"Those Ladies of Finest Culture … Are Truly Our Working Women": Gender Unity, Class Fractures, and the South Kensington Museum Model in Cincinnati, 1876–1890

Abstract

While professional women artists responding to modernism's emphasis on individuality contributed to the 1890s decline of women's collective art culture, so did increased social class solidarity. Cincinnati's women museum advocates backed the goals of women's art culture embodied in Kensington-style institutions, including art training and decorative and fine arts parity. Women's art culture contained internal class tensions; women backed women's art labor both as a new artistic career path and as charity for the deserving poor. Cincinnati's women museum supporters exacerbated such class tensions when they targeted elite male donors by promoting art training to reform working-class men who lacked the unifying refinement that mitigated class tensions in women's art culture. Women thereby consolidated a cross-gender charitable elite patron class at the expense of women's art culture. Museum-trained women artists, furthermore, successfully advocated shifting to an institutional fine arts focus, addressing an elite patron class newly consolidated by women's museum advocacy.