Hardcover
Publisher: Berry Campbell
Excerpt from Modern Women, Dancing Bodies: Judith Godwin’s Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s
By Aliza Edelman, Ph.D.
In one of her last interviews from 2016, Judith Godwin (1930–2021) recalled an amusing but sobering anecdote from her days as a young fine arts student about the unreasonable social expectations and demands placed on women. A straight-laced female peer at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) had reported Godwin for breaking the college’s formal dress code after
wearing soiled, paint-stained blue jeans to the cafeteria in lieu of a proper
tidy skirt. Godwin convincingly pleaded her case to the dean that changing one’s attire between studio and academic classes while on a tight schedule was a time-consuming, pointless task, emboldening the
administration’s revamped orthodox rules: henceforth, women did not
require skirts to eat lunch.
tidy skirt. Godwin convincingly pleaded her case to the dean that changing one’s attire between studio and academic classes while on a tight schedule was a time-consuming, pointless task, emboldening the
administration’s revamped orthodox rules: henceforth, women did not
require skirts to eat lunch.
Godwin completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at RPI in 1952. This was perhaps a small victory for the young artist from the native environs of the American South, raised in a prominent family with colonial and political ties in Suffolk, Virginia. Nevertheless, it was a telling recollection that exemplified the nationwide struggles women experienced to define and fashion their social and artistic identities as modern in the postwar 1950s.
Essays by Aliza Edelman Ph.D., Gwen F. Chanzit Ph.D., Anthony Korner
Designed by Mark Robinson
Published by Berry Campbell
Printed by Meridian, Rhode Island
