Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and 20th-Century Feminism

Linda M. Grasso discusses how women’s activism in the suffrage era affected Georgia O’Keeffe’s life choices and art-making. Unmarried, mobile, and an independent wage earner, O’Keeffe lived by feminist ideals. This lecture will focus on how O’Keeffe was shaped by the quest for women’s rights and why she continues to be a feminist icon today.

Linda M. Grasso is the author of Equal Under the Sky: Georgia O’Keeffe and Twentieth-Century Feminism (University of New Mexico Press), the first historical study of the artist’s complex involvement with, and influence on, U.S. feminism from the 1910s to the 1970s. Her most recent article, which compares the treatment of suffrage in two 1910s radical magazines, is included in Front Pages, Front Lines: Media and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage (University of Illinois Press). Linda is a professor of English at York College and of Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York York.

You can find Linda M. Grasso’s book for sale in our Museum Store.

This video was recorded Wednesday August 5 as part of the Breakfast with O’Keeffe lecture series.

Featured image: Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe, ca. 1930. Gelatin silver print, 3 9/16 x 4 1/2 inches. Museum Purchase. [2014.3.74]