It has inspired and necessitated a revision of the story of the Surrealist movement. Since this book was first published, it has acquired the undeniable status of a classic among artists, art historians, critics, and cultural historians. Her book Women, Art and Society was first published by Thames and Hudson in 1990 and revised in 1997 it is now in its fifth edition.

Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, now revised with a new foreword by art historian Dawn Ades, contains a wealth of extracts from unpublished writings and numerous illustrations never before reproduced. Whitney Chadwick (born 28 July 1943) is an American art historian and educator, who has published on contemporary art, modernism, Surrealism, and gender and sexuality. Whitney Chadwick, author of the highly acclaimed Women, Art, and Society, interviewed and corresponded with most of the artists themselves in the course of her research. Their stories and achievements are presented here against the background of the turbulent decades of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and the war that forced Surrealism into exile in New York and Mexico. Leonora Carrington, Frida Kahlo, and Dorothea Tanning, among many others, embodied their age as they struggled toward artistic maturity and their own “liberation of the spirit” in the context of the Surrealist revolution. Surrealism, single-sex friendships and the trauma of the Second World War shaped the adult lives and work of many women, Chadwick writes at one point. This pioneering book stands as the most comprehensive treatment of the lives, ideas, and art works of the remarkable group of women who were an essential part of the Surrealist movement.

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