Though the name may sound ultra masculine, Whitney Chadwick is a woman as well as a respected academic (in America, predictably).
Studies in this area of art history almost inevitably run up against the bald fact that before the 20th century - certainly before the 19th - there were few women artists of real calibre and that the female achievement in visual art was incommensurate with women's achievement in literature. So, equally inevitably, the best sections are the most recent ones, since the New Woman has blossomed out in the field which previously had easily been dominated by men. Some of the visual products of American feminism already may look dated and tedious, but the past eighty years have undoubtedly been a Golden Age for women artists.