Pedagogy and Income Inequality: Women Artists in California after WWII

Art education in universities, teacher’s colleges, and community college settings dramatically expanded after World War II, entering what has been called a “Golden Age” in terms of its fast growth and record enrollments. Despite such expansions, women artists routinely faced precarity and difficulty in securing ongoing paid work as art professors throughout California during the 1950s and 1960s. This paper examines the growing body of evidence that early forms of adjunct teaching labor were the norm and not the exception for the state’s women artists.