Women in Revolt! review: Finally these radical artists get their moment

“Equal pay is not enough, we want the moon.” “Women are revolting.” “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly. We’re angry.” Who needs paintings in galleries when you’ve got demo placards that are works of art in themselves? In this bracing exploration of British feminist art, you’ll find yourself plunged viscerally into the atmosphere of 1970s Britain, and confronted by raw, funny, in-your-face slogans and one-liners from the front line of Second Wave feminism.

It was a time when everything was proverbially grim and grotty, but which saw huge upsurges in the struggles of what were then regarded as “minorities” – women, the gay community, Black people. These cultural battles have had a powerful impact on what Britain has become in the decades since.

That quintessential Seventies feel is evident in not just the placards but the lumpen, embattled quality of the materials used in the art: Xerox photocopies, grainy black-and-white photography, blurry video, torn newspapers and, er, knitting.

The wall texts spell out the predicament of the early Seventies woman in stark terms: unequal pay, no statutory maternity rights, no legal right to say “no” to their husbands in the bedroom. No women’s refuges; no, well, pretty much anything. Yet the Second Wave feminist response feels already very much underway in the show’s early images: wonderfully vivid photography of epoch-making demos and conferences, vox pop interviews, DIY magazines and flyers with a proto-punk feel.

Rose Finn-Kelcey’s 1974 work Divided Self (Speakers’ Corner) puts two photos of the artist into a seamlessly montaged conversation on a park bench near Marble Arch. It embodies one of the show’s key ideas: that women are more likely than men to fracture into public and private selves. Yet the work’s technical slickness feels anomalous in an exhibition where much of the work feels put together on the run from one political event to another, with a day job and likely childcare squeezed in along the way.

In Maureen Scott’s rough-and-ready painting Mother and Child at Breaking Point (1970), you can practically smell the nappies and dirty washing up in the background. A massive elephantine penis looms down over two men in what look like military helmets in Monica Sjöö’s Phallic Culture (1970). If these are hardly the subtlest of works, there’s a sense of invigorating urgency in the early stages of the exhibition, that the artists are just about keeping up alongside the political struggle, with no time to apply for Arts Council grants or scrounge favours from the art establishment, even if they’d been so inclined.

Anne Bean’s Heat (1974-7) attempts to pin down the fleeting nature of her performance art with photographs related to her “happening” Elemental (Heat) showing her head apparently on fire. While you’d assume much of the work here would have a similar struggle with ephemerality given its relation to rapidly passing events, there’s plenty here with lasting resonance. Penny Slinger’s photo work Wedding Cake – Open Secret (1973), which encases her naked body in a cardboard wedding cake, with her genitalia exposed in the base layer, was seized by the police on obscenity grounds when first exhibited. But it’s gone on to influence many other artists, not least Helen Chadwick, whose now iconic In the Kitchen (1977) encases her naked body in “soft toy” domestic appliances.

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All the time we can hear the agonised groaning of a live birth drifting from Robina Rose’s video Birthright (1977) playing in the next room. And from beyond that comes endless screaming from Gina Birch’s 3 Minute Scream (1977), a ceiling-high projection of the artist’s face howling at the sheer pain of having to exist in an era of what she described as “casual sexism, casual sex and more overt sexism”.

Images such as Linder’s photomontage of a naked woman with an iron for a head, used on the cover of the Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict, will be immediately familiar to anyone – male or female – who was around at the time. So will a series of hilariously defaced billboards by Jill Posener. The best known shows a Fiat car billboard ad with the copy-line “If it were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched”, on which Posener has spray painted, “If this lady was a car she’d run you down.” While such works were, unsurprisingly, widely publicised at the time, much of the art here was barely seen by mainstream audiences then – or indeed since.

The show powers on through feminism’s interactions with other great moments and movements, showing the artists’ responses to punk, the Greenham Common peace camp, the 1984-5 miners’ strike, the wider Gay Rights struggle and, by far the most important – certainly in terms of the art produced – the emergent Black women’s movement.

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If the mainstream, substantially white, women’s movement was an object of derision for a substantial majority of the British population, including many women – with endless sniping at “bra burners” – the fact that there was or could even be a Black women’s movement barely registered in the national consciousness. Yet the Eighties saw the arrival of a powerful new generation of Black British artists, many of them women, who have gone on to considerable success, including Sonia Boyce, Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid and Claudette Johnson, who is currently having a major exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. While all are represented here with excellent works, the pieces that struck me most were by less well-known figures.

Mowbray Odonkor’s patently angry Onward Christian Soldiers (1987), shows a figure – presumably the artist – remonstrating before a flag embedded with an image of manacled slaves, while Sutapa Biswas’s hilarious Housewives with Steak Knives (1985) features a comic cod-Hindu goddess wielding a huge knife and a white man’s severed head. These works have an abrasive immediacy that makes most current art – by men or women – look tame.

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This is a marvellously rich exhibition of work that has largely been omitted from the official story of art in Britain. This is partly because art by women has tended to get less attention than art by men, but far more because this is art with a message. Much contemporary artwork allied to “causes” bends over backwards not to be propaganda, which can give it a rarefied, even apologetic feel. Here, however, it sets out to challenge, first and foremost in the field of sexual politics, but by extension in every aspect of British life. You don’t tend to get thanked for that, however much the art establishment likes to think it veers towards the radical. So most of these artists are, incredibly, only now getting their moment in the sun.

Women in Revolt! is at Tate Britain, until 7 April