How did the Victorian idea of "separate spheres" determine how women artists created their art?
The Victorian period was an era of constantly shifting and contradicting ideologies concerning women, which extended over many areas of society and culture including politics and the media, the family and domestic field as well as the contemporary and traditional beliefs within the art institutions. The body of the belief systems about women and the feminine ideal that are present in each of these areas involve a combination of established or traditional ideas versus those of a contemporary and revolutionary nature. Whether traditional or revolutionary these evolving ideologies played a consistent and prominent role in regulating the methods by which women produced their art and the subject areas and genres in which they employed themselves. Significantly, the increase of feministic values throughout the nineteenth century dramatically changed the ways in which women could produce art, and also the ways in which their critics assessed them compared to the more traditional beliefs about propriety and established feminine spheres that constrained women artists earlier in the Victorian period.
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