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By Anita Selzer
In this third volume of The Female Gaze in Art and Photography, author and academic Anita Selzer turns her attention to Australian women artists working between 1850 and 1950, foregrounding the lives and artistic contributions of Emma Minnie Boyd, Jane Sutherland and Josephine Muntz-Adams. Building on the themes established in the earlier volumes, Selzer continues her exploration of the “female gaze” – a way of seeing and representing the world through women’s lived experiences and women’s ways of seeing, rather than through traditionally dominant male perspectives.
Through detailed biographical research and insightful analysis of their artworks, Selzer examines how these artists challenged the conventions of their time. Whether depicting domestic interiors, intimate portraits or everyday scenes of women in the Australian landscape, their work offered authentic and deeply human portrayals of women’s lives that contrasted sharply with the heroic and nationalistic narratives favoured by many male artists of the period.
As in previous volumes, Selzer combines art history with social and cultural commentary, uncovering the barriers women artists faced in gaining recognition and the social expectations that shaped both their opportunities and their artistic subjects. At the same time, she reveals the originality, emotional depth and quiet radicalism embedded within their work.
Expanding the ongoing conversation around women’s representation in art, The Female Gaze in Art and Photography: Volume 3 highlights the enduring relevance of the female gaze and the importance of restoring overlooked women artists to the centre of Australian art history. Richly researched and thoughtfully written, this volume offers an illuminating perspective on art, gender and cultural identity, and will appeal to readers interested in feminism, biography and the evolving history of women in art.
Anita Selzer is an acclaimed author of fourteen books in adult and children’s non-fiction, including the first volume of The Female Gaze in Art and Photography. Her interest is in women, gender and culture, and history. She has earned a BA, Dip Ed, Master of Education, PhD in Education and Grad Dip in Women’s Studies at universities in Melbourne, and was awarded the Peter Fensham Education Scholarship 1989 at Monash University for her PhD work on gender, history and education. She was also the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award (APA, now renamed RTP – research training program) and the Postgraduate Publication Award for a paper based on her PhD work.
Selzer has been a lecturer in politics and English and worked in women’s affairs in the Victorian Premier’s Department as an administrative officer. She has also been a book reviewer for Cambridge University Press and the peer-reviewed journal Gender and Education.
Anita Selzer’s young adult publication, I am Sasha (Penguin, 2018), was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards in 2019, and is currently being taught in schools. It is about her father, who assumed a female identity and lived that identity as a teenage girl during the Holocaust to survive. A 40-minute movie, Sasha’s Game, based on this book is currently being produced.
Among her other publications, Selzer wrote a series of books on Australian Sportswomen (Macmillan Education, 2000), which focused largely on Olympian athletes; The Armytages of Como (Halstead Press and National Trust of Australia: Victoria, 2003); Governors’ Wives in Colonial Australia (National Library of Australia, 2002); and Educating Women in Australia from the Convict Days to the 1920s (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Her recent publication are I am Woman (Shawline, 2020), a memoir focusing on gender issues, and Reclaiming Beauty (Shawline, 2022), which has been nominated for the Elizabeth and Colin Roderick award for 2023.
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