MICHAEL WOOD ON… A CELEBRATION OF BRITISH FEMINISM
A WONDERFUL EXHIBITION HAS JUST CLOSED at the Tate Britain in London: Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990. Exploring British feminism, the show ranges from punk and protest, reproductive rights and the Greenham Common anti-nuclear protests to the Aids epidemic and the formation of the British black arts movement. It offers a wonderfully affecting and wide-ranging portrayal of social history through art, photographs, film, posters, magazines and other material objects. We may enjoy blockbusters on Picasso or Cézanne, but this is art that is about all our lives. As a picture of where we were so recently – and how far we still have to go – it is a brilliant insight, not only into art history but into the dramatic social changes that took place in late 20th-century Britain.
The modern women’s liberation movement in the UK began with the famous 1970 Ruskin College conference, which called for equal pay for women, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion rights and free 24-hour nurseries (which had existed during the Second World War) reminding us what an impact the lack of childcare has on women’s lives. “It was a utopian moment,” writes Professor Catherine Hall, “the recognition that we shared a feeling and experiences that had a name.”
That same year Germaine Greer published her path-breaking critique of the patriarchal order, The Female Eunuch. It was also the year of the Equal Pay Act – a start, though it must be said that much remains to be achieved. The next two decades saw a nationwide grassroots feminist movement against the oppressive structures and attitudes that still ruled British society.
That’s the story told by the exhibition. It is packed with often jaw-dropping material, the kind you never see in mainstream art galleries. It’s sobering to think that the women artists in the show had little or no access to public institutions, private galleries, teaching posts or mainstream publishing; their art with a few exceptions was never seen on TV.
Visceral and moving, bursting with invention and humour, this exhibition vividly re-evaluates women artists’ contribution not only to British art in this period, but to social change in this country. Many of its themes explore the links with other struggles, against racism, class oppression, homophobia and nuclear weapon
