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Understandably, men have resisted submitting their most basic relationships with women—as mother, wife, saint, whore—to any critical analysis that threatens to undercut their power. Since they have used their power, not just to defend themselves, but to change things—invent and destroy tools; establish and transcend nations; build industry, then break out of industry's iron cage; imagine gods, then escape them—this disinclination has posed the most formidable challenge to feminism. In their wish to escape the roles prescribed by men for women, women have had to ask whether they want the same powers men have had. If so, equality, as an ideal, has not sufficed. Equality can be shared by the powerless.
In the past a few women … attempted to express themselves in painting … but somehow all the attempts I had seen, until O'Keeffe, were weak because the elemental force and vision back of them were never overpowering enough to throw off the Male Shackles. Woman was afraid! She had her secret. Man's Sphinx!! In O'Keeffe's work we have the Woman unafraid.
Social changes, aesthetic transformations, and psychological upheavals, particularly those involving gender identity, rarely coalesce so dramatically as they did in the first 25 years of this century. Western culture experienced the rise of mass consumer democracies, the inclusion of women as voting citizens, an aesthetic revolution called Modernism, and the development of psychoanalysis, importantly based on libidinal desire and repression,