Images of women bend over needlework were popular in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century as exemplars of obedience and housewifery duty. Hanneke Grootenboer argues that in the context of the early modern debate on women’s education (also referred to as the querelle des femmes), these images should also be understood as portrayals of female thinking—the pictorial equivalent of the melancholy male philosopher—and the act of needlework they represent, as a moment of subversion and escape.
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