i-xxii Front matter.qxd - Brandeis Institutional Repository

Truth Unveiled / 157others were doing them,” 29 Raphael Soyer must be credited for introducingthe subject as early as the 1950s. Soyer also came to the pregnant nude matterof-factly:he could hardly help but notice that many of his models becamepregnant, and simply decided to continue painting them in that condition.However, because Soyer’s pregnant nudes retain the air of the studio, they occupythat netherworld in which personality is suspended (Nude, 1952, ƒg. 151).In comparison, Neel’s ƒrst pregnant nude, Pregnant Maria, from 1964 (ƒg.152), seems to take pleasure in the viewer’s possible discomfort. The difference,as always, between her nudes and those of her urban realist contemporarieslies in the speciƒcity she gives her models, who are as re„ective of theirperiod and social status as Soyer’s models are detached from theirs.In 1964, when Pregnant Maria was painted, the birth control pill was becomingwidely available, 30 and the ƒrst rumblings of the 1960s rebellions,emerging from the counterculture of the 1950s, had begun. As with NadyaNude, Neel again references Manet’s Olympia, in this instance borrowing herprototype’s look of aloof indifference not simply to her nakedness but to thedisplay of her pregnancy. The pill had promised sexual pleasure freed fromfear of the consequences, and at the very historical moment that sex and reproductionwere disconnected, Neel reunited them. Even in the era of the pill,after all, pregnancy remained a “basic fact of life” resulting from the sexual act,a causal relationship suppressed in the history of erotic imagery. In BlancheAngel Pregnant from 1937 (ƒg. 153), Neel had depicted a friend who, like herself,had chosen to bear children without the legal sanction of marriage. Thesimilarity in their facial expressions suggests that Neel considered Maria to bethe representative of the next generation of openly rebellious bohemianwomen. Taut and well-proportioned, Maria’s body projects a sexual autonomycomparable to that of the nude portrait of her daughter Isabetta, painted thirtyyears earlier.By the 1960s, Freud’s postulate of women’s “weak libido” was being overturnedby sexual research. In The Human Sexual Response (1966) Masters andJohnson found that women are multiorgasmic and that their bodies are possessedof numerous erogenous zones, as opposed to just one. Dr. Mary JaneSherfey’s contemporary ƒndings suggested that the female sexual response,rather than diminishing during pregnancy, actually increased. 31 With Freud’sauthority on the defensive, women’s sexuality could be pictured differently.Neel painted Pregnant Maria the year after Betty Friedan’s The FeminineMystique was published and the year that the word sex was added to Title VIIof the Civil Rights Act. Because the second wave of feminism was directedprimarily at workplace equity, just as earlier it had narrowed its agenda tosuffrage, pregnancy was increasingly seen as inimical to liberation. As SusanBrownmiller wrote in 1975, “Pregnability . . . has been the basis of female