Though the women Surrealists were introduced into the Surrealist circle
through their connections with the male artists,9 they managed to create a
place for themselves as artists. Through their self-portraits and their art
depicting their bodies,10they integrated their inner (that of the personal and
the psyche or subconscious) and outer (that of the physical, the persona, the
self that others are welcome to see) realities, which tend to be kept separated
within our culture.11

Frida Kahlo was one of the women artists of this period whose work most
depicts this transformation through the exploration of the her body. She
suffered from polio during childhood, and when she was 16, she was in a
bus accident that left her permanently and painfully injured.12 After this
accident, she began making art. Her art of her physical conditions is her
journey toward insight, reclaiming the physical or outward self in order to
gain access to the inner or subconscious reality. In Kahlo's painting, Henry
Ford Hospital, (fig. A) she depicted her miscarriage and inability to have
children. Surrounding her, bleeding in a hospital bed, is the fetus she lost, the
broken pelvis which caused the miscarriage, a machine, perhaps referring
to the bus accident, an orchid given to her by Rivera, and a snail's shell
symbolizing the slow process of the miscarriage. Kahlo used concrete, physical
symbols to express what was she was experiencing on the inside.13 Through
the integration of two very related selves, Kahlo and other women Surrealists
came to accept both their physical selves (outer) and psychic selves (inner) as
valid realities.