A comparison in terms of dealing with the women's image: Works of Turkish and French women painters

Throughout art history, women's participation in the arts has been shaped by various barriers such as gender roles and inequality of opportunity. In her work A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) addresses this issue through the fictional character of Judith, the imagined sister of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), raising important questions about women's presence in the art world. Woolf explores whether women, given equal education and opportunities, would achieve the same success as men, while revealing how societal norms limit women's creativity. This study examines the barriers women face in the arts through the lens of female artists' representations of women in their works, using a comparative perspective between Turkish and French modernization. It explores how female images in the works of pioneering Turkish women artists, such as Mihri Hanım, Müfide Kadri, and Celile Hanım, as well as French women artists, are addressed in social, cultural, and artistic contexts, and how the meanings of these images differ within the two distinct modernization processes. Georg Baselitz's (1938-) statement in 2013, "Women don't make very good painters," reflects a widespread view of women's marginalization in art. However, this study argues that women have made significant contributions to art in every era and that their works represent important reflections of the quest for social equality.