What Did MoMA Mean for Women? Gender and Belonging at the Museum of Modern Art

Until recently, art historical scholarship has convincingly portrayed the Museum of Modern Art as a space engineered to facilitate the male viewer’s journey through a labyrinth of masterpieces that use the female body as object on a path to a liberating abstraction; however, this article will reveal that in its first 35 years, MoMA was an institution that specifically sought to address middle-class women by providing a space for intellectual stimulation and leisure in midtown Manhattan. My argument proposes that MoMA’s attention to female viewers was key to its mission of promoting a holistic modernism and that women were fundamental to the museum’s success on all levels: as patrons, curators and especially educated audience members.