“The paintings in this book reproduce designs originally created by Charles Horgath and published in Women at Work (1996), a title in the Dover Clip Art series of royalty-free illustrations. Throughout the eighties and nineties, Dover published many "Ready-To-Use” spot illustrations collections, with titles like Men’s Heads, Senior Citizens, and Services, for both commercial and personal use. The tropes taken as inspiration are often benign–the cornucopia in Gourmet Foods comes straight from antiquity–but others, like Oriental Designs or Weddings (of white, straight couples), are clearly offensive, especially today. Depicting a wide range of professions, Women at Work is somewhat of an outlier, in its (at times) refreshingly enlightened vision of gender equality. It posits Firefighter and Mother as legitimate (and equal) roles for women in society, a notion that decades earlier would never have been accepted. Yet other professions, such as Masseuse, Manicurist, or Secretary, reaffirm stereotypes that continue to persist. The suggested spectrum of women’s roles on view here, as progressive as it may have seemed at the time, is revealing of the ways in which gender equality has both moved forward and stagnated over the recent decades.“