She cited an immensely popular Victorian poem by Coventry Patmore, an homage to the ideal woman as virtuous, devoted to her domestic duties and her husband’s pleasure, and docile despite her misery, loneliness, and abuse. Woolf defied that calling––and she urged the rest of us to do the same.

Nearly a century after Woolf’s warning, I set out with my camera to see how modern women are faring—in other words, if we’d managed to kill the angel, or at least shoo her out the door. To begin, I swore off the macho, predatory language of photography and pledged that instead of “shooting” or “capturing” my subjects, my subjects would become my “collaborators."

I called the process: “photo improv.”

Over many cups of coffee, phone calls, emails, and texts, my collaborators and I engaged in deep conversations, often over several months, about our lives. I learned histories through old snapshots and family lore, and new posts on social media. We talked and traded stories about relationships, power dynamics, worries, dreams, triumphs, and disappointments. I dug into the ways in which they’d arranged their physical spaces, the objects they hold dear, the cluttered bookshelves, the children’s rooms. Slowly the prompt for the picture emerged. Then, working together, we turned their home or garden or rooftop or backyard into a stage, moving set pieces, adding props, selecting wardrobe. My collaborators became actors acting out their own lives. What was revealed was always something none of us could have planned, or scripted. What was revealed was clear: the angel in the house is still very much alive, and she hasn’t much budged.

My journey in this series taught me that Woolf’s warning remains as relevant today as it was in the early 20th century—not such a surprise, especially given how the devastation of the pandemic year highlighted how so many women were left handling everything on the home front. For me, the pictures my collaborators and I created reflect the complexities of this insight; the ways in which our domestic spheres define us, for better and for worse.

The future? That’s a discussion I invite you to join.

Lanie McNulty, 2021