What Was The Role Of Women In The 1960s And 1970s

The feminist breakthrough during the 1960s and 1970s saw many feminist artists liberating women as they began to explore the female body and use it as a site of resistance in their art, leaving behind a legacy that many contemporary feminist artists still follow today. The 1960s was a time of great change for women as everything began to change socially, politically and culturally. The Pill had been approved and the sexual revolution had begun. Women began to fight for many things in their art, taking back the male gaze, reclaiming the female body for women; showing the female experience using their own bodies in their art which became, as said by Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard in The Power of Feminist Art “some of the most radical and provocative
Women were almost always the object of art rather than the subject, though feminist artists fought to change this and women became an active speaker in art rather than a passive theme. “The question of how - or whether - the fact of being female had in any way affected the style or content of these women’s art was a question that was increasingly foregrounded by feminist criticism in the 1970s” as women began to change how they were viewed in the art world. They began to show to the world that women could become makers of meaning instead of bearers of man’s meaning in art as feminist artists began to use the female body, often their own, in the form of an image, an idea, and an issue of continuing importance in women’s art. Because of this, feminist artists began to redefine the nature of the female identity and very quickly began to explore the erotic as it became a key element in the argument of feminist art as women sought to reclaim their sexual
Through her career she explored sexual, social and philosophical issues often using her body for body-based art and performance. She used her body as a site of resistance, intending to, according to Lauren F. Nochella in Hannah Wilke: An Eternal Venus “reclaim the female body as a positive symbol for women in order to move beyond a male, dominated culture.” She encouraged women to engage in self-love, her body-based art being a celebration of the female body. While Wilke engaged in this self-love she reclaimed the erotic female body for herself and for other feminist from the objectification of the male gaze. She did this through performance, video, sculpture, photography and painting almost always adapting “her own body as a sculptural material which is what she called “living sculpture.” Wilke’s eroticized body-based art performance is what she is known for in the feminist art world and has created this legacy of her own celebrating women’s sexuality, the feminine and feminism. In her work S.O.S. – Starifaction Object Series (1974-82, fig. 1) Wilke has looked at female beauty as out of all the feminist issues, as Thomas H. Kochheriser states in Hannah Wilke: A Retrospective “beauty as an issue seems to be embarrassing, and consequently low on the feminist