What does a woman look like?
The answers come to us before we even know to ask the question, argues art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt in “Look Like a Lady: Five Visual Tropes of Womanhood and How to See Ourselves Differently” (Brazos, 2026). The broad collection of images surrounding us accumulates into an internal “visual archive” through which we unconsciously learn how women ought to look and who we, as women, are supposed to be.
Weichbrodt argues that “Western visual culture repeats a limited set of identity stories,” which she organizes around five tropes: Venus, Vessel, Maiden, Mother, and Monster (4). She labels these limiting stories with nouns, but follows each with a counterstory expressed as a verb: Witnessing, Being, Moving, Cultivating, and Partnering. The nouns are “set and unyielding,” identities into which women must contort themselves (7). The verbs instead suggest movement, vocation, relationship, and what Weichbrodt calls “the beautiful spaciousness of being beloved by God” (8).
Learning to See
The brilliance of Weichbrodt’s framework is that once she names these stories, it becomes difficult not to see them. Consider the Vessel. Weichbrodt traces a long artistic tradition of using women’s bodies to personify everything from virtues and academic disciplines to nations and political ideals. Women become “containers for others’ meaning and messages,” symbols rather than particular people (56). In Eugene Delacroix’s 1830 painting “Liberty Leading the People,” for example, the men represent different kinds of individual Parisians, while the lone woman at the center must represent Liberty itself (69).
After reading this chapter and telling my daughter about the trope, she pointed out the burden placed on female characters in film and theater. Often they are cast to represent women as a whole, while male characters are afforded greater complexity and particularity. Real women carry the same burden: a woman’s success or failure, strength or weakness, too easily becomes evidence for what all women are like.
Or consider the Mother, whose virtue depends on her seemingly instinctive and inexhaustible devotion to her children. Weichbrodt exposes the anxiety underneath this ideal with a personal story of standing pregnant in Target, overwhelmed by baby products, only to have an older woman reassure her that motherhood would “come naturally” (148). But what happens if nurturing doesn’t feel effortless, or if a woman never becomes a mother at all? Here, too, the story is easy to recognize once Weichbrodt has named it: Parenting advice, social media content, and even Christian conversations can subtly make maternal instinct a measure of womanhood.
Perhaps most revealing is the Monster, the woman who violates the expectations established by the other four tropes. She may be too sexual or not attractive enough, too ambitious, too old, too powerful, insufficiently maternal. We need only read the comment thread of a woman expressing her opinion on the internet to know the Monster story is alive and well. Rather than contend with what she’s said, trolls call her ugly, unfeminine, or a bad wife or mother. The woman herself becomes someone to be dismissed. And I wish I were referring only to conversations outside Christian circles.
The church will benefit from careful attention to Weichbrodt’s argument. Images shape imaginations, and the stories women and men absorb don’t disappear when they enter the church. More troublingly, Christians can baptize these inherited assumptions, giving biblical authority to ideas Scripture itself does not require. Weichbrodt observes a “suspicious overlap between the teachings offered by some Christians and the guidance found in mainstream fashion magazines, celebrity profiles, TikTok videos, and so on” (5). When we describe certain personality traits, capacities, ambitions, appearances, or domestic instincts as inherently feminine, are we describing God’s design or repeating a cultural story old enough to feel natural?
For pastors especially, this is more than simply an academic question. These scripts shape real people in our pews: the single woman who wonders whether she is in a holding pattern; the infertile woman who has heard motherhood described as the height of feminine purpose; the capable woman who worries her ambition makes her threatening; the aging woman wondering if beauty has an expiration date. These stories about women also affect the men who see, disciple, employ, marry, minister, or work alongside them.
Weichbrodt also shows that these ideas have histories. What feels timeless often isn’t. The images came from somewhere, served particular cultural purposes, and changed as those purposes changed. Recognizing that history helps Christians distinguish more carefully between what Scripture actually says about women and the cultural assumptions we have layered on top of biblical truth.
Weichbrodt’s alternative to these tropes isn’t self-definition. Her counterstories are grounded in a Christian account of women as beloved image bearers, created alongside men to receive and steward God’s world. She returns throughout the book to repentance and faith, fruitfulness, reconciliation in Christ, and the shared work of men and women in the church. Readers looking for an extended biblical theology of womanhood will not find one here, but that is not Weichbrodt’s aim.
Entering the Art History Classroom
Weichbrodt is a professor of art and art history at Covenant College, so it’s unsurprising that she makes her case primarily through art history. That focus gives the book its distinctive strength and, for some readers, its greatest challenge.
I consider myself a creative, and I love beautiful things, but I have never taken an art history course. Many of the artists and works Weichbrodt discusses were entirely unfamiliar to me. But a good teacher shares more than information; she passes along a love for her subject. In this, Weichbrodt succeeds. Her vivid descriptions taught me to look more carefully. She provides her own drawings of the artworks she discusses, along with a section of full-color reproductions of some of the originals. I found myself flipping between her descriptions and her drawings, practicing the work of paying attention. Her expertise shows us something a more conventional book about contemporary womanhood could not: the images confronting women today did not originate on Instagram. The stylized photograph of a woman on a magazine cover is part of a long visual history.
Still, the tropes are broadly relatable, while the route Weichbrodt takes to demonstrate them is relatively specialized. A chapter may begin with an experience almost any woman recognizes — worrying about aging, feeling inadequate as a mother, becoming conscious of being looked at — and then spend considerable time tracing that experience through centuries of sculpture, painting, patronage, artistic convention, and social history.
Readers interested in art, cultural history, or visual studies may be captivated by precisely the sections where I occasionally became bogged down. Other readers may find themselves wishing Weichbrodt returned more frequently to the contemporary images that populate their own visual archives. As a young woman, I wasn’t measuring myself against a Renaissance Venus; I was measuring myself against the cover of Cosmopolitan. Weichbrodt convincingly helped me see the relationship between the two. At times, however, I wished she had lingered longer over what that relationship means for the ordinary woman scrolling her phone, shopping at Target, sitting in a Bible study, or raising a daughter.
That is less an objection to Weichbrodt’s project than a clarification of what kind of book this is. “Look Like a Lady” is not conventional Christian living with a little art sprinkled in for good measure. Weichbrodt invites readers into the art history classroom and asks them to learn to see.
Better Stories
Thankfully, learning to see is not the book’s final destination. “We also need more than just a critique of existing stories,” Weichbrodt writes. “We need new, different ones” (7). Her counterstories reject the constricting assumptions behind the original tropes. Witnessing, Being, Moving, Cultivating, and Partnering move women beyond static types to people acting within the freedom of belonging to God.
That makes “Look Like a Lady” a particularly useful conversation starter. We can ask where we recognize Venus, Vessel, Maiden, Mother, and Monster in the images surrounding us — and in ourselves. But the richer question for churches may be: How can we help one another inhabit better stories? We can notice and celebrate women bearing witness to what is true, receiving their lives as valued creatures rather than objects to be evaluated, moving toward Christ in repentance and faith, cultivating life and fruitfulness in and beyond biological motherhood, and partnering with men and women in the work God has given his church.
Weichbrodt may require some readers to work harder than others, but she rewards that work with a useful vocabulary for identifying stories so familiar we have mistaken them for reality and a richer visual imagination for recognizing the many forms faithful womanhood can take. Women need something far more spacious than another prescription for how to look like a lady: the freedom to live as women beloved by God.
Kendra Dahl is the women’s ministry director of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Encinitas, California, and the author of “A Place For You: Reframing Christian Womanhood.”