Forgotten women deserve so much more

ALTHOUGH I’m open to persuasion about the merits of a National Women’s Museum, brainchild of Arts Minister Catherine Martin, my initial reaction is that it’s another of those dull-but-worthy ideas that women feel morally obliged to endorse without any real enthusiasm.

Blame the decade of centenaries if you like but if you ask me, the heroines of 1916 and the leading lights of Cumann Na mBan are now almost as mythologised as Pearse and the lads, while female literary figures such as Kate O’Brien and Elizabeth Bowen have, since the 1980s when feminist publishing houses began rescuing their work from obscurity, been steadily gaining iconic status.

It’s hard to see how curating these women and their achievements in a purpose-built museum will fire the imagination like, say, the National Gallery’s recent exhibition of Renaissance painter Lavinia Fontana.

Fontana, who achieved fame in late 16th century Bologna, was the first European woman accepted as a professional painter, but I didn’t hear of her until last year. The small but perfectly formed exhibition showed how the constraints of her era on women shaped her work and defined her interest in portraiture, fashion and textiles.

It left me wondering what other dazzling female talents are out there, forgotten by history, overlooked entirely except for earnest scholars whose work may never reach the mainstream.

History’s verdicts depend on those who write them. The discovery of outstanding women through history is also a record of women consigned to the margins of public life with their talent and ambition, of patriarchy in action. It is an ongoing and fascinating project, far more captivating to me than any national women’s museum.