@frothywalrus If you click through to full size, the artist is Varnette P. Honeywood, an African-American artist whose work was featured on sets for The Cosby Show, A Different World, Amen and 227. So it's a Black woman depicted by a Black woman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
@me3dia From the Tumblr you linked to, it shows a set of paintings including a Latina woman as a mother in a village (or a migrant worker, painting provides no context), a Black woman as a diner waitress, and the white woman as a doctor. So it's all stereotypes where only one of them gets a middle-class career with a high standard of living.
I mean, there's a reality-of-the-situation here that complicates it. The Women's Bureau was (officially still is, but who fucking knows now?) a US federal agency charged both with researching women's labor and with advocating policy. Do you try to show labor situations as they are, including labor's problematic relationships with race and ethnicity, or do you try to be aspirational? It does feel like the selecting of images might have been well-intended, but if they were trying to make a point with the selection it was communicated poorly.
1920 it was amazing they even mentioned women. They had to start somewhere, accounting for the work, anywhere, everywhere, women do. The world wars took a lot of men away, forever, as well as from the work places. In the twenties "working girl," meant sex trade worker. Regardless of the times, and the brokenness, hatefulness, things were only going to get worse as the dirty thirties and depression set in. Anyway, I like the poster.
@me3dia I'm not criticizing the art, i'm criticizing referring to wait staff as women's work. Even in 1995, I wouldn't have called it women's work. But in respect to the collection it does make more sense... I guess it's referring to anything as Women's work... kind of seems a little sexist.... even for 1995.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
It's part of a series, apparently, covering a range of professions: https://kheelcenter.tumblr.com/post...
I mean, there's a reality-of-the-situation here that complicates it. The Women's Bureau was (officially still is, but who fucking knows now?) a US federal agency charged both with researching women's labor and with advocating policy. Do you try to show labor situations as they are, including labor's problematic relationships with race and ethnicity, or do you try to be aspirational? It does feel like the selecting of images might have been well-intended, but if they were trying to make a point with the selection it was communicated poorly.