Archetypes and Icons:

Materialising Victorian Womanhood in 1970s Feminist Art

Abstract

North American feminist artists working in the 1970s produced a corpus of visual culture that can be characterised as neo-Victorian, but has yet to be analysed as such. This article will analyse how performative role-playing, appropriation of Victoriana, experimentation with modes of ‘women’s work’, and archival research presented opportunities for these artists to materialise Victorian gender norms while examining them through a feminist lens and forging links with their first wave feminist foremothers for political and aesthetic purposes. Finally, this article will consider the theoretical implications of this imperative to create a ‘documentary trace’ of the Victorian past, especially in relation to trauma studies.