Since painting - unlike literature - was for centuries largely a male preserve, it was inevitable that the fashionable academic industry known loosely as "gender studies" would find it a fertile field for investigation and interpretation. Unlike so many feminist commentators, however, Linda Nochlin is a respected art scholar and her studies of key works by Delacroix, Millet, Degas and others are sobre and seriously considered. She does not confine herself to male artists either; Mary Cassatt and Kathe Kollwitz are also drawn in for scrutiny and speculation. However, the book is more a series of individual essays than a venture into broad generalisations, of which there are in fact very few.
