Feminism and Art: the Seventies

The Seventies

The women of that period had the need to make their voices heard: the burden of those centuries in which the role of mother and wife had been relegated to women weighs too heavily, there is an abundance of desire and need to emerge from all those who have been ignored for a long time.

Artistic Field

Even in the artistic field, things are not different: women finally decide to be subject and not object, to decide themselves about what and how to talk.

There were multiple topics that had long been diminished by men – the body, affectivity, sexuality – and the time had come for women’s vision to forcefully empower these issues.

Italy does not fall behind, Italy keeps up. There are several artists who support this need to re-evaluate being a woman at 360 degrees.

Their art had not only to be art made by women, but had to speak like a woman, express itself in forms not conventionally accepted by the patriarchy, depart from the overly strict standards set by men.

The Seventies also embody this: change and departure.

From the very first years of that decade, which would change the mentality of an entire society, female figures such as Bianca Pucciarelli, known as Tomaso Binga, imposed themselves on the artistic scene.

In a baptism in 1971, she chose this new identity as an act of extreme rebellion against the purely male artistic scene of the period.

Very close to Binga is another artist, La Rocca, who chose to take a different path, however: she made irony the preferred tool with which to denounce patriarchal standards.

During the years of the economic boom, women, who should have adapted to all the novelties of the period, seemed instead to only adapt to new domestic appliances.

By emphasising this, La Rocca highlights, in an ironic and light way, another truly interesting concept.