As Judy Chicago And Edward Luciesmith (1999:88) Testify, The 'fallen' Woman

As Judy Chicago and Edward LucieSmith (1999:88) testify, the 'fallen' woman was the most popular portrayal of female sexuality for many of the male artists who dominated the pretwentieth century artistic arena with creators highlighting her essential weakness with a minimal visual emotional connection.
She is the one who has no way out, and the painter contemplates her dilemma with a sort of repressed sadism. With each one of these works one feels a conflict of intention. The artist, will ostensibly sympathising with the plight of his female subjects, in fact enjoys their suffering, and expects the audience to do so as well.
Where hair was employed as a tool to reference female sexuality, it was used to derisory and derogatory effect, as witnessed in the 1934 sculpture by René Magritte entitled, Le Viol (The Rape), which transforms a mould of a woman's torso into a distorted image of her face; her breasts are made into eyes, the hair covering her genitals becomes the mouth, while locks of coarse wavy hair protrude from the neck, conforming to the male stereotype of female hair as an instantly recognisable feature of her fertile sexuality.
Clearly, female artists, although very much in the minority were by no means obsolete and painters such as LouiseMarie Elizabeth VigéeLebrun, Rosalba Carriera and Angela Kauffman are but three of a long history of richly talented women artists who showed the intellectual and artistic communities the muted side of female sexuality, beyond the narrow conceptual borders imposed by man. However, in relation to the issue of hair as a vehicle through which to transport female sexuality to the viewer, few of these artists, male or female, made substantial inroads into a deeper philosophical exploration.
It is important to note the significant socioeconomic shift that beset Europe and the United States after the end of the Great War in 1918. Because of their contribution to the labour force, in addition to the nascent political bodies such as the Women's Institute (founded in 1915) and the Suffragette Movement, females in the West were for the first time able to exist, albeit nominally at first, outside of the control of a patriarch.
Gradually at first, more completely after the end of the Second World War in 1945, women were able to embrace independency, which necessarily brought with it tremendous consequences for the artistic community. Whereas women artists previously had to pander to male taste in order to sell as well as fund their work, women artists of the second half of the twentieth century were more able to create for the sake of creation as opposed to as a means to fit into male structured society.