Women in Revolt

The Tate Britain has just opened an amazing new exhibition called Women in Revolt.  It explores how female artists – whether by painting or photography or performance -  fuelled the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. 

I was born in 1974.  In the late 1960s, jobs were advertised by gender with men’s jobs generally far better paid than women’s and that was perfectly legal.  Women couldn’t borrow money from the bank or take out a mortgage without a man’s permission.  Welfare benefits were paid to husbands and there were no domestic violence shelters.  The first would not open until 1973.  The Equal Pay Act wasn’t enacted until 1975.

In 1970 more than 500 women attended the first of a series of national women’s liberation conferences.  The exhibition comments that this marked a second wave of feminist protest, more than fifty years after women’s suffrage.  Art was a crucial part of their activism

Wages for Housework was an international campaign which demanded recognition of unpaid domestic work, primarily done by women, as a way to combat oppression and help restructure social relations.

The 1970s were a time when the bunny girl was popular and I love the humour expressed by one performance artist who decided to subvert this by posing as a pregnant bunny girl in a cage at an agricultural show! You can hear her interviewed in episode 2 of Linsey Young’s brilliant mini series Women in Revolt.

The artwork entitled “Hegemony” by Suzan Swale is very striking.  The curator comments that the marriage of Charles and Diana was a major point of discussion for feminists who saw the “exaggerated ceremony and archaic gender norms it represented as the antithesis of the lives they were fighting for”. 

It really is the most extraordinary exhibition with so much to take in that I felt I could not possibly absorb it all in just one visit.  I will certainly be going back.

It runs until 7 April 2024 at Tate Britain.