21 21st Century Women
“FEMINISM”…. How does the word sit with you? Does it make your toes curl? Do you visualise loose breasted hussies hurling flour bombs at the establishment? Where HAVE all the feminists gone?
– Annie Lennox for Alice’s 21 21st Century Women Book 2008
The paintings for 21 21st Century Women (2008) were begun while Alice was in her late twenties, when she first started working as an artist. They were inspired by a trip to the National Portrait Gallery in the early 2000s, which seemed overwhelmingly filled with room after room of paintings of men, with occasional women as wives or monarchs. Alice wanted to show inspiring women as powerful and influential and was frustrated and enraged by the Lady Macbeth' syndrome she saw in the popular press, where ambitious or high achieving women were routinely demonised and their clothes or personal choices mocked and attacked.
It's hard to imagine now how against the common tide Alice's 21/21 project was at the time. Being a feminist was extremely unfashionable and routinely ridiculed.
21 amazing women sat for Alice, all in a red chair: Baroness Scotland, the first ever woman Attorney General and the first black woman QC, responsible for numerous reforms. Annie Lennox, the groundbreaking musician, sang along to Ella Fitzgerald as Alice painted her. Dame Parveen Kumar, Professor and leading figure in the world of medicine, author of one of the world's most successful medical textbooks and President of the British Medial Association. Baroness Greenfield, Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology, the first woman to give the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and parliamentary cross bencher in the House of Lords speaking on education, drugs, and economic empowerment for women. All of the 21 were the first women to do their role and it was Alice's first body of work as an artist.
“We still think of a powerful man as a born leader and a powerful woman as an anomaly.”
– Margaret Atwood