27 December 1945 — 5 November 2010
By Ruthie Petrie
Rozsika (Rosie) Parker, who died at 64 of cancer, was a woman of extraordinarily diverse and groundbreaking achievements as feminist, art historian, psychotherapist and writer. Her published books, all of which remain in print, are major contributions in these fields.
Rosie was born in London, and spent her early years near Oxford, where she attended Wychwood School. In 1966 she began her degree in the History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute, graduating just as the old male hegemony was being challenged by a new wave of political and cultural feminism. She joined Spare Rib in late 1972, the year of the magazine’s launch, and until 1980, wrote, commissioned and edited the magazine’s arts coverage, as well as many of its mind/body features. In all of her work is a prefiguring and a stitching together of the themes which occupied her: women’s struggle for recognition within the arts establishment; a challenging of the division between fine art and the decorative arts – and women’s consignment to the latter; the tensions, sometimes productive, sometimes destructive in women’s creative work; and the ambivalences of motherhood. In writing that was assertive without being aggressive, she also tackled the invidious pressures on women, especially young women, to have perfect bodies. Indeed, the body as a site of conflict became one of her chief concerns.
In one issue of Spare Rib, she contributed three distinct pieces: an interview with Judy Clark about her ‘Body Works’ exhibition in which ‘matter out of place’ (a conceptual phrase from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger) – hair, nail parings, ear wax, menstrual blood – are meticulously laid out in display cabinets. Rosie’s and Judy’s fascinating exchange explored purity and status, the body as symbol, pollution, and shame. In her second article, a review of Anais Nin’s reveal-all Diaries, these same themes arose in Rosie’s assessment of Nin’s need to ‘intensify the personal and articulate the unconscious so that…introspection could become communication’. Her third contribution was a review of Posy Simmonds’ Chocolates Exhibition, in which ‘Simmonds draws chocolates as metaphors for women’s prescribed role; round, soft-centred chocolates…girls lay down hockey sticks to face a future as a commodity “looking good enough to eat” for general consumption.’
Rosie, Rose Ades, Marsha Rowe and Marion Fudger in the Spare Rib office
Rosie met Griselda Pollock in 1973 and from that meeting the Feminist Art History Collective, an informal group composed of artists, art historians and journalists was formed, seeking to create out of nothing a theoretical and critical framework for tackling the structural sexism of the art world and art history. Rosie and Griselda’s collaboration resulted in the pioneering Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (1981) which analysed the works of women in both the fine and decorative arts, as well as challenging the myths about women’s supposed creative inferiority. They then went on to a second work: Griselda describes Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement (1987) as ‘a homage to Rosie’s generous and constant attentiveness to every intervention by women from 1970-1985. The possibility of writing such a book lay in her collection of invitations, flyers, handouts – all the ephemera of the working critic and the dedicated feminist responding to and making the effort to see, to understand and write about this emerging culture of creative resistance.’
In 1984, Rosie published The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine. This radical history showed that embroidery, once the work of women and men, had been downgraded, and in being categorised as women’s work, ‘the same characteristics were ascribed to both…mindless, decorative and delicate’. The book was reissued in early 2010, with a new introduction by Rosie, to coincide with the stunning Quilts exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Reviewing it in the Guardian‘s Saturday Review section, Vera Rule conjectured that without it ‘there would likely be no Tracey Emin or Grayson Perry’.
In 1982, Rosie took herself in a new direction and began her training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation. In 2000 she joined the staff of WPF Therapy as a supervisor where she inspired trainees and staff with her lively, thoughtful, and reflective attitude. Her earlier experience and her own constantly inquiring mind enabled her to bring to her clinical work a rigorous yet aesthetic sensibility. Many of her patients attest to the transformations wrought by her insight and wisdom.
Her feminist politics pervaded this area of her work too. From 1993-2002, she was a clinical trustee of the Maya Centre, originally the Islington Women’s Counselling Centre, and contributed enormously to its evolution in its provision of free psychodynamic counselling to women on low incomes.
In the mid-80s Rosie had two children with Jungian analyst Andrew Samuels. She combined her psychotherapeutic training and her experience of motherhood in the daring and radical Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (1995) which holds a key place in the literature of mother-child relationships. As she explained, the nub of her position was that ‘A mother needs to know herself, to own up to the diverse, contradictory, often overwhelming feelings evoked by motherhood. It doesn’t matter whether she stays at home, goes out to work, is partnered or single. Only a mother who can face her own inner turbulence can make sense of her child’s. It’s only by accepting that at times you are a bad mother, that you can ever be a good mother.’
Cover of the first edition, 1995
Among Rosie’s other published works were her elegant study of Virginia Woolf’s struggle to be both a writer and a woman, ‘Killing the Angel in the House; Creativity, Femininity and Aggression’, published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis (1998). ‘Body Hatred’ in the British Journal of Psychotherapy (2003) is now regarded as seminal among experts in the clinical field of such ever-increasing and recalcitrant problems.
Her enthusiasm for writing led her to do an MA in Creative Writing at Middlesex University. She graduated with Distinction in 2002, and out of her course came two novels and short stories, as yet unpublished. Gardening, and the cultivation of roses, were also Rosie’s passions and The Anxious Gardener (2006) is an engagingly wry account of her pleasures and travails. Her essay, ‘Unnatural History: Women, Gardening and Femininity’ is included in The Culture and Politics of Gardens, edited by Noel Kingsbury and Tim Richardson (2005).
Rosie was an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. She was to have delivered a paper on body dysmorphic disorder to a research seminar when her illness was diagnosed.
Throughout her illness, Rosie worked to complete her manuscript, Critical Looks, a study of the roots of appearance anxiety and our understanding of that anxiety.
Rosie’s beauty, grace and elegance were remarked upon by everyone who knew her – and her friends were legion. It was always a joy to spend time in her company. She had an infinite capacity to listen and to respond, and she did so with such thoughtfulness and tact, with such nuanced, incisive, and illuminating analysis. Her questing and always original mind made all her talk and observations so vital. And her exchanges were laced with the most wonderful wit, irreverence and self-mockery.
She is survived by her son and daughter.
This is a longer version of an obituary that appeared in The Guardian on 21 November 2010
By Jo Ryan
Rozsika (Rosie) Parker, who died of cancer aged 64, exemplified through her life and her work the exciting creativity of modern feminist thought and practice. She wrote several groundbreaking classics in the fields of art history and psychoanalysis, all of which remain in print, and which are widely used on academic and psychotherapy courses. She wrote with great clarity and nuance, but accessibly, always committed to reaching as wide an audience as possible. Much of her work explores and remakes the dynamic tensions between the personal and the political, the inner subjective world and that of external social realities. She was also a person of great wit, elegance and kindness.
Rosie was brought up in Elsfield, near Oxford, where she went to Wychwood school. Her family were of British/Hungarian Jewish descent. She graduated in History of Art from the Courtauld Institute in 1969. She joined the new feminist magazine, Spare Rib, in 1972, becoming the editor for its arts coverage and contributing many of its mind/body features. It was at Spare Rib that, as Professor Griselda Pollock writes, “…. she single-handedly pioneered a way of analysing both contemporary art by women and the art world’s structural sexism.” Through her reviews of artworks and artists in Spare Rib, and her participation in the Feminist Art History Collective, Rosie began to elaborate a framework for theoretical criticism of the representations of women in art, and the socio-historical conditions under which women artists worked. Drawing on this, she and Pollock together wrote Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (1981) and edited Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement (1987). One of Rosie’s greatest achievements, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984, 2010) is a detailed history of embroidery from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. In it she traces the shifting notions of femininity and also “ the inherent duality in embroidery”, by which women were on the one hand educated into the feminine ideal, their work proof of its attainment, and on the other, making a creative space of their own, a vehicle for individuality and resistance. Reissued to coincide with the recent exquisite quilt exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, this book made a crucial contribution to the contemporary shift from seeing textiles as craft to their recognition as art.
Rosie decided to become a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, training at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (WPF) and qualifying in 1985. She established a flourishing psychotherapy practice, and in 2000 she joined the staff at WPF, as a supervisor of trainees and others. She also became a clinical trustee to the Maya Centre in London, where women on lower incomes could have access to free psychodynamic therapy in ways that recognised their difficult circumstances. In all these arenas Rosie’s contributions were marked by her outstanding capacity to listen to and engage with others, her liveliness and humour in debate, and the clarity and depth of her thought.
Out of her own experience as a mother combined with her psychoanalytic and political understandings, Rosie wrote Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (1995, 2005). This book speaks to professionals and to mothers themselves and quickly became, as it remains, an inaugural classic in the burgeoning field of maternal studies , and also in the wider psychoanalytic field. In it she critiques the predominantly child centred nature of psychoanalytic theory about mothering, and argues for the vital importance of mothers being able to acknowledge, and not feel ashamed of, their more negative feelings towards their children. She argues that this recognition of maternal subjectivity and ambivalence, the seesaw of love and hate, deepens rather than impedes the capacity to mother, and helps avoid thoughtless actions. She criticised the too frequent tendency to blame mothers, recognising both the immense pressures they were under to conform to a cultural ideal of mothering, and also the consequent propensity to shame. Rosie brought together her art historical perspective with her psychoanalytic understanding of ambivalence and creativity in a seminal and hugely original paper in the prestigious International Journal of Psychoanalysis, ‘Killing the Angel in the House’: Creativity, Femininity and Aggression (1998).
Rosie extended the theme of shame in her article in the British Journal of Psychotherapy (2003) on patients suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (extreme hatred of the appearance of parts of one’s body). She saw shame as both generating the condition and maintaining the secrecy around it, a despairing stasis. It is testimony to her empathy, insight and subtlety of approach that she was able, through therapy, to help alleviate such suffering. In 2009 she delivered a major paper, “The Psychotherapist’s Shame” to colleagues at WPF and in the same year she was made an honorary research fellow in the Centre for Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, London. In Critical Looks, the manuscript she was working on throughout her illness, she explores the links between individual lived experience and cultural formations in the more everyday negative body images that both men and women can be prone to.
Rosie was also a passionate and talented gardener. In The Anxious Gardener (2006) she wittily and astutely portrays, with a light-hearted psychoanalytic touch, the emotional life of the gardener, in her relationship to her plants and to imagined others.
She is survived by her son and her daughter.
This is a longer version of an obituary by Jo Ryan which appeared in The Times.