Upon entering the historic 1834 home, visitors first encountered the parlor. Originally the site of formal social entertaining, the Dear Womanhouse artists responded to the architectural intent of this space by exploring themes of women’s social standing. These include standards of how women should behave in public, courtship, aging, the persistent gap between the sexes in wages, opportunity and recognition, the power plays between differing paradigms between the sexes, and the common slang in use today which continues to demean women as sexual objects.