The death of the surrealist Leonora Carrington is a reminder that the 20th century was the first in which women began to win equality in the world of art. Before 1900, women artists were incredibly few. In the Renaissance and Baroque periods a woman who became an artist was likely to be part of a family of artists, like Artemisia Gentileschi, the brilliant daughter of painter Orazio Gentileschi, because that was the most likely way she could get a training otherwise closed to women.
In fact, there is a link between the craft traditions of art and the dominance of men. Male critics who still, today, think it is clever to denigrate women artists ignore the social history of painting and sculpture. These skilled arts were taught according to the guild system, and then through academies that started to appear in 16th-century Europe. They were subject to rigid social controls that imagined the relationship between master and apprentice, teacher and pupil, as one of father and son. It was only when the idea of well-crafted art was attacked by a variety of movements (not just Duchamp) in the 20th century that women started to get a look-in.
This is one of the reasons why, by the end of the 20th century, these ancient crafts in art were disparaged and why today the freedoms modern art bequeathed seem infinitely more liberating. It is true that pre-modernist art excluded those without access to its training system.
Contrast the story of art with the story of writing. In literature all you really need is pen, paper and literacy, and so women writers were more effectively able to defy male prejudice, and make their voices heard, from Heloise in medieval France to Mary Shelley in the Romantic age. There are great female voices throughout the history of western literature. It is far harder to find great women artists before 1900.
