Issue date: 3/31/09 Section: News

Robyn Roslak, an associate professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, speaks about images of French laundresses in 19th-century art during her lecture "The Laundress in 19th-Century French Art: Representing the Working-Class Body" Monday night in the Lecture Hall of the Doudna Fine Arts Center. (Erin Matheny / The Daily Eastern News)

Although plasma high-definition televisions or glossy magazines did not glow with prismatic colors in 19th century France, society was surrounded by images of women, images that could qualify as sexual in nature.

"The Laundress in Nineteenth Century French Art: Representing the Working-Class Body" discussed this topic Monday in the Lecture Hall of the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

Much like the scantily clad women featured everywhere today selling toothpaste or cars, images of laundresses were prevalent during the second half of the 19th century in French culture.

Images of these women were written into history with strokes of paintbrushes and pencils by male artists of the day, said Robyn Roslak, art history professor at University of Minnesota, Duluth.

These male artists shaped the way laundresses were viewed and perceived by French society, in particular the bourgeoisie.

"I'm convinced that because these [bourgeoisie] didn't have television, so when someone saw a painting, it shaped the view of how these women were," Roslak said.

She said this is still done in modern culture especially when it comes to stereotypes of certain groups, such as goths.

Roslak said the images were voyeuristic in nature, in that, like the paparazzi, the artists captured women in their natural habitat as they exerted significant amounts of force to carry and wash the heavy loads of laundry.

"You see the bent-over body and protruding buttocks ... They embody pervasive sex and animalistic sex," Roslak said.

The artists fixated on the laundresses being deviants, and she said men loved this because the images were viewed as a type of fantasy embodying dirty aspects of human nature.

"These women evoked, especially in men, the feeling of desire as well as repulsion," Roslak said.

The paintings and cartoons depict the laundresses almost exclusively from a distance. The artists never got close to the subject, yet managed to influence and shape an entire society's view of the women who washed its dirty laundry.

Roslak said these women were captured at work by middle- and upper-class men who never understood the lives of these women who worked 12 or more hours a day, from dawn till dusk.

"From what I know of men in my middle-class background, I think that when they see women who labor, they don't pay real attention to them and they dismiss their worries because (men) don't identify," she said.


Karolina Strack can be reached at 581-7942 or at ktstrack@eiu.edu.

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