Women - as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women, even absent mothers - haunt 19th- and 20th-century Western painting. This text brings together Linda Nochlin's most important and pioneering writings on the subject, as she considers work by Miller, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt and Kollwitz, among many others. In her partly autobiographical, extended introduction, she argues for the honest virtues of an art history which rejects methodological assumptions, and for art historians who investigate the work before their eyes while focusing on its subject matter, informed by a sensitivity to its feminist spirit.