It is an open secret that many museums, large and small, owe the strength of their collections to women patrons, yet few scholars to date have studied women as serious art collectors and tastemakers. Biographies exist of individuals from Catherine the Great to Peggy Guggenheim, but the collection and arrangement of beautiful things was a more widespread pastime among women than biographers suggest. The most deeply historicized, contextualized study of women patrons thus far concerns the Renaissance; we still have much to learn about how gender, art, politics, and collecting interrelated in the modern era. It seems entirely appropriate, therefore, for Dianne Sachko Macleod to look for female art collectors in the nineteenth-century United States, another time and place in which economic and political power found public expression through the visual arts. As the rising captains of industry—the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts—erected ornate homes and cultural institutions, where were the women? How did women find the means to penetrate the masculine public sphere? How did they gain the authority to help shape American culture?

Macleod’s book is a collection itself: a compendium of women who sought a sense of self through the art objects they amassed. She resists presenting the celebrated examples (like Isabella Stewart Gardner, Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, and Mabel Dodge) as isolated exceptions. Unquestionably, even the less famous figures also represent the elite classes as these women possessed the disposable income necessary to travel broadly and to cultivate and indulge a taste for fine art. Even so, they comprise a broader group portrait of collectors than one usually encounters. Through their lives, Macleod traces the arc of women’s involvement in collecting. What originated as a solitary pursuit in the early nineteenth century blossomed into a Gilded Age social performance. It then transformed gender expectations at the turn of the twentieth century.

Macleod’s central argument concerns the personally “liberating effect” that the practice of collecting had for these women. In Macleod’s conception, collecting art was a sort of consumption that led to psychological and emotional empowerment. Women played and fantasized through their art collections (as others did through fashion, books, motion pictures, and other products of consumer culture). Whereas market-driven mass consumption might co-opt women’s desires, the purchase and control of art objects ultimately gave women access to “the male discourse of possessive individualism” (45). Some then projected their emancipation outward to the built environment, the staging of world’s fairs, suffrage advocacy, and philanthropy. Their assertion of masculine prerogative met with resistance, but it also became part of the continuous, malleable, reciprocal process of making gender.

Macleod finds unsurprisingly few antebellum women collectors. Her first chapter focuses on Eliza Bowen Jumel who returned from a sojourn in France with 229 paintings in 1816 and promptly exhibited her art collection to the public in New York. The transgressive Jumel fits neither the masculine nor the feminine paradigm for her day. She rejected the “scientific or teleological principles” (23) of contemporary male collectors like Thomas Jefferson, but equally resisted a focus on domestic objects like Abigail Adams; guided by her own aesthetics, she preferred Old Master paintings. Such blurring of gender boundaries and styles recurs repeatedly among Macleod’s case studies. She often describes her subjects as combining the attributes and styles of both genders. Katherine Dreier, for instance, a century later “combined the male habit of documenting and classifying the objects she owned with a feminine regard for domestic display” (147). Jumel also set a dramatic standard for female actualization, rising from abject poverty and unwed motherhood to become a wealthy society matron.

Women collectors began by adorning the domestic interiors in which they were sequestered. Their practice fulfilled prescriptions of proper womanliness, which assumed an affinity between femininity and decoration. But it also provided an imaginative escape from domesticity and laid the foundation of later shocks to gender ideology. By the Gilded Age, a slowly growing number of female art collectors had developed a “signature style” (91). These women were less likely than their male counterparts to segregate paintings and sculpture from decorative arts. As at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court, the density and diversity of objects they exhibited created a more homelike atmosphere than men’s typically stratified style of display.

Despite their domestic origins, these collections met with public hostility, much as in Jumel’s generation. The very irrationality and innate emotionalism that made women ideal consumers seemed to invalidate them as serious art patrons. Mary Sexton Morgan, for instance, was condemned for supposed mental instability, of which her profligate habits of consumption were seen as a symptom. Yet in the postbellum period, women exercised increasing power in the art market which dealers could not afford to ignore. And although cultural tension persisted between those who saw decorative objects as mere bric-a-brac and those who valued objects as a means of aesthetic and sensual education, the debate did not fall into neatly gendered lines. Men found themselves drawn to collecting decorative arts (sometimes, like Phoebe Hearst’s and Louise Mackay’s sons, at their mothers’ knees). Magnates like J. P. Morgan and Charles Freer managed the stress of business by caressing their soothing specimens of jade and porcelain.

By the end of the nineteenth century, women’s “individual fantasy and self-realization” had burst the confines of the home. Some art matrons in major U.S. cities put their collections at the service of social and political causes. Women harnessed the “symbolic power of art and architecture” at world’s fairs and other public venues. For example, before becoming president of the National Woman’s Party (in 1921), Alva Belmont Vanderbilt used Marble House as the site of the Conference of Great Women in 1914; its Chinese teahouse housed many suffrage rallies.

Even the early twentieth-century backlash could not eject women from the public sphere. By then, Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Juliana Force, and Hilla Rebay were infusing modern museums with women’s perspectives as well as their art collections. In the era of modernism, gender categories seemed to collapse; men like Frank Alvah Parsons took over the field of interior decoration, and Abigail Rockefeller built a Bakelite-walled room to display the modernist prints that her tapestry-and-porcelain-collecting husband hated. The book’s final chapter follows Mabel Dodge Luhan, Claribel and Etta Cone, Emily Chadbourne, and others who found refuge, personal freedom, and inspiration in Europe. Gertrude Stein’s magnetic salon, replete with works by Cézanne and Picasso, epitomized their self-confident defiance of convention. Although the home remained inextricably linked to women’s gender identity, art continued to provide women with “a source of empowerment . . . an entrée into the public sphere and a venue for the shaping of culture” (220).

Macleod faced notable difficulties in researching her subject. Identifying and tracking specific paintings and objects in women’s collections (especially for the early nineteenth century) proved elusive. Having scoured official records and accounts, Macleod searched elsewhere for the essence of women’s collecting. Her interdisciplinary approach ultimately relies most on psychoanalytic theory, especially the concept of transitional objects and the well-established psychological significance of play. Macleod argues persuasively that collecting could be imaginative, creative play, from a manifestation of desire to an act of reverie. Autobiographical writings reveal the intimate, tactile relationship women (and many men) had with their art objects. Macleod also incisively reads visual evidence of how women arranged and displayed their collections. She effectively contrasts photographs of interiors, such as Cornelia Stewart’s drawing room (ca. 1883) and Alexander Stewart’s picture gallery (ca. 1883) (ills. 26–27), to deconstruct masculine and feminine stylistic elements. Images record how others saw women collectors as well, from the female figure rapt with emotion in Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s Lady in Gold (ca. 1912) to the discerning woman art buyer portrayed in Ignacio de Leon y Escosura’s Samuel Putnam Avery in His Gallery (1876). Indeed, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects is a sumptuous volume that vividly illustrates the sensuous dimensions of its subject.

At times, however, Macleod’s psychological profiles of her subjects will discomfit empiricists. Pure fantasy life leaves tenuous traces at best. How can we be certain of the reason that Etta Cone collected odalisques? In Mary Morgan’s case, there are only posthumous published accounts of how she treated her things. Knowing how the press pilloried and parodied other women collectors, how can we trust their testimony to tell us about Morgan’s authentic “sense of self”?

An underdeveloped aspect of the study is the role of class and race in collecting. Did collecting provide a route to emancipation that women of lesser means could somehow follow? Did other kinds of collections, like the much disparaged china craze, similarly empower middle-class women? Kristin Hoganson’s recent book Consumers’ Imperium (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007) suggests much in this regard as it explores the meanings that American women ascribed to foreign household objects, foodstuffs, and fashion.

Furthermore, how did collecting serve other ends beyond aesthetics and personal fulfillment? One should take into account the ideologically conservative impulses that informed Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s Vinland in Newport, Rhode Island, for example; a reverence for Scandinavian origin stories not coincidentally elbowed out the Italian Columbus as “discoverer” of the Americas. Macleod might have considered nineteenth-century appropriations of decorative art from around the world as a form of imperialism as well. Only in the epilogue, which explores the elite’s nostalgia for a romanticized past, does she touch upon the ways that art collecting legitimized class status. Yet liberation often comes at others’ expense, as seen in recent scholarship on feminism and racism from the nineteenth century forward.

At least one woman collector in this book yearned for a different sort of actualization. Mabel Dodge Luhan found herself captivated by the Pueblo’s “lack of interest in material goods” (218). Macleod writes that, “In Taos, she attempted to throw off the shackles of Western possessive individualism” (218), the very principle that had seemed to grant women collectors their desire of self-actualization. Was there a worm in the apple? It is tempting to read women’s bequests of their objets d’art to museums in this light. Although they birthed their collections in the domestic sphere, these women did not pass them on to daughters or nieces. Instead many founded institutions where the objects could educate a broader public. Did an ethos of collectivism spring out of their possessive individualism?

Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects will captivate scholars in many fields, from material culture and American studies to women’s and gender studies. This is not only a book whose physical beauty will grace the shelves; Macleod raises fascinating questions about the connection between art and subjectivity. She makes a convincing case that we should not underestimate either women’s cultural influence or the power with which objects conduct human feelings.