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140 / The New York Art Networkother concepts of sexual identity. Like Alfred Kinsey in 1949, she argued thatsexual orientation was not stable: “Most people are convinced that they . . . are,by nature, heterosexuals, homosexuals or bisexuals . . . It is my belief that thesesexual categories ƒx an idea in mind that need not be ƒxed but can be extremely„uid.” 52 In her view, the answer to sexual confusion was to look withinto ƒnd the spiritual wholeness of one’s inherent androgyny. Many feminists,such as Carolyn Heilbrun, were initially drawn to this argument. 53 But counterargumentssoon emerged. Within feminism, Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology(1978) attacked the notion of androgyny as expressing “pseudo-wholeness inits combination of distorted gender descriptions...” 54Unlike their male counterparts, many of Neel’s female androgynes appearasexual, and the very contrasts between them indicate that the ideal of androgynyhad not erased questions of “difference.” For instance, the redoubtable, elegantOberlin College art historian Ellen Johnson (1976, ƒg. 132) is reducedto an old maid schoolteacher. 55 The slightly later portrait of Marisol (1981, ƒg.133), though more forceful, is still asexual. Like her sculptures, she appears tobe made of wood, and, with her high cheekbones and straight black hair, shebecomes a “wooden Indian,” inscrutable, unbending. For this group of womenborn well before mid-century, androgyny is equated with repression, suggestingthat the sitter had been forced to choose between marriage and career.For the younger generation, Neel permitted a wider but still primarilyrather negative range of meanings. Louise Lieber, Sculptor (1971, ƒg. 134) representsone point along the scale: the „eshless ideal of beauty enforced by contemporaryfashion. An artist, Lieber appears to have consciously sculpted herbody into a cultural artifact of chic. The angular shoulder emerging from her“toga” references the image of the sensual half-draped female from GreekKore to Renoir, but it is now reduced, by design, to bone rather than „esh.This ideal, which refuses the woman any material reality at all, gave feministsone basis for questioning whether slim Modern Woman was a positive goal. 56In 1977, Neel painted the prominent feminist art historian Mary D. Garrard(ƒg. 135), the young counterpart to Ellen Johnson. The second presidentof the Woman’s Caucus for Art, the Washington-based art historian wouldsubsequently co-edit two important anthologies of art historical writings thatserved to “question the litany.” Garrard, in tan pants, navy pea coat, and rakishknit cap, is a model of the androgyne as a militant feminist activist. Seatedsquarely in her chair, Garrard appears to converse with the viewer, while thehorizontal of Garrard’s interlaced ƒngers, a gesture Neel highlights with thered scarf, speaks of calm rationality and balance as well as of a defensive wall orbarrier, of political equality as well as protection of privacy. In Lieber androgynyis a sign of oppression; in Garrard it signals a political and sexual liberationthat must as yet be carefully guarded.