The first time the Women’s Liberation Movement landed squarely in the imagination of the British public was 1970. Twenty-two million people watched the Miss World host Bob Hope on TV being flour-bombed by protesters, after he joked that he was “very happy to be here at this cattle market” of contestants.
The next 20 years would see women invent equally headline-grabbing ways to call out the patriarchy. In Leeds in 1977, when police told local women to stay indoors after dark during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, protesters took to the streets to Reclaim the Night. When US nuclear missiles were stored at Greenham Common, Berkshire, in 1981, a group of Welsh women established a peace camp that would last for two decades. The night that Margaret Thatcher’s government passed the notorious Section 28 law in 1988, banning the “promotion” of homosexuality, lesbian protesters abseiled into the House of Lords.
Yet most work done by female activists at the time did not have a big public stage. This month, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–90, will open at London’s Tate Britain, and shockingly enough, it is the first major museum survey to look back at what happened as feminism gathered steam in the country. It packs in more than 100 artists and collectives who pioneered work touching on everything from equal pay to menstruation taboos, the goddess movement to sex work. On the lawn outside, meanwhile, you can literally chew over the issues in Bobby Baker’s recreation of her 1976 interactive sculptural installation Edible Family in a Mobile Home, with a lifesize Mum, Dad and kids made from garibaldi biscuits and meringue.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the murder of Sarah Everard and the threat to abortion rights across the world, the timing couldn’t feel more urgent. It is also a reminder of what previous generations were up against. Marital rape was not recognised as a crime in the UK until 1991 and it was only in 1975 that a married woman no longer needed her husband’s permission to get a bank loan. Maternity leave wasn’t available to all working women until 1993, which meant that for many, getting pregnant meant losing your job. “It starts with a lot of disparate women getting angry, talking back and rising up,” says the exhibition’s curator, Linsey Young.
Women in Revolt! takes an expansive look at these rebel years that is less about landmark artworks than the collective energy. Away from the boys’ club of museums and galleries, this energy percolated through experimental spaces for living and working, from women’s co-operatives to traditional family homes, and saw women making innovative work in pioneering forms such as video and performance, manifestos and social schemes. “Most female artists had no expectation art institutions would pay attention, so they just had to make it happen in a different way,” says Young.
Margaret Harrison’s journey is a case in point. A year after she joined the Miss World protest dressed as “Miss Lovable Bra” (wearing a black plastic chest with orange fur nipples), her first solo exhibition at Motif Editions Gallery in London was closed after one day on grounds of indecency. Its satirical drawings showed pin-up girls as obvious commodities, straddling giant bananas or splayed in ice-cream cones, consumable as the food they were paired with. What riled the police, though, was her depiction of Playboy magnate Hugh Hefner as a breasty Bunny. “The art market was nonexistent for people like me,” Harrison says. “But the notion that you could do things outside a gallery brought people together.”
After co-founding the London Women’s Liberation Art Group and then the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, Harrison was moved to look “at people’s material conditions”. With fellow feminist lodestars Mary Kelly and Kay Hunt, in 1973 she began recording the experiences of female workers in a south-east London metal box factory to uncover the real-world impact of the Equal Pay Act of 1970, which had been one of the women’s movement’s key demands. Learning that the workers were often scared to speak out in case they were sacked, they discovered how little had changed.
London in the 1970s is remembered for its grim living conditions and buzzing creative community, a time when off-the-beaten-track areas included Notting Hill and Camden Town; empty buildings might be squatted or turned into artists’ studios. Collectives of women formed across the city, such as the Hackney Flashers, whose photographs captured working mothers’ day-to-day lives in the East End, or the See Red Women’s Workshop, who created agitprop posters for progressive causes and once rattled the National Front so much it trashed their print studio. “We did not see ourselves as part of the art world at all,” the surviving members of See Red say today. The posters were sold at radical bookshops and women’s conferences, and they recall spending a lot of time at the post office, sending out work. “We actively subverted our art school training that promoted the sole ‘Artist with a capital A’, who produced expensive signed prints,” they explain. “All work was accessible and affordable, and authored collectively with no hierarchy.”
The exhibition has its share of breakout names from these years, such as Helen Chadwick, who turned fridges and ovens into wearable sculptures, or Kelly, whose installation Post-Partum Document chronicles the uncompromising reality of her relationship with her young son and is an acknowledged trailblazer (it caused a press furore when it was debuted in 1976 thanks to its inclusion of dirty nappies). But equally fascinating are the under-the-radar artists whose output has not always been carefully preserved for posterity. “A lot of work has come direct from under beds and in cupboards,” says Young.
In London, Harrison recalls “something creative happening around the corner all the time”. Not so in Birmingham, where art graduates and new mothers Su Richardson and Monica Ross met at a baby clinic. At a women’s art history conference in 1975, they joined forces with the artist Kate Walker, who stood up in the crowd and invited people to participate in a women’s postal art project. Working at kitchen tables with whatever was available around the house, they produced work small enough to be mailed. By inviting friends across the country, the network grew, the works seen as a co-creation between sender and recipient. “Themes were repeated,” says Richardson today. “[Such as] being caged in; invisibility as a wife and mother.” The resultant works – crocheted sandwiches topped by flies, a chocolate box of breasts and lips – convey the sweet poison of “a woman’s world”. Young says that what survives “looks ratty and that’s just fine”. It is a testament to how the women made the most of their limited resources, but a sign too of the decades of missing attention to female artists from the wider culture.
Gina Birch’s 1979 Super 8 film Three Minute Scream, where the young art student simply screams into the camera, sums up the explosive outcry of these years. Birch found release not in the art world, where she recalls, “the boys could drink and talk with the tutors and the girls got talked to, judged and often fucked”, but in punk music. She describes it as “somewhere I could really belong”. Although unable to play an instrument, she formed the now much-revered band the Raincoats with Ana da Silva.
The female artists who emerged amid Britain’s new music scenes get a special focus in Women in Revolt! Alongside the better-known names – Birch, Throbbing Gristle’s Cosey Fanni Tutti or the collagist Linder – are unsung mavericks such as Jill Westwood, who donned fetish wear and challenged social norms with Bataille-esque extremes in the early 1980s. With her noise band Fistfuck, she reportedly peed on and beat willing audience members at wild gigs that crossed the bounds of art and life. “The events were conceived to put women in the position of power, to explore ritualised enactments of aspects of violence and intimidation,” says Westwood. “[I was] exploring what it might be to occupy a role that can dominate, control, be cruel, be shaming, subordinate another … maybe all the things patriarchy does to us, women and men.”
These many stories will unfold chronologically through Tate’s galleries. “I wanted to show the reality of what it was like living in the UK,” says Young. “It meant I couldn’t take any licence with the truth. Feminist art by women of colour doesn’t appear until later. A thematic hang may have hidden that.” Feminism’s white middle-class early days are notorious. In the 1980s however, with the rise of the British Black Arts movement, Black women who’d typically been lone figures at art school began establishing networks and staging shows that spoke of their experiences. On display was what the painter Claudette Johnson has described as “not portraiture”, but “our humanity, our feelings and our politics”.
A key organiser was the 2017 Turner prize winner Lubaina Himid, who’d initially studied theatre design but found few opportunities. “I realised I had to take the lead and create an audience-friendly space for myself and others,” she says. “ We met in the house of my partner who supported our endeavours by helping us deliver our work in a hired van in her spare time. It was always easier to maintain these networks if you had a kitchen to offer hospitalityas always easier to maintain these networks if you had a kitchen to offer hospitality.”
The women she assembled for formative London shows such as 1985’s The Thin Black Line included the key figures Ingrid Pollard, Sonia Boyce, Sutapa Biswas and Chila Kumari Singh Burman. Confronting marginalisation on the double front of race and gender, their art is a long-resounding battle cry, from Biswas’s fierce, stereotype-defying painting of Kali as a housewife brandishing steak knives to Burman’s Riot prints of 1981, which explored the social unrest provoked by Thatcher’s government over tinderbox issues such as nuclear arms and police brutality.
Thatcher affirmed individualism with the infamous quip that there was “no such thing as society”, but if anything, the exhibition reveals that group action was a powerful force for female artists in the 80s. The women’s photographic agency Format Photographers documented the miners’ strikes, anti-nuclear and anti-racism protests. Artists joined the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common. Another of the show’s under-exposed talents, Tessa Boffin, made elegantly raunchy fantasy photographs of a lesbian angel discovering safe sex: were conceived at the height of Section 28 and the Aids crisis, they and in the wake of section 28, and highlight the neglect of lesbians in sex education and treatment.
The show ends in 1990, when consciousness-raising radicalism was being outpaced by capitalism. There was no room for it in the big-money art market ushered in by Charles Saatchi and the YBAs, while urban property development put paid to the co-operative culture engendered in squats. The exhibition’s concluding note is Kate Walker’s Art of Survival, A Living Monument of 1987, which portrays the artist standing on a plinth, paint palette in hand. Women, Walker implied, can’t sit back and wait to be commemorated, but must get on with the business of constant, engaged making.
“Too much of women’s art has been hidden from view for far too long,” says Richardson, who hopes the show’s clarion call will resound with younger generations. “The most important lesson is how much can be achieved by women when we work together. It is women’s strength to collaborate, we need to use it.”
Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–90 is at the Tate Britain, London, 8 November to 7 April.
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The xx factor: selected highlights from Women in Revolt!
Chila Kumari Singh Burman – Solidarity With Sisters, 1981
Burman curated the first UK exhibition of Black female artists, Four Indian Women Artists, in 1981 and helped establish the feminist magazine Mukti. This early work depicting South African women was created at a time when she was using screenprints to draw attention to issues often marginalised in mainstream news.
Gina Birch – Three Minute Scream, 1979
The Raincoats bassist was a 20-year-old art student when she first screamed into the camera for this piece. She has since restaged the work at age 40 and 60. “As time has gone on I have felt more and more in my own skin, becoming the person I want to be,” she says. “Empowered and able to express myself without fear, with humour and compassion.”
Helen Chadwick – In the Kitchen (Stove), 1977
This seminal feminist work, a sinister takedown of the domestic goddess cliche, was first staged by Chadwick as a performance for her graduation show in 1977. Chadwick and two other naked performers donned kitchen machinery to unnerving, sexualised effect.
Margaret Harrison – Banana Woman, 1971
Harrison’s early satirical works draw on Playboy pin-ups and pneumatic comic-strip superheroes to skewer how women are objectified and consumed in visual culture. Later she began co-creating documentary projects exploring women’s working conditions.
Jill Westwood – Potent-Female, 1983
Westwood had first started making wearable latex sculptures as an art student and later explored the transgressive power of “dom” personas and London’s rubber fetish scene. This photo mimics the pose of James McNeill Whistler’s painting Whistler’s Mother, and was staged at home, which was “a shared short-life housing co-op with other artists”, she explains. “Our lives were a constant process of artmaking and living.”
See Red Women’s Workshop, 1974-1990 7 Demands, 1974
See Red made affordable posters that questioned “sexist, racist and homophobic society”. They began operating out of an empty shop in Camden Town, their first work depicting a green-skinned everywoman vomiting housewives and porn mag models. They followed that up with this design spelling out seven demands, including free childcare, and the abolition of women’s legal dependency on men.
Lubaina Himid – The Carrot Piece, 1985
With a suggestive unicycle protruding awkwardly between his legs, a white man tries to tempt a Black woman with a phallic carrot. She’s not interested: her arms are already full with what she needs. Himid’s painted plywood figures comment on white male presumption and gender relations, but also how white-run art institutions tried to woo Black artists with unappealing offers in the midst of 1980s identity politics.
