As a girl and young woman, I saw these stories venerated in art historical objects and reiterated in popular culture. The images themselves might have looked different, but the underlying scripts were the same, over and over and over again. And, though they sometimes carried a different inflection, the stories also appeared in the evangelical culture of my youth. These scripts became so familiar that they felt essential, natural, and inescapable.

Studying art history taught me that these visual stories are, in fact, stories. They are scripts that have an origin, that have served social purposes, and that make certain assumptions about race and social class. Learning more about the histories of these tropes drained them of some of their power.

But studying art history also did something else: it introduced me to other visual stories of womanhood. At first I thought the counterstories were only found in contemporary art, from artists who were actively challenging the past. Eventually, however, I realized that alternative stories were there waiting for me, sometimes forgotten, sometimes in plain sight. These artworks made by or for women were not just inversions or reclamations of established tropes. Instead, I found counterstories that echoed God’s heart for his children and expanded my own imagination of womanhood.