Date of Award

6-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts

Department

Art

First Advisor

Nadia McDonald

Second Advisor

James Hutson

Third Advisor

Piper Hutson

Abstract

This study constructs a curriculum unit comprising five lessons in feminist art history for middle school learners in 5th-8th grade. Drawing on theories and concepts from feminist art history, visual culture, and inquiry in art education, this curriculum aims to address the scarcity of age-appropriate materials in feminist art history. There is a need for curricular materials that help learners critically analyze issues of gender, identity, and power conveyed through visual culture. The curriculum encourages middle-grade students to engage with three approaches to art analysis: formalism, iconography, and feminism. The organized unit focuses on inquiry, interpretation, comparison, production, and evaluation. Through carefully selected works of art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by men and women, the students analyze how form, iconography, subject matter, and context shape depictions of gender roles.

This thesis will examine several works of art, namely Mary Cassatt's The Child's Bath, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait with Daughter, Jean-Baptiste Greuze's The Village Bride, and Winslow Homer's Snap the Whip. Using feminist visual analysis, this study will examine how the selected works uphold or challenge historical concepts of femininity, domesticity, masculinity, and artistic expression by translating feminist art-historical research into practical classroom applications. This curriculum serves as a model for teaching feminist art-historical theories and methods in middle school art classes. It supports students in engaging in their own visual analysis practices and creative approaches.

Research Highlights

  • The Problem: Standard art history education lacks age-appropriate instructional materials for middle school students to critically analyze issues of gender, identity, and power conveyed through visual culture.

  • The Method: The study develops a five-lesson art history curriculum for fifth- through eighth-grade learners that utilizes formalist, iconographic, and feminist pedagogical frameworks to analyze 18th- and 19th-century visual culture.

  •  Qualitative Finding: Visual analysis of selected historical artworks reveals that traditional artistic conventions establish a system of visual patriarchy by embedding gendered expectations of domesticity, passivity, and virtue into structural compositions or through the complete exclusion of female subjects.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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