This work offers a sustained examination of Dutch 17th-century genre painting from a theoretically informed feminist perspective. Other recent works that deal with images of women in this field maintain the paradoxical combination of seeing the images as positivist reflections of life as it was and as emblems of virtue and vice. These reductionist practices deprive the works of their place in visual culture and complex nature, important frameworks that the book attempts to restore to them. Salomon seeks to expand the possibilities for understanding both familiar and unfamiliar paintings from...

This ground-breaking book offers the first sustained examination of Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting from a theoretically informed feminist perspective. Other recent works that deal with images of women in this field maintain the paradoxical combination of seeing the images as positivist reflections of "life as it was" and as emblems of virtue and vice. These reductionist practices deprive the works of their complex nature and of their place in visual culture, important frameworks that the book attempts to restore to them. Salomon expands the possibilities for understanding both...