Women's work : 1970s feminist art and domestic labour struggle

During the 1970s, feminists across the world challenged the home’s depiction as an apolitical refuge from capitalist labour, revealing instead how the domestic functions as a workplace. This thesis examines how feminist artists in the United Kingdom, United States, and France articulated a broader vision of working-class politics through engagement with struggles for welfare rights, Black Power, Wages for Housework, homeworker rights, prison abolition, and sex worker rights. Diverging from scholarship placing the middle-class housewife at the centre of feminist domestic labour debates, Women’s Work instead analyses artworks that focus on racialised and working-class subjects marginalised in feminist art history, particularly domestic workers, industrial homeworkers, incarcerated women, and sex workers. Through analysis of artworks by Betye Saar, Margaret Harrison, Suzanne Lacy, Carole Roussopoulos, and the French collective Groupe de Cinq, the home emerges as a crucial, yet underexamined site of labour struggle. Building on methodological intersections between social art history and labour studies, this project illustrates how 1970s feminist artworks remapped labour struggle’s terrain by revealing the continuum between the home, the state, and institutions including the plantation, factory, prison, and the nuclear family.