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In her founding essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” published in ARTnews in 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin explains that “such an outlook helps guard men from unwanted competition in their 'serious’ professional activities and assures them of 'well-rounded’ assistance on the home front, so they may have sex and family in addition to the fulfillment of their own specialized talent.” Starting from the dilemma between creation and procreation, private life and public life, social conventions and desire for emancipation that women artists must constantly negotiate, this article analyzes discourses and representations of the specific status of single women artists around 1900. While becoming a group visible and important enough to challenge the established gender order, women artists suffered, through discourses and representations (scientific, popular, literary), as within their private lives, from remarks comparing their life choices—when they did not correspond to a marital and reproductive ideal—with a form of non-suitability, emotional disease, or pathological deviance. Against this prevailing stigmatization, this article shows that representations changed slowly but surely. They found a climax among those women who managed to challenge this predominating discourse by fully embracing their choices in the public space.