I am just finishing off a baby blanket. I don’t do a lot of functional quilting. This one is for someone I’ve known for years who is having her first grandbaby. It’s a girl. That project got me thinking.
Of course there’s a special bond between a mother and her child. For some of us our adult daughters are really now more of a good friend than they were when they gave us a lot of trouble as teenagers. Other people I know have to put some distance between their daughters for one reason or another.
My daughter and I are close. She even allowed me to use her image in a series of contemporary portraits which look at how woman today are warriors in a culture and economy which presents many challenges. One of the earliest portraits of her is “Bond” which is a contemporary Madonna.
Madonna comes from an Italian phrase: ma donna ; meaning my lady. This phrase appeared around the 16th century and was used as a respectful term toward a woman in Italian. The term eventually became associated with an ideal or virtuous woman. In the 17th century the Madonna became one of the titles for Mary, the mother of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church.
Interestingly, in the early 16th century, the English phrase referred to a prostitute in a pamphlet by Thomas Dekker in 1602.
In pop culture, Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone) turned that term on its head when she gained super star status in the 1980’s. Her stage personna was far from being a virtuous woman. She challenged the idea in popular culture that good girls were not sexual beings. Her second album “Like a Virgin” has sold 21 million copies worldwide.
At the time of it release the title song of that album drew the ire of conservative critics for its lyrics and its provacative promotional video. She performed the song at the first MTV music awards on top of a wedding cake. It was an iconic moment that seemed to settle the requirement for a generation that “good girls” were virgins at the altar.
Madonna is now 66, just a year older than me. Surprisingly the cultural headspace of many men who are a generation or more younger than her has regressed. The Vice President Elect JD Vance is an example of that shift in thinking. He has said in a September 2021 podcast interview “Professional women choose a path to misery when they prioritize careers over having children.”
In the Harvard Youth Poll 46 percent of young Republican men agreed with the statement "women are too promiscuous these days". These same young men have are fans of the manosphere which is defined by Wikipedia as “a diverse collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism”. It was this group that helped elect the new administration.
One can trace the judging of a woman by her sexual nature in the Christan Church. Mary the mother of Christ is an important figure in the bible. In both the book of Luke and Matthew, Mary is a Virgin and a perfect woman. Her role in Christian teaching has grown since the early days of the church as a model for women. She is obedient to God and devoted to her assigned role as mother to the Christ.
In Luke 1:27, Mary is called a virgin. Luke also describes Mary's surprise when she learns she will have a child, and explains that the pregnancy was the result of God's Holy Spirit. In Luke's account, Mary asks Gabriel, "How can this be, since I am a virgin?".
Icons of the Virgin Mary are called Theokotos in the Orthodox Catholic Church. The term literally translates as the “bearer of God”. These images of Mary and the devotion to her first appeared in the 5th century. By the 12th century both Orthodox and Roman Catholic included imagery and devotions to the Virgin Mary. The subject of Mary was painted by Raphael, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Titian.
The iconography of the Virgin Mary served the church as a powerful form of communication. The message to female members was to aspire to the ideal attributes of womanhood: Devotion to Children and to God. In modern terms this was creating a brand. It had visual appeal. The message was clear and repeated over and over to a willing cult of Mary.
There are many wonderful secular paintings which celebrate the role of mother and child. One of my favorites is a Mary Cassatt portrait of a mother bathing her child. Cassatt was an accepted member of the impressionist painters in France where she spent most of her adult life. Her work is among the best of that group of artists.
The impressionists painted what they observed directly in their environment. Mary was able to capture moments that men did not see. She looked at her subject from a woman's perspective by authentically capturing domestic life through art. Interestingly, Cassatt never wanted to marry. She devoted herself to her profession.
Unlike Mary Cassatt who came from an upper class family, Dorthea Lange had a tough early life and worked hard to create a life as a working artist. She had polio as a child which left her with a limp. Her father left the family forcing her mother to move into a tough neighborhood in the lower east side of New York City.
Lange actually dropped her fathers last name and took her mother’s maiden name as her own.
After high school Dorthea studied photography at Columbia University and worked as an apprentice to learn her trade. In 1918 she moved to San Francisco. She was able to, with the help of an investor, open her own studio. In 1920 she married a painter named Maynard Dixon. They had two sons. She was the families breadwinner.
By the time the depression hit her studio could no longer support the family and she turned her camera to documenting the effects of the economic collapse. In 1935 she divorced Dixon and married an economist. Together they travelled the country as a team for the Federal Government focusing on the most severe impacts of the depression. He interviewed subjects and collected data. She took pictures to document the work.
It was during that time that Dorthea found her voice as an artist. Her photographs tell the story of a terrible period of time. Her famous photograph “Migrant Mother” is a portrait of Florence Owen Thompson. The photograph is of a 32 year old mother and her children on the brink of starvation.
Dorthea explained in lecture that the woman in her famous photogrpah had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. Her children were living off birds they killed in nearby fields and vegetables found frozen in the ground. She described the photograph as a call for help. It was published shortly after it was taken in a San Frasicso newpaper and indeed government help arrived.
This photo of mother and child was a Madonna of a different sort. A real life woman without hope. Her society had left her unable to feed herself or her children. Migrant Moth was not an icon of virture, but a authentic statement of what is was to be poor and powerless. It was a call to action.
It was during this period in American History that a social safety net was created and the begining of liberal policies that worked to even the playing field for the poor. Social Security Act signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 as part of his New Deal initiatives.
Much of my work over the last decade has been about women and children. Recently I have been using photographic images of women taken in the era when I was born. As make this series I am considering what these women they would think about our current culture shift to the right.
Policies that are outlined in documents like Project 2025 are bolstering a belief that women are biologically tied to motherhood and rearing children. For me, I think leaders like JD Vance believe there is a formula for an ideal woman. Those women that stray from that formula are a problem.
The trouble with icons is that they are a fantasy based on an idea that does not exist in the real world. I would rather raise up the authentic experiences of brave, intelligent, hardworking, and imperfect women in my artwork. I have no use for a icon of female identity that moves women back to an imagined reality.
Until next time….
Thank you, thank you. I never knew the story behind the migrant mother.
Compelling, to say the least. Looking at it with new knowledge my reaction is even more visceral than before.
Well said!! I applaud you for speaking out. I do not understand the backwards slide of women and their choices. My hope is that these men with their ancient and chauvinist ideas will die off and the kinder, more accepting and understanding generation will take over. I can only think that men of "power" are realizing that intelligent, capable women are more prevalent than men and that women are not going to go away and go home. They are here to stay and that has them scared. (I am only talking of the Vance-like ones.). We (Strong, intelligent, independent women) are a threat to the far too long standing patriarchal system.