Women artists of the early modern period have finally arrived in major museum exhibitions, accompanied by an overdue expansion in the scholarship on gender. Though these trends tend to favor Italy, the early modern Low Countries have also garnered attention. Edited volumes—Sutton, 2018; Moran and Pipkin, 2019—have begun to fill a notable lacuna. Martha Moffitt Peacock's 2020 volume Heroines, Harpies, and Housewives rounds out the trio by undertaking a slightly different task—one focused on reception and manipulation more than creation or commission. Peacock opens her text by reminding the reader that already in the sixteenth century, writers commented with alarm on the power held by women in the Low Countries in particular.

Following in the footsteps of older scholars, she argues that images do not only describe existing gender roles but engage in creating, communicating, and critiquing the options available to women. What is new is her focus on the gendered audience. She draws attention to the fact that the scholarship on the topic tends to assume a patriarchal view, a male viewer, and a monolithic audience. Women, she proposes, likely would have viewed images differently. Partly due to the display of images within the home, they enabled and limited female viewers differently. Instead of merely moralizing messages encoded in symbolism and proverbs to be decoded, as argued by previous specialists in Dutch genre imagery, Peacock presents alternate understandings of archetypes in female imagery for a gendered audience. While acknowledging the challenges of establishing what might have constituted the female gaze, she argues persuasively that there was one.

The book is divided into four lengthy chapters, each of which could almost stand alone. The introduction, which sets up the theoretical stakes of her project, will be of interest to any reader interested in the gaze and reception or the study of early modern women, regardless of locale. Peacock identifies the role of women as one that is understudied specifically in the context of Dutch art; as noted above, this has improved notably since her manuscript was begun. Indeed, if any critique is to be leveled at this otherwise imposing and essential book, it is merely that each woman and the tropes discussed here in brief merit their own monographs, and in many cases, those monographs are being carried out by junior scholars elsewhere. The following chapters examine three broad archetypes: the eponymous heroine, harpy, and housewife. The second chapter examines heroines as a type presented in visual and literary sources, primarily focusing on portraiture and allegory. The chapter is further broken down into subtypes of heroine, including the citizen-warrior type, who stands up against tyrannical Spain; the allegorical maiden in the form of the Maid of Holland; the intellectual or poetess; and the maker.

All four are examined by situating images of women within the iconography of type: the citizen-rebel Kenau is compared positively with images of male military leaders. Rather than her seemingly masculine traits rendering her un-womaned, they make her the virtuous protectress through similarities with masculine heroes. Chapter 3 focuses on the enduring stereotype of the woman as a shrill, violent harpy as it plays out primarily in genre scenes and caricature. Rooted in a long northern European visual tradition of a world upside down, Peacock addresses the sometimes-humorous battle of the sexes that turns alternately misogynist and misandrist. Chapter 4 returns to a more positive view of women as a group by conceptualizing the housewife as an esteemed cultural role with complex loci of agency. By the end of the century, Peacock argues, the “harpy” type abated in favor of the more palatable but no less powerful “housewife.”

In all chapters, she examines both painted and printed works, which demonstrates the pervasiveness and efficacy of the tropes in question. Peacock's work whets scholarly appetites and opens doors for further inquiry while also providing a serious look at how images functioned from a different perspective than that of her predecessors. The terrain traversed in these chapters includes iconography, humor, biology, politics, religion, economics, education, and morality, and therefore will be of interest to a range of readers.