“We’re not Ugly, We’re not Beautiful, Just Angry”
So says one of the banners on display at the ‘Women in Revolt’ Exhibit ‘ which showed until 7th April ’24, at the Tate Britain Gallery, London. This exhibit displayed art and activism within the UK Second Wave Feminist movement from 1970 to 1990s within its social & political setting.
The collection features the work of more than 100 women artists, some very beautiful & creative & sometimes provocative artworks, archival material, as well as a record of events and ‘Happenings’ held at the time. Displays illustrate the range of perceptions of feminist women as being hairy-legged beings, bra-burners, dykes, the ‘too ugly to get or keep a man’ adage, to the slightly saner perception of Marxist thought, which acknowledged that the Capitalist state relied on the unpaid housework of women to maintain the family unit, but that current socialist movements did very little to address or change this dynamic.
Despite the Equal Pay Act 1970 in Britain, huge issues still existed around child care, labour union chauvinism, a lack of safe refuges for victims of domestic violence (namely women & children), sexist advertising, violent pornographic images, the vulnerability of night-time office cleaners (often non-paleface), and more generalised issues of racialism and economic deprivation—which included child benefit legislation that discriminated against Black families, the non-visibility given to tortured Algerian women, repressed Asian Muslim women, those struggling with handicaps.
So says one of the banners on display at the ‘Women in Revolt’ Exhibit ‘ which showed until 7th April ’24, at the Tate Britain Gallery, London. This exhibit displayed art and activism within the UK Second Wave Feminist movement from 1970 to 1990s within its social & political setting.
The collection features the work of more than 100 women artists, some very beautiful & creative & sometimes provocative artworks, archival material, as well as a record of events and ‘Happenings’ held at the time. Displays illustrate the range of perceptions of feminist women as being hairy-legged beings, bra-burners, dykes, the ‘too ugly to get or keep a man’ adage, to the slightly saner perception of Marxist thought, which acknowledged that the Capitalist state relied on the unpaid housework of women to maintain the family unit, but that current socialist movements did very little to address or change this dynamic.
Despite the Equal Pay Act 1970 in Britain, huge issues still existed around child care, labour union chauvinism, a lack of safe refuges for victims of domestic violence (namely women & children), sexist advertising, violent pornographic images, the vulnerability of night-time office cleaners (often non-paleface), and more generalised issues of racialism and economic deprivation—which included child benefit legislation that discriminated against Black families, the non-visibility given to tortured Algerian women, repressed Asian Muslim women, those struggling with handicaps.
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Two paintings (shown here as thumbnails), ‘Mother & Child at Breaking Point’ (Maureen Scott, 1970) and ‘Wages for Housework’ (Monica Sjoo, 1975) illustrate issues within the domestic world of women; childcare, who’s left holding the baby, the isolation of being home all day, unpaid labour, and the blurring of working and caring--not the usual subject matter of museum paintings.
A proliferation of newsletters, magazines, leaflets like Red Rag, Spare Rib, Shrew, Jolt, Shocking Pink, Mama, Banshee, and Drastic Measures, as well as RAS (Rock against Sexism) & RAR (Rock against Racism), which challenged stereotypes in the music industry, provided much archival support for this multiplicity of feminist issues--this was networking 1970s style & providing valuable information of where to get help, and also advertising upcoming events.
The anger wasn’t all London-based. There were art activist events, demonstrations, happenings, Resource Centres set up, picketing at political conferences, anti-war & anti-nuclear demonstrations, held in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and Nottingham, Scotland, often bringing to the fore, issues for Black women & Asian & Indian women. Women artists’ names never seen in the popular press were on all the walls here.
A still highly relevant issue, now known as the ‘Take back the Night’ events, is typified in the print "Sweep Men of the Streets" ( from the Lenthall Road Workshop Collective, 1980.
A still highly relevant issue, now known as the ‘Take back the Night’ events, is typified in the print "Sweep Men of the Streets" ( from the Lenthall Road Workshop Collective, 1980.
Some striking visual images were shown; ranging from a cheeky billboard pic that says ’These dykes are gonna walk all over you’, to a large black/white photo of a bride still in her white wedding dress cooking dinner with the title ‘Is there life after marriage?’; a photo sequence entitled ,‘Brides against the Bomb’ and when the bomb collapses in a flurry of confetti flowers she says ‘the happiest day of my life’ –this made me think of flowers being put in gun barrels during Vietnam anti-war demos.
An amusing button saying ‘At first you sink into his arms’ but soon ‘you will be up to your arms in his sink’ was bittersweet. One of the more provocative images of the times was Helen Chadwick’s image of a woman trapped inside a cooker, part of a series entitled ‘In the Kitchen' (1977) with other sculptures,
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"In the Kitchen" (1977) by Helen Chadwick |
which including herself in a washing machine—thought-provoking, a new way to see the job title of washerwoman. The show was also dominated in the background by Gina Birch’s ‘3 Minute Scream’ (1977), the sound of a woman screaming on a continuous sound loop endlessly
After this heavy dose of provocative and political art, beautiful and creative as it is, and after my walkaround, having absorbed some of these messages, so relevant, timely and clearly displayed, I felt an energy rush and just wanted to seize a big paintbrush and pot of red paint and write on the walls of the gallery, ‘Some things haven’t changed yet!'
Penny was graduated from Smith College ( Massachusetts ) with a degree in Art & Architectural History. She is interested in all things cosmic and terran, and currently studying law via an online course.