Where Have All the Women Gone? A Crash Course in Finding Them for YA Librarians

Recently, when I asked a forty year old artist friend if she was interested in women's achievements, she said, with a perfectly straight face, “Which achievements?” She continued with the assertion that women are not the ones who have done things in this world. All the exciting and important events have been engineered, created, and/or directed by men. Read the biographies, the histories, subtract a few token queens surrounded by powerful men and see, she ended triumphantly. Yet she would have been enraged by the antique dealer I confronted a month later when I needed to identify the painter of an early twentieth century landscape. The artist's signature was very difficult to read, and only the first and middle initials were given with the last name. The dealer announced he would check to see who “he” was in one of his catalogs on Maine art. Recklessly, I asked, “What makes you think it isn't a woman?” “Because there are no good women artists,” he snapped.