Women and Work: Feminist Factory Interventions in 1970s London

In the context of their joint political work in the Women’s Workshop of the London Artists’ Union, the artists Margaret Harrison, Kay Fido Hunt and Mary Kelly conducted a two-year research project in a canning factory. The research results, which they presented as an exhibition in 1975, focused on the gender-based division of labour and the realities of life for women in the factory. The conceptual techniques employed by the artists demonstrate, in my argument, the profound and pervasive influence of the sexual division on the industrial mode of production, and the extent to which female artists were similarly shaped by the conditions of the 1970s. Keywords Art and labour, female labour, factory interventions, feminist art, conceptual art