This insightful and beautifully illustrated book offers the first feminist analysis of the phenomenon of women art collectors in America. Dianne Sachko Macleod brings a surprising paradox to light, showing that collecting, which provided wealthy women with a private sense of solace, also liberated them to venture into the public sphere and make a lasting contribution to the emerging American culture. Beginning in the antebellum period, continuing through the Gilded Age, and reaching well into the twentieth century, Macleod shows how elite women enlisted the objets d'art and avant-garde paintings in their collections in causes ranging from the founding of modern museums to the campaign for women's suffrage.

Dianne Sachko Macleod is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity.

Jacques Barzun Prize, American Philosophical Society

PROSE AWARD, Association of American Publishers, Inc.