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In the early 1970s, women in the UK were second-class citizens who had few rights. A woman could not buy or own a property without a male guarantor. There was no equal pay, no maternity rights nor any kind of protections against sex discrimination.
There were no domestic violence shelters, no rape crisis centres and no childcare. And if they were ethnic minority or working class, women suffered even greater inequalities. Unsurprisingly in this climate, women artists – either contemporary or historical – were rarely seen in art galleries and cultural institutions.
It is against this backdrop that Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990 explores two decades of women’s art as activism, protest and fury at the societal dice that was were loaded against them. The touring Tate Britain exhibition, now at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, takes as its starting point the 1970 National Women’s Liberation Conference. This was an initiative designed to bring together feminist activists with the intention of developing a shared political outlook.
The exhibition brings together legions of courageous women who made political works of art about their lives, to tell the story of the feminist movements of the 1970s and the 1980s.
A crashing wave that swept up women artists, writers and academics – urging them to change the art world into something more socially responsible and inclusive – this feminist movement demanded equal opportunities, visibility of women artists and equal pay.
Set out chronologically, the show examines the social and political backdrop to the art that women were making in the 1970s and 1980s. More than 100 artists are showcased, reflecting the diverse range of voices that sought to challenge the status quo in art and society at the time. There are installation works as well as film, photography, painting, drawing, textiles, printmaking and sculpture, all created during a period of significant social and political upheaval.
The irreconcilable social and economic pressures of being a mother and a worker are explored in the installation Who’s Holding The Baby (1978-1980). This series of prints, by photography collective the Hackney Flashers, highlights the issues caused by the lack of governmental support for childcare.
Wandering around the Modern Two gallery feels like being a part of the protest. Art becomes activism and activism merges into art with black and white photographic documentation, and posters on the walls punctuated with striking paintings and slogans.
A founding member of the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent, Stella Dadzie’s watercolour Motherland (1984), depicts an estranged immigrant woman dressed in vivid colours. The painting was used as the cover for her book Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature. This important book examines the lives of black British women faced with socioeconomic challenges, sexual inequality and institutional racism.
Elsewhere, analogue video and installation works are arranged amid the display cases, crammed with photographs, pamphlets, journals and zines documenting the wide-ranging networks between groups of women.
The archival material meticulously chronicles a series of 1970s national women’s liberation conferences that demanded social change based on equality, reproductive rights and equal pay. This also branched out to include the Gay Liberation Front, Brixton Black Women’s Group (1973-1985), the British Black Artists movement of the 1980s, Greenham Common women, anti-nuclear war protest and environmental campaigning.
Changing times, changing art
The installation Women and Work, by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly (1973-75), documents the division of labour in industry. It incorporates photography and audio accounts of women’s experience of the workplace and Equal Pay Act. These issues are mostly unresolved today.
What has visibly changed is women taking their place in galleries as artists, in academia, engineering and science. But inequality is intersectional – meaning characteristics such as race, class, gender, sexuality, age and ability can overlap to intensify oppression or disadvantage – and thrives more than ever.
The screaming coming from Gina Birch’s looped Super 8 film, 3 Minute Scream (1977), projected on a gallery wall is a disturbing aural statement on defiance. It articulates a common feeling of the rage and frustration felt by many women at the time – and now.
Two decades of art activism, provocation, campaigning and progress are surveyed, acknowledging the collective commitment to changing art in terms of accepted historical tropes and media stereotypes – the idealised passive nude, the selfless mother, the loving housewife.
Sutapa Biswas’ oil painting self-portrait as the four-armed Hindu Goddess Kali in Housewives with Steak Knives (1985) comments on the prevailing art history canon and the Eurocentric nature of the female model. Jo Spence’s black and white print challenges the Madonna-like mother figure by nursing an adult male in Remodelling Photo History: Revisualisation (1981-82).
Helen Chadwick’s In the Kitchen photographic series (1977) which presents woman’s bodily and domestic space as sites of oppression is also part of Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood This currently touring show, curated by Hetti Judah, examines representation of motherhood in art history and now.
In Women in Revolt!, the private is political, everyday life is political, and the art of women’s struggle is political. Whether you want to reflect on art and politics, the history of women’s protest, the construction of gendered roles, or women’s fight for democratic rights and freedoms, it is a thought-provoking exhibition that simultaneously reveals how far women have come, and how little things have changed for many.
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Katarzyna Kosmala does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
