4 ideas
Women's scarcity in art history comes from a chain of structural gates, not from a lack of talent. They were barred from academies and nude life-drawing classes, which were the basis of prestigious history painting. Their work was then misattributed to men or left out of the survey books that decided what later generations would see. Each gate made the one after it look like a natural verdict of quality.
Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were founding members of London's Royal Academy in 1768. In Johann Zoffany's group portrait of the Academicians (1771–72), the men gather around a nude male model, while the two women appear only as painted portraits on the wall, because propriety kept them out of the life room. No other woman was elected a full Academician until Laura Knight in 1936.
Judith Leyster was a successful 17th-century Haarlem painter with her own workshop and pupils. After her death her paintings were absorbed into Frans Hals's oeuvre, and one was sold as a Hals. In 1893 her 'JL' monogram was found on it, which exposed how attribution to a famous man could erase a woman's authorship entirely.
A single-volume survey of a field acts as a canon-making machine: what it names gets taught, bought, exhibited and remembered, and what it omits drops out of view. The fix is not to insert a few names into the old narrative but to write a full parallel chronology. That makes the omitted figures visible as a continuous tradition rather than a set of exceptions.