In 2015, I was on a panel at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design titled “Do We Need Exhibitions Just for Women?” As I remember, most of the participants agreed that we did, though some expressed concerns about ghettoization or weariness at having a conversation they’d had many times before. As the youngest participant, I understood their frustration, but I had no doubt that the answer was an emphatic yes. It seemed obvious that as long as we had gender inequality, we also needed correctives.

Asking myself the same question today, I’m still inclined to answer in the affirmative, but with markedly less gusto. Over the last decade I’ve witnessed the ways that progress can seem linear only to suddenly loop back on itself. Women face increased misogyny and discrimination in many places, including the US. Even in the art world, the situation is retrograde: a 2022 report by the journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin found that only 11 percent of acquisitions and 14.9 percent of exhibitions at thirty-one American museums were devoted to women, despite them accounting for almost half of the country’s working artists.

The catalog of “The Woman Question, 1550–2025,” a recent exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, traces the origins of all-women exhibitions to the late nineteenth century, the early years of the first-wave feminist movement. Female artists started societies like the Palette Club and the Union des femmes peintres et sculpteurs in cities like Chicago and Paris, showing and promoting the work of their members at a time when women in the arts faced a range of professional exclusions, including being barred from life-drawing classes and most art academies.

Such shows flourished until the beginning of the twentieth century, when they suddenly dwindled, and the men curating and writing art surveys and textbooks began editing women out of history. As the curator of “The Woman Question,” Alison M. Gingeras, notes in the catalog, “Ironically, it would seem that the rise of suffragist and first-wave feminist movements that won women the right to vote produced a misogynous backlash in the field of art.” It took almost an entire century for the all-women exhibition to return amid the heyday of second-wave feminism in the 1970s—and when it did, it became a vehicle for reclaiming forgotten histories.

One of the most important such shows of the time was “Women Artists: 1550–1950,” organized in 1977 by the art historians Ann Sutherland Harris and Linda Nochlin at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (before traveling to museums in three other cities). Harris and Nochlin attempted to rewrite the patriarchal canon, gathering works by eighty-three artists from twelve countries in what the press release described as “the first international exhibition of works by women artists.” They concentrated on historical painting but found wide range within that category, moving from the Italian Renaissance artist Sofonisba Anguissola to the French realist Rosa Bonheur to the Russian modernist Natalia Goncharova to the American Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner, and featuring many artists who were largely unknown to audiences at the time. Still, the vast majority of the figures they included were white and Western, and Harris and Nochlin acknowledged and defended this narrow purview in their catalog. The omissions, they wrote, meant “not so much that the present exhibition is limited but rather that the possibilities for future ones exploring the work of women in the arts are unlimited: we look forward to future developments.”

“The Woman Question, 1550–2025” took up this challenge by bringing the story of women’s art into the present and greatly diversifying the ranks of its practitioners. Like her predecessors, Gingeras eschewed any attempt to be comprehensive, instead homing in on a series of motifs that have appeared in art by women across nearly five centuries, including self-representation, surrealism, motherhood, sexuality, and war. The sweeping show was anchored by the works of well-known artists—including Artemisia Gentileschi, Leonor Fini, Louise Bourgeois, Tracey Emin, and Catherine Opie—but prioritized the delight of discovery. There were surprising selections by names I knew well and many more names that were unfamiliar to me, such as the modernists Charley Toorop (Dutch) and Fahrelnissa Zeid (Turkish). Gingeras paid particular attention to Poland and Eastern Europe—including, for example, work by the contemporary Polish artists Katarzyna Górna and Zuzanna Hertzberg—and carefully placed formally educated artists in conversation with those who were self-taught. A section titled “Anonymous Was a Woman” included a painting and accompanying text relating the art historian Beata Purc’s case for why a Renaissance artist known only as the Brunswick Monogrammist may have been Mayken Verhulst, Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s mother-in-law.

Gingeras writes in the catalog that “inventories alone do not change patriarchal power structures; continual deep scholarship does.” This idea has a long history, though by now it might sound a bit more like a hopeful mantra than like an assertion of fact. “The Woman Question” was named for a literary genre of sorts that flourished in early modern Europe; thinkers both male and female—perhaps the most famous of whom was Christine de Pizan—wrote about la querelle des femmes, debating the status and nature of women. Were they all temptresses? Inferior to men? Or were they capable of reason and worthy of education? Centuries have gone by since then. Art has been made. Books have been written. Laws have been passed and repealed and then passed again. Freedoms have been hard won. Yet people keep finding new ways to ask the woman question. And so, no matter how weary we may be, we keep answering.

In what I can only describe as a punk move, “The Woman Question” opened with a gallery devoted to beheading. It was part of a larger first section titled “Femmes Fortes,” which took its name from a genre of paintings that flourished in seventeenth-century Europe, depicting biblical and historical heroines. Among the favorite subjects of the period were the princess Salomé, who requested and received the head of John the Baptist, and the widow Judith, who beheaded the Assyrian general Holofernes. (In lieu of a decapitation, one work on display depicted the biblical story of the Israelite Yael, who nailed a peg into the skull of the Canaanite general Sisera.) One of the most famous examples of the genre, Gentileschi’s visceral rendering of Judith in the act from around 1620, was not part of the show, but Gingeras did include her empathetic painting of an anguished and naked Susanna, from the Old Testament, being harassed by two elderly men.

Instead of historical works, though, the show’s small initial gallery held five modern and contemporary interpretations of the classic stories. Among them was a striking self-portrait from around 1929 by the Chicago-based artist Macena Barton, who depicts herself as an unapologetically nude, almost magician-like Salomé, clutching a scythe in one hand and a red curtain in the other; the fabric trails on the floor, where John the Baptist’s head rests on an ornate tray. Barton’s stance presages Cindy Sherman’s in a photograph that hung nearby, Untitled #228 (1990), which stars Sherman as Judith, dressed in a red gown and grasping a wrinkled dummy head of Holofernes. The works in the gallery conveyed a provocative range of emotional states, from the calm surreality of Barton’s Salomé to the sublimated rage of Betty Tompkins’s Women Words (Artemisia Gentileschi #2) (2024), which features sexist epithets overlaid on a copy of one of the Renaissance artist’s compositions. The cumulative effect was one of radical power: women dominating men, a tale as old as time.

The show also dealt inventively with other, more quotidian subject matter. In a section on motherhood, explicit images of birth and abortion—and images of queer and exhausted mothers—complicated idyllic mainstream conventions. One of the most surprising works was a contemporary replica, by the Franco-Brazilian artist Rebecca Campeau, of the “machine,” a medical doll used by the eighteenth-century French midwife Angélique Marguerite Le Boursier du Coudray to teach fellow midwives and simulate births. It’s a life-size, anatomically accurate linen and leather model of a woman’s pelvis, birth canal, and baby—an object born of need that reflects astonishing ingenuity and agency.

Meanwhile, a section titled “Wartime Women” focused on intimate or mundane scenes of violence rather than militaristic tributes or grand battles. Two small paintings by the Roma artist Ceija Stojka, one of several Holocaust survivors included (and also the subject of a recent exhibition at New York’s Drawing Center), portrayed Nazi soldiers humiliating prisoners while frenzied flocks of birds fill the sky. Works by contemporary Ukrainian artists were mostly more oblique, referencing the ongoing war through expressive, gestural paintings of solitary or abstracted figures; one by Lesia Khomenko shows a woman whose body has been reduced to a ghostly collection of brushstrokes by the force of an explosion.

But the show gave the most space to self-portraits, which filled two linked sections, one focused tightly on images depicting artists at work and the other including all manner of self-portraits. The quality and scope of work on view here was stunning. Gingeras brought together pieces by old masters like Anguissola (Italian, c.1532–1625) and Angelica Kauffman (Swiss, 1741–1807) with those of contemporary practitioners like Lisa Brice (South African, b. 1968) and Somaya Critchlow (British, b. 1993).

Given such a mix, the galleries could easily have become a hodgepodge, but Gingeras organized them into revealing juxtapositions and insightful thematic groupings, highlighting how different practitioners have riffed on consistent tropes, like the front-facing gaze and the inclusion of the artist’s accoutrements. Marie-Nicole Vestier-Dumont holds a palette in one hand and the cloth on her infant’s crib in another, as if to balance the two; Toorop places her palette behind her head so that it becomes a halo. A patchwork quilt by the self-taught African American artist Yvonne Wells, which shows her speaking into a megaphone in front of a US flag, hung near paintings by several self-taught Polish artists, creating an exchange about autodidacticism. A full-length, nude sculpture by the trans artist Puppies Puppies—a bronze cast of her body, including her breasts and penis, on a pedestal bearing the word “WOMAN”—stood at the end of a row of bodily sculptures, both illuminating the tradition she is working in and against and proposing her figure as a kind of culmination of an evolution of womanhood.

The feminist art historian Griselda Pollock writes in the catalog of “The Woman Question” that throughout the history of the all-women show, curators have felt compelled to “challenge the typical format of the narrative of Art History—charting art across eras, periods, styles, and movements crowned by a male genius.” Every exhibition, in other words, is a rejoinder as well as an expression of an independent vision. What made the show in Warsaw thrilling was that it felt like the women were talking first and foremost to each other, forming a chorus of female voices from across time and place, all shaping and insisting on their own selfhood.

Still, “The Woman Question” was not immune to the mandate that shaped its predecessors. On my last day in Warsaw I visited the nineteenth-century art galleries at the city’s National Museum. There, on one wall of a small room, a curator had organized a row of self-portraits by artists working on the cusp of the new century. The subjects exuded confidence as they stared at the viewer from their colorful canvases. They were all men. Gingeras’s carefully composed ensemble seemed to me like a direct rebuttal.

If self-representation was the greatest strength of “The Woman Question,” it was also the show’s most apparent weakness. The exhibition consisted almost entirely of figurative painting and sculpture. There was a logic to this: as Gingeras writes in the catalog, it “make[s] this continuity of women’s authorship legible over such a long span of art history.” (And, as she told me when we spoke, it made the show more accessible.) But it also limited the story that “The Woman Question” could tell. Centuries of female creativity have produced far more than representational art in traditional media.

The show’s omissions were highlighted in part by the other work on view in the museum. The same floor featured four small feminist exhibitions collectively titled “The City of Women”; the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson’s contribution, which focused on allusive abstraction, was a standout. Upstairs, there were solo shows devoted to two very different abstract artists: the Polish modernist Maria Jarema and the Ethiopian American painter Julie Mehretu. These exhibitions usefully expanded on “The Woman Question,” but they also pointed to other pathways it could have taken.

I can picture a version of the show that incorporated more diverse work into Gingeras’s thematic structure. How might the conversation between the self-portraits have deepened if, amid a sea of paintings, there appeared Adrian Piper’s What Will Become of Me (1985–ongoing), a collection of jars holding her cut hair and fingernails? How would the gallery on motherhood have felt different if Louise Bourgeois had been represented not by figurative prints but by one of her more abstract fabric sculptures? The show already contained several such moments. The early gallery that housed Gentileschi’s Susanna, for instance, also included a video of Yoko Ono’s harrowing Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which she invited the audience to cut off pieces of her clothing. The connection was surprising and generative, suggesting continuity across centuries and continents between the ways women have made sense of violence against them.  

“The Woman Question” did not aspire to be comprehensive, but it did seek to reflect how women have imagined and asserted themselves through their art. What about the women who engineered new styles and techniques because the ones available couldn’t hold what they wanted to say? Hilma af Klint pioneered abstraction as an outlet for her spiritualism; Helen Frankenthaler soaked her canvases with paint she had thinned to make the color flatter and more ethereal; Senga Nengudi twisted pantyhose into bulging shapes that evoke women’s bodies. (Nengudi’s work appeared in Bryan-Wilson’s “City of Women” exhibition.) By largely omitting more formal work, as well as a wider scope of media, “The Woman Question” not only neglected this history, but also inadvertently confined its subjects to a narrowed range of experience.

Though “The Woman Question” did not include much expressly political art, most visitors surely arrived with an awareness of the history unfolding just outside the museum. In 1989 the Polish people freed themselves from Soviet rule and reinstated democracy, thanks largely to Solidarity, an opposition movement that grew out of a trade union. But when the leaders of Solidarity established their new government, they sold out Polish women: bowing to pressure from the Catholic Church, they passed an ordinance that made it more difficult to obtain a legal abortion. This was a sharp reversal from prior decades, when pregnant people had been able to get abortions with relative ease—so much so that women from Sweden were known to travel to Poland to access the procedure.

Restrictions have continued to accrue. In 2016 parliament debated a total abortion ban, catalyzing a movement called Polish Women’s Strike, which held enormous demonstrations filled with black-clad protesters mourning the proposed death of their rights. That ban failed, but abortion was largely outlawed in 2020, when Poland’s constitutional court ruled that abortions in cases of fetal anomaly were prohibited. The judgment set off another round of protests, co-organized by the Polish Women’s Strike, in which hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets despite restrictions on gathering imposed due to Covid-19; the demonstrations were the largest in the country since the fall of communism.

Photographs from some of these events could be seen in the hallway outside “The Woman Question,” as part of the artist Karolina Gembara’s “City of Women” show about reproductive rights. Shot by members of Poland’s grassroots Archive of Public Protests, they captured flashes of people in the streets, holding up coat hangers and middle fingers against dark, imperceptible backgrounds. The images were reproduced as takeaway posters and placed in stacks on wedge pedestals on the ground. Standing over them, I had an acute sense of the tension between the almost utopian world that was represented inside the museum and the hostile one outside its walls. One of the values of art is to help us envision how things could be different. It offers a space for imagining other realities, if not a way out of the one in which we live. “The Woman Question” did so by offering a rich vision of female creativity and solidarity. Perhaps most striking, it refused to make the case for women’s place in art history, instead simply asserting it as fact. This suggests a potential model. The Polish lawmakers banning abortion are, in their own way, asking the woman question. What would happen if we stopped answering and instead rejected its terms?