Women -- as warriors, workers, mothers, sensual women, even absent women -- haunt nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western painting. This book brings together Linda Nochlin's most important and pioneering writings on the representation of women in art, as she considers works by Millet, Delacroix, Courbet, Degas, Seurat, Cassatt, and Kollwitz, among many others. In a riveting, partly autobiographical introduction, Nochlin argues for the honest virtues of an art history that rejects methodological presuppositions 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.