Women in Revolt! Art and Activism 1970-1990
Tate Britain, London
 

THIS is a significant, high profile and very political exhibition presenting “two decades of art as provocation, protest and progress.”

Chronologically, starting with the first women’s liberation conference in Britain in 1970, it spans second and third wave feminism (the first wave being the suffrage movement of the early 20th century). It ends somewhat arbitrarily in 1990 with a note on the commercialisation of art and the marginalisation of “artists engaged in socially motivated practices.”

For many of us caught up in the debates of the women’s movement in the 1970s the questions the exhibition raises retain much of their fascination and the diversity, awareness, experimentation and rawness of the output is nostalgic and heady. The exhibition is large, detailed and richly repays a visit.

The blurb points out that the movement was “defined only by its range of perspectives, many of which undermined and challenged each other;” some perspectives are given more room than others and overall identity politics, unsurprisingly, reigns supreme.

There are perhaps three broad strands represented.

Prominent are those artists who turned inwards, sometimes literally, to women’s bodies, pregnancy and their “divided selves.” A second strand are those works which, especially in the hands of black women painters, provide some arresting portraits.

On entering, the visitor must be struck by the deadened, lonely face of the mother with a screaming child in Maureen Scott’s Mother and Child at Breaking Point. Stella Dadzie’s Motherland conveys history and dignity in the head of a black woman vividly depicted against the backdrop of an industrial Thames.

The third strand, given ample and welcome coverage, is the socialist or socially minded wing. The Hackney Flashers produced two fascinating series of photos plus research and testimony on women’s work and childcare in the 1970s, and there is See Red Women’s Workshop’s piece Message to the Women of our Nation”. Its “Support the women’s peace camps” is part of the exhibition’s fulsome recognition given to Greenham.

Yet if women involved in wider struggles are to be included (as the title would suggest) it must be noted that there is minimal space granted to work by and about Women Against Pit Closures, which probably actively involved the largest number of women in the whole period 1970-90.

There is just one striking piece, on mixed fabrics, by Thalia Campbell, Thatcher’s Thugs. Orgreave 1984. This references the iconic photo and later cartoon of a policeman on horseback reaching down to club a woman photographer, a fact which is omitted from the accompanying information and which younger visitors need to be told.

Meanwhile, the work of “demon snapper” Tish Murtha, https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/c/portrait-socialist-photographer, is missing.

She was an outstanding photographer movingly portraying the lives of the Tyneside working class and Soho sex workers. Finally the significant and fruitful Marxism/feminism debates of the period are represented principally by Alexis Hunter’s series of images The Marxist Wife (still does the housework) in which a housewife’s dusting of Marx’s portrait eventually erases his face entirely.

Leaving nostalgia aside, the big question is how far have we come? A must-watch film in the exhibition documents the 1971 women’s lib demo in London whose four demands are still mainly to be met: equal pay, equal job opportunities, free 24-hour childcare centres and free contraception and abortion.

In the 1960s when I was growing up, for a typical family, nuclear and patriarchal as it may have been, one man’s wages could support wife and children. Today two working parents are likely to have to apply for benefits to support their family and self-fulfilment becomes a joke. Bread and Roses seem further off than ever.

Runs until April 7 2024. For more information see: Tate.org.uk