Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women, even absent women haunt nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western painting. This book brings together Linda Nochlin's most important and pioneering writings on the subject as she considers works by Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among others. In a riveting, partly autobiographical introduction, Nochlin argues for the honest virtues of an art history which rejects methodological presuppositions and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focussing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.