert Darnton. Art History was much in evidence, including sessions on "The Artist as Hero," "The Political Unconscious and Revolutionary Imagery," "Portraiture and Ideology," "Gendering Art: Rococo and the Feminine," and "Culture and Cataclysm in the Late Eighteenth Century." Although many different factors undoubtedly played a role in the expansion and diversification of ASECS, the prominence of women, from the outset—on the Executive Board, as officers, and in the Women's Caucus—has been essential in fostering the Society's mission of interdisciplinary scholarship and inclusiveness.

At the beginning of my academic career, ASECS played a crucial role in introducing me to eighteenth-century scholars across the disciplines, and the Society became a sounding board and key arena for presenting my research and networking. With a heavy teaching load focusing primarily on modern and contemporary art, in a predominantly studio department, the Society was vital to my continuing engagement with eighteenth-century studies. ASECS itself continued to evolve in the late 1980s and 1990s, becoming more open and inclusive and expanding its scope through the addition of affiliates and new members working in diverse areas, including theater and performance studies, race and empire, and gender studies. Art History...