International Women's Day 2025 Talk

Onsite at the Ashmolean and online via Zoom.

This talk marks International Women's Day 2025

What occupies a woman’s day? Alice’s talk explores the duties and responsibilities of women at work. From depictions of farm workers and hearth keepers in the Middle Ages by anonymous artists, to picture restorers in the 21st century.

From the earliest days, women participated in brewing, baking, farming and textile weaving. During World War 2 they made armaments; they were researchers in science and the arts and eventually they were allowed to become priests.

All these jobs have been recorded in visual terms sometimes by famous artists such as Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro and Laura Knight, sometimes by less well-known artists.

And some women became artists themselves and faced the challenges of what it was like to infiltrate into what was considered a man’s world.