BREAKING THE MOLD OF TRUE WOMANHOOD: EXPRESSIONS OF FEMININE AGENCY IN THE SCULPTURAL CAREERS OF HARRIET HOSMER, EDMONIA LEWIS, AND VINNIE REAM

Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, and Vinnie Ream were successful female American sculptors active during the second half of the nineteenth century. As women in a traditionally male profession, they negotiated their expressions of feminine propriety and their ambitions carefully. At a time when women were expected to act only within domestic spaces, these three women operated to varying degrees in the public sphere. They had to conform to the expectations of their patrons and meet standards of proper feminine decorum. However, each woman found ways to challenge cultural norms of femininity in their careers and in their work. The careers of Hosmer, Lewis, and Ream occupy spaces of tension and contradiction. Their work simultaneously resisted the restrictive conventions of femininity and conformed to standards of feminine propriety. These three women performed different aspects of ideal femininity, each using it as a tool to create a sort of façade of “true womanhood,” which often allowed them to continue to function with greater agency, having deflected attention from behavior that was considered too masculine.