Over the last few weeks, I’ve wondered about the little construction that’s appeared on the forecourt of The Whitworth as I’ve been cycling past. The greyscale utility of this post-WWII prefab house is striking against the gallery’s late 19th century decorative red brick façade. I’ve found the spray-painted words above the windows – ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘baby’ – somewhat sinister. So, the invitingly sugary scent that envelops me as I finally enter ‘An Edible Family in a Mobile Home’, a recreation of Bobby Baker’s 1976 installation, is a welcome surprise. The work is shown here as part of Women in Revolt!, a huge exhibition spanning women’s activist art in the UK over the two decades up to 1990.
Inside the prefab, the walls, floors and ceilings are covered with yellowed 1970s newspaper. Bright white icing is piped into doodles and stars everywhere you look. There are life-sized confectionary family members for visitors to sample: a coconut cake baby lying in a cot; a stodgy, sturdy fruitcake and marzipan father, built around a metal armature, hunkering down in a low armchair opposite a black-and-white telly; a mother hovering in the corner, a dressmaker’s dummy whose clear-fronted torso reveals a fully stocked snack cupboard. Her biscuits and raisins are endlessly available. The artist, Baker, is milling around offering out cups of tea. She says that when she’d first made this work, at the age of twenty-five, she hadn’t realised it was a model of her own family until the show had closed and the baby was all eaten.
That’s the moment I can’t stop thinking about: the end of the installation’s run. How foul it will be in here with crumbs everywhere and icing smudged across the walls where visitors’ sleeves caught, where tea has spilt onto the carefully papered surfaces. The longer I spend inside, the more the sweet smell turns my stomach. It’s the inherent contradictions that make this work – while at once valorising the family unit, painting a picture of delicious perfection, it also foregrounds its instability: it will be eaten, or it will deteriorate. This, the installation says, is not sustainable. It’s patently absurd that the fundamentally human offer of feeding and watering one’s guests is entangled in our minds with feminised domestic space. For me, the work suggests that such vacuous assumptions, which the organisation of the nuclear family bolsters, are downright dangerous: you can’t live on sugar alone. But as a retort to the egoistic, male-dominated art scene of 1970s London with its monumental ambitions, where the work originated, Baker’s cakes I can get behind.
As a woman born in the nineties, I do sometimes struggle to comprehend just how violently the structures of 1970s British conservatism were implemented and upheld, by both the state and society. Many artists whose work is included in Women in Revolt!, for example,experienced censorship in various guises. Margaret Harrison, whose contribution here is her installation ‘Greenham Common (Common Reflections)’ (1989-2013) which represents a section of the fence around Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, had a 1971 exhibition raided and shut down by police for apparently breaching obscenity laws. I say apparently, because the drawings which crossed the line weren’t the ones depicting the ludicrous hypersexualisation of the female body that was given carte-blanche at the time (think Page 3, which The Sun launched in 1970 just as the Women’s Liberation Movement was getting going), but the ones that slightly détourned it onto men: Hugh Hefner as one of his own bunny girls, a drawing which was actually stolen from that opening fifty-three years ago. The photographs by Cosey Fanni Tutti on show in Women in Revolt!, from the series ‘Incognito’ (1979-2021),show the artist modelling one of the handmade costumes she made for her job in a strip-tease club, a trademark of her work in the sex industry throughout the 1970s. Tutti was subject to almost laughable censorship in the 1976 ICA exhibition Prostitution. Laughable, because the exhibition was named after Tutti’s own works that the gallery eventually censored – pieces she had produced through her own pornographic modelling and sex work. But only almost laughable, because the ICA did erect very real barriers: viewers had to become members, sign in, enter a private room to access the artworks.
Legacies of censorship loom large and recent in Manchester, with its de-platforming of Palestinian arts at HOME and the Royal Exchange. Indeed, the shadow of Alistair Hudson’s aborted directorship haunts The Whitworth itself, tinting any ‘radical’ exhibitions in this institution – part of the University of Manchester, who have been utterly objectionable in their attitude to student protesters – a shade suspect. However, the fact that Women in Revolt! is showing here for free – the first time there is no entry fee on its three-stop tour which previously visited London and Edinburgh – gives us not only some cause for celebration but also access to plenty of inspiration. We can glean methods, tools of resistance, at a time when they are sorely needed. Opening a mere six weeks into Trump’s second term and the manic acceleration of recent-years’ slow rolling back of women’s, trans and migrant rights, from the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade in the States making access to abortion impossible for many, to the recent withdrawal of critical healthcare for trans patients by UK GP surgeries and the Labour government’s abominable plans to cut PIP payments, this exhibition shows us not only where feminism has been – its difficulties struggling towards a genuine intersectionality – but where it can go. It enables us to imagine how we might use feminist art today to fight our own battles. The expansion of the term ‘feminist’ to encompass the fight for everyone othered by the state, by patriarchy, by any and all structurally oppressive forces, is one of the journeys the exhibition starts to trace.
Initially, the amount of information feels totally overwhelming. But making my way around, the connections and networks between strands of activism start speaking together: from direct action through community organising and alternative modes of living and family units, to posters and paintings and sculptures. I returned three times before even thinking about writing on this massive body of material. Free entry makes such engagement possible. In some ways the curation feels rhizomatic, where works’ wall texts list the actions and organising the artists were engaged in to draw connections across groups. But it is also neatly, and I think helpfully, separated, with the more directly agitprop material including zines, posters, flyers and badges displayed in vitrines while the more clearly distinct artworks are displayed on walls and plinths.
Curator Linsey Young states explicitly in the exhibition text that the show is inspired by and dedicated to her late mother, Gael Elizabeth Stuart (1955-2020). It’s rare for an exhibition to so candidly centre such personal origins. But this is exactly how Women in Revolt! functions throughout, always embedding the political in the personal, as the feminist rallying call goes, and questioning how we can talk about it. Young grew up in a socialist single-parent family, beset by barriers to care for Stuart’s chronic illness and her struggles for justice as a WASPI woman, who sadly passed away before getting her pension. It’s the intersection of these daily injustices that enter women’s lives from all angles that map directly onto the present day, and that carry between the artworks here, despite the differing contexts of their creation.
When Young started researching this project back in 2017, she was employed by the Tate who, to her dismay, had hardly any works by women in their 1980s collection. Just as the networks between each object, vitrine and room in Women in Revolt! develop by layering connections, Young began by reaching out to people, asking what organisations like The Peace Museum in Bradford and the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton knew about women’s activist art in this period. So much of the work exhibited was eventually sourced from artists directly – either ignored by curators and reviewers at the time of first showing, wilfully missed from the art histories developed by institutional acquisitions, or withheld by the artists. When the exhibition eventually opened at Tate Britain in 2023, it carried the hefty entry fee of £17 per person. I’m still trying to figure out whether my feelings about that eye-wateringly high entry cost are somewhat assuaged by how many pieces the Tate eventually acquired off the back of the show – around twenty, while the second leg of the tour to Scotland’s National Galleries in Edinburgh yielded further acquisitions. There’s part of me that simply wants these artists to get paid for the work they have made, but whether a major institution like Tate accessioning feminist artworks will lead to increased visibility of either the objects or their makers, and whether that feeds into any of the feminist demands the works make, is yet to be seen. Moving through the show, it’s interesting to note which pieces were acquired in 2023/24, and which remain snubbed by the institutional money power of the art world.
I’m particularly taken by Shirley Cameron’s 1974 performance ‘Rabbits – The Pregnant Bunny Girl’ which is documented here in four photographs. As the title suggests, the photos show the heavily pregnant artist dressed up as a bunny girl but, and this is where it gets weirder, she only ever showed this work at agricultural fairs and local county shows. Not in galleries or festivals, but spaces which were filled with caged animals as part of their routine function. This work epitomises the fundamental belief that runs through the exhibition: that art as part of society has the capacity to challenge damaging views, to educate, to create real change. This work is shown ‘Courtesy of the artist’. Perhaps the work was simply never bought, or perhaps Cameron’s retention of ownership here is a claim to agency – where art’s societal basis is bolstered by artists snubbing the exclusionary art world which neither desires nor represents them.
Posters from the See Red Women’s Workshop (1974-1990) are included in every room. ‘Tough! My Message to the Women of Our Nation…’ (1979) is a poster including a high-quality printed portrait of the newly elected Margaret Thatcher, foolishly donated to See Red by Number 10, from whose mouth protrudes a speech bubble exclaiming ‘TOUGH!’. Around the edges are words and images depicting all the terrible ways Tory policy from the nation’s first female prime minister will affect women, from ‘Day care centres closed’ through ‘6,000,000 council houses FOR SALE’ to ‘Fares increase’. This piece exemplifies the palpable rage across the exhibition, but especially the ‘punk’ room it’s shown in. I can’t stop thinking about how insanity inducing, how enraging, just how unbelievable it must have been to live through the proper dissolution of the postwar welfare state, with a woman at the helm. Where Women in Revolt! makes me angry, I think it’s doing its job.
While many of the social conditions faced by these artists remain, depressingly, unchanged – such as the structural injustices Young experienced with her mother – many of the differences are stark. So much of the show’s work arises from the creation of communal modes of living, alternative family structures and the collective provision of childcare. In 2025 the ability to successfully and sustainably squat a building in the UK has all but disappeared. But in the ‘70s, See Red occupied an empty shop in Camden and did all the renovations themselves. In fact, they did everything themselves, together, all the time – artmaking, organising, caring, cooking, eating, plumbing, electrics. There was no distinction between creative work and waged labour – no work-life balance to maintain. Where there are empty buildings nowadays, it’s safe to presume they are owned by absentee landlords and already heavily surveilled. But the knock-on effects of available housing are clear: Baker would never have made ‘An Edible Family in a Mobile Home’ (1976/ 2025) had she not been provided such temporary housing. It’s difficult not to let our comparatively fragmented and isolating social landscape, and the basic unavailability of so-called ‘affordable’ housing, lead us into feelings of total hopelessness.
Indeed, the emotional weight of this exhibition is often as overwhelming as the amount of information included. The paintings are, for me, the undoubted highlights of the show. There are paintings that are wild and powerful and deeply entangled in histories and systems of power through critique and defiance. They break my heart open with the strongest of political feelings. ‘No to Torture (After Delacroix “Women of Algiers”)’ (1982-3) by Houria Niati, for example, takes my breath away. Niati’s figuration clearly mimics the women’s positions in Delacroix’s 1834 orientalist painting, but here they are depicted brightly, through an enraged layering of brushwork over the stormy background of deep blues and purples. The women are faceless, their heads variously caged, cancelled, scratched out or simply missing. The painting is a rallying cry of remembrance for the women who fought against French colonial occupation of Algeria, and the subjugation they were subsequently forced into.
Jennifer Comrie’s pastel and textile work on paper, ‘Conflict’ (1985), is another piece that binds so much together succinctly: the political, personal, spiritual, racial experiences of Black womanhood. It’s a difficult image to take in – a close-up, abstracted portrait of a woman’s face drawn in swathes of black pastel. I follow the stitching holding one eyelid closed, along the nose skewed to one side so I can’t tell where or how she might breathe, down to the open mouth at the bottom from which it seems a puff of air is escaping rather than being inhaled. It’s an image of defeat and of beauty. And that, too, is so important – that we can acknowledge and sit with the feelings of despair that sometimes engulf us. This image reminds me that it’s not really possible to fight one hundred percent of the time.
Women in Revolt! is an enormous, galvanising survey. The show takes in punk, the HIV/AIDS crisis and Section 28, the separations and convergences between the early women’s liberation movement and activism by women of colour. As Andrew Tate re-enters the USA, and the fetishisation of the ‘trad wife’ takes hold of incels and young women alike, and in London our contemporary female Tory leader Kemi Badenoch speaks to the patently fascist Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (founded by Jordan Peterson and funded by GB News owner Paul Marshall), there’s much to glean from an exhibition like this. It shows us that there is no action too small – that to keep knocking on the institutional doors where monetary power can actually affect structural change, we should start in our own communities. We should keep making, and sharing, and protesting. Our rage should burn as righteously as that of the women in the 1970s and ‘80s. We’ve got a lot of work to do.
Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, The Whitworth, Manchester, 7 March – 1 June 2025. ‘An Edible Family in a Mobile Home’ is open on specific dates until April 20th.
Jazmine Linklater is a poet and writer based in Manchester, where she works for Carcanet Press and is the Northwest Editor of Corridor8.
This review is supported by The Whitworth.
Published 26.03.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
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