Night gained practical and philosophical importance in early modern Europe as lighting technologies became increasingly affordable and urban growth stimulated habits of staying up later and doing more after dark. This study poses the question of how night might have been uniquely important for early modern women throughout this process of nocturnalization. I propose that the nighttime was a period when women were freer to engage in personal creative activities and that many artistically inclined women were inspired by the growing connection made in the early modern period between night, emotion, and creativity. Today, women still must work longer hours to make the same pay as their male peers and women continue to take on a larger burden of household labor. Looking backward, women in the 1600s were already attuned to night's ability to extend the day and provide a refuge for personal creativity. When I began this research two prominent examples emerged from the visual art of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century: the nocturnal imagery of Judith Leyster (1609–1660) in the first part of the 1600s and that of Gesina ter Borch (1633–1690) later in the century. My larger research delves into the expanding nocturnal experiences of urban societies in seventeenth-century Northern Europe and how artists and writers reflected and informed this new nighttime culture. For artists in the 1600s, tales of lost masterpieces of nocturnal art from antiquity coincided with new innovations in chiaroscuro lighting and explorations of nighttime imagery by Caravaggio, Rubens, and their artistic circles.