‘It starts with women getting angry’: the giant exhibition giving art’s feminist trailblazers their due
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
