The artistic achievements of Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), both as a major expatriate American painter and as a formative innovator in the decorative arts, have long been overshadowed by her fifty-year relationship with writer Natalie Barney and a reputation as a fiercely independent, aloof heiress who associated with fascists in the 1930s. In Romaine Brooks: A Life, art historian Cassandra Langer provides a richer, deeper portrait of Brooks's aesthetics and experimentation as an artist―and of her entire life, from her chaotic, traumatic childhood to the enigmatic decades after World War II, when she produced very little art. This provocative, lively biography takes aim at many myths about Brooks and her friends, lovers, and the subjects of her portraits, revealing a woman of wit and passion who overcame enormous personal and societal challenges to become an extraordinary artist and create a life on her own terms.

Romaine Brooks: A Life introduces much fresh information from Langer's decades of research on Brooks and establishes this groundbreaking artist's centrality to feminism and contemporary sexual politics as well as to visual culture.

Beginning in the 1940's with Hollywood's image of the American woman, this book goes on to discuss the images of home, family, and domesticity in the 1950's and the impact of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique on the 1960s generation. Next, it examines the 1970's, the so-called golden age of American feminism, including sexual politics and reactionary rhetoric about lesbians and women who didn't follow the party line. Antifeminist cultural discourses on women's rights, including Susan Faludi's Backlash, are discussed in relation to abortion, equal pay for equal work, and other political, social, and cultural issues. The book assesses the highly charged sexual politicas of the 1990's using the writings of Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, and Katie Roiphe to analyze different levels of post-feminism. With examples from the mass media, film, literature, popular culture, art criticism, this book surveys the impact of the American feminist movement, hot it originated, why certain ideas and images had to change, and how this movement shaped our notions of feminine and masculine over the last fifty years. A Feminist Critique is a fair and much-needed overview of the accomplishments, issues, and goals of the feminist movement and its future course.