‘She’s behind you!’ – Women and War

It was December last year and I was visiting the current exhibition at Tate Britain, Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, with Pru Stevenson who until a few years ago was a neighbour in Fitzrovia and who, in the 1970s, was one of the founders of the women’s printmaking collective, See Red Women’s Workshop, whose output features in the Tate exhibition.

Most of the visitors were women — plus a few men looking slightly lost. As we were speaking Pru managed to capture on her phone this image of one of the Tate security guards peering at one of See Red’s posters “Is there life after marriage?” featuring a photograph of herself in bridal attire many years earlier. The guard was completely unaware that the woman in the poster was standing right behind him as she took the picture. I wanted to call out: “She’s behind you!”

The Tate exhibition features a history of political art and activism of diverse women’s groups between 1970 to 1990: the brave young Asian women protesting at Grunwick laboratories in 1976-78 for better pay and conditions, the clash of punk and post punk images, women of the British Black Arts Movement and of course the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, who called themselves “Women for Life on Earth”, opposing the siting of 96 American Nato nuclear missiles on common land in the bucolic Berkshire countryside.

Many thousands of women from all over the UK and elsewhere camped on Greenham Common over the next 20 years and all these women understood that money spent on nuclear weapons meant less money for essential services and “would have devastating consequences for all mankind”. Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990, at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. Until 7 April 2024.

Beautiful American Lee Miller moved from in front of the camera, as a Vogue model in Paris, to behind the camera with the surrealist, Man Ray, later setting up her own photography studio in New York. She moved to London with her surrealist husband, Roland Penrose, on the first day of World War II in 1939 and enrolled as a freelance photographer at Vogue Studios, then in Rathbone Place.

Her work combined her preoccupations — surrealism and fashion, against the background of London in the throes of the Blitz.

At first she photographed beautiful women in elegant suits against bombed out buildings in London and later retained her surrealist eye for strange juxtapositions as she continued to record what she saw.

As a member of the London War Correspondents Corps, Miller later joined the Allied forces during the liberation of Western Europe in 1944 and photographed prisoners at Dachau concentration Camp in 1945 shortly after its liberation. Like many war artists, Lee Miller was left with PTSD after seeing what she had seen.

Some of Lee Miller’s work is currently on show at the TJ Boulting gallery in Riding House Street. There is a wonderful wall displaying her portraits of significant women of her time — including film director Jill Craigie, war correspondent Martha Gelhorn and Margot Fonteyn. Catch the exhibition now. Lee Miller, You Will Not Lunch In Charlotte Street Today. At TJ Boulting, 59 Riding House Street, Fitzrovia, London W1W 7EG. Until 20 January 2024.

Meanwhile this heartfelt and eloquent advocacy by a woman, Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, against a war at the International Court of Justice in The Hague only last week, may be discovered on YouTube. Irish lawyer’s stunning speech at The Hague accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza.