10 x 10: Ten Women / Ten Prints

Curator’s Statement

Even the eldest among the 10 women represented in 10 x 10 cannot remember a time when women could not vote, but all remember when circumstances for women were different from today’s. Women gained equal suffrage with men in 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. The rights the suffragists won benefitted women of all classes and of divergent political points of view. My grandmother, Matilda Robbins (Tanya Rabinowitz), symoblizes for me the spirit of this project. She was 33 years old then, a single mother with an infant daughter, and although she was a feminist, she was not a suffragist. For her, the real issue was not permission to cast a ballot, but full economic and social parity with men. Women should be paid a living wage, she argued then, and marriage was a corrupt institution which degraded and enslaved them. In retrospect, the Nineteenth Amendment was only the beginning of a long, difficult, and still-unfinished campaign for rights. In 1995, the dilemmas my grandmother faced in the 1920s — the lack of affordable and competent childcare for wage-earning mothers, the difficulty of balancing the demands of a job and motherhood, limited reproductive freedom, unfair employment practices, and unequal pay for their work — are still constant struggles for American women.

This portfolio presents the work of 10 contemporary women artists in celebration of this struggle. Spanning more than three decades and coming from diverse ethnic and social backgrounds, these women have become activists, working for civil and human rights and the protection of children, as well as for personal freedom for women in the workplace, in public life, in artistic expression, and in the most intimate areas of their private lives. Each voice is separate and distinct in these 10 prints, but each explores an area of women’s experience with implications for all of us.

–Robbin Légère Henderson