All week, I’ve been trying to get a minute to blog about new evidence showing the earliest artists were women. From NBC News:

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women.

 

This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they’d find on their hunt, and it’s widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner.

 

But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers.

“The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic,” Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks.

 

Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. “[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work,” Snow said, and it’s possible that “had something to do with it.”

What, rigid gender roles now, in 2013? But I thought were we beyond all that, living in a post-feminist world and all. Here are some stats on women artists today:

Want to see something else fucked up? Looking for this story, I typed “cavewomen artists” into Google. Here’s the first match I got.

A pink bow, are you kidding me? Looks like Disney has been here or perhaps, just Hollywood.

Think gender bias is restricted to archeology “experts”? Here’s another story from NBC News

Last month, archaeologists announced a stunning find: a completely sealed tomb cut into the rock in Tuscany, Italy. The untouched tomb held what looked like the body of an Etruscan prince holding a spear, along with the ashes of his wife. Several news outlets reported on the discovery of the 2,600-year-old warrior prince.

 

But the grave held one more surprise. A bone analysis has revealed the warrior prince was actually a princess…The mix-up highlights just how easily both modern and old biases can color the interpretation of ancient graves.

 

I see these two stories as related, showing how gender bias today influences how we interpret at the past. It’s funny because I’ve heard a lot from others that I look at the world through a feminist lens, but what if it’s not me wearing the funny glasses?

 Update: Commenter says pic is satirical (like the first) in which case, I like it. Maybe it’s saying, “Is this the proof archeologists are looking for to attribute work to women?”

My daughter, inspired by the movie, “Soul Surfer”  about champion Bethany Hamilton, made this:

Why do you think so many little girls make art about pretty girls in pretty dresses? Because that’s just “natural”?

Last Spring, when another daughter of mine was 3 years old, she made made a magical creature called a flying Brachiosaurus.

Here’s what she said to her teacher about it:

This is its little wings for going to tree because it has to. These are horns to help him pick up people. He steps on giant people. He flies on mountains or houses and it doesn’t break.

Why do you think her creature is male? I looked at the other children’s art work in her class, half of them girls. Every picture I saw described a male creature.

When another daughter was asked to write a story during school in third grade, she used a male protagonist. When I asked her why she chose a male, she said, “Because everybody did.”

Can you imagine if in a class of third graders, every kid wrote about about female protagonists? Do you think the teacher would notice?

Here is that daughter’s drawing of Harry Potter. This is the same daughter who later drew Bethany Hamilton.

This scene didn’t happen in the book but she was inspired by the book. Her drawing shows a typical gender matrix you see all over children’s media: 2 boys, 1 girl; boy in front, girl behind; text supports male competition and victory.

Here is a picture my middle daughter drew at age 6 while I was reading her the first part of the first Harry Potter.

She made up this character, a witch and her cat soaring through the sky on a broom surrounded by many crescent moons. I was pretty psyched about this witch, but then again, we were only at the beginning of Book 1. Would she still make a female character, front and center, after Book 7?

Here is a make-a-plate my older sister made when she was a kid and obsessed with fairytales.

It’s fascinating to me how much care she took to represent ethnic diversity in these women. Also, their faces are so animated, even though they’re dead. I was impressed but grossed out and disturbed when my sister drew this. She wanted to know which one I thought was the prettiest.

I sought out “Soul Surfer” for my daughters, because I’m always on the look out for images and narratives about heroic females to inspire them. That’s why I started this blog, as a place to collect stories and pictures. But unfortunately, these kinds of depictions of women and girls are far too rare in kidworld, not to mention the grown-up one.

What happens to the imagination of children, and the adults they become, when we live in in a world where heroic girls go missing?

After I posted asking what the world would be like if we hadn’t been experiencing it through male artists for thousands of years, commenters respond that not all women are feminists. I agree, absolutely, and many men are feminists. Also, art is derivative, responding to what came before, as Marian writes:

women artists (and writers) being capable of playing into negative gender stereotypes. Even feminist artists, often in unexpected and subtle ways. We’ve all been conditioned and it’s very hard to get beyond it, consistently.

Very true and makes me think of Gloria Steinem’s comment on Miley Cyrus:

“I wish we didn’t have to be nude to be noticed … But given the game as it exists, women make decisions. For instance, the Miss America contest is in all of its states … the single greatest source of scholarship money for women in the United States. If a contest based only on appearance was the single greatest source of scholarship money for men, we would be saying, “This is why China wins.” You know? It’s ridiculous. But that’s the way the culture is. I think that we need to change the culture, not blame the people that are playing the only game that exists.”

I doubt the world will ever be dominated by the vision of one group the way it has been for so long by white men. But what I was imagining in my post is: what if our worldview had always been dominated by women as a group, the way it has been dominated by men? Men’s roles in narratives would repetitively show up as lovers, sex objects, prizes to win after a quest. When we don’t have diversity, we get stereotypes.

Women, just like men, come in all shapes and sizes. The problem is, right now, we are allowed to exist only within extremely limited parameters. Why animation fascinates me is that it’s a clear intersection of art and story, and also, a fantasy world where anything is possible, marketed to children. It’s clear to see how sexism is packaged, recycled, and sold to a new generation. Or at least, clear to me.