This series of twelve etchings are drawn from the book Disgrace: Feminism and the Political Right. The book includes essays and artwork, and explores the complexities behind the feminist movement in the UK by, in Hannah Quinlan’s words, applying ‘the same critical framework we have applied to male culture to look at women’ .
The etchings take in the British imperial project in the late 1800s, with the Imperial Ladies Auxiliary and Tea, garden & evening parties, rifle competitions, polo matches, the trooping of the colours and other special events. The etchings, I’m not a woman I’m a conservative and We Will Not Be Silenced draw the viewer into considering charged issues that remain relevant in public life. In these works Quinlan and Hastings also take in the fraught debates surrounding transgender communities; the intersection of feminism and class politics (as seen in Votes for Ladies); and the links between the feminist movement in Britain and eugenics (in Social Hygiene) and fascism (in Blackshirts). The etching Sex Wars, depicts a clash between sex-positive campaigners and anti-pornography feminists in the 1980s, recalling when anti-sex work campaigners identified women as objects of oppression who needed to be protected, regardless of whether that protection was solicited.
Quinlan and Hastings’ etchings in Disgrace articulate a take on the history of the feminist movement, as one entwined with violence and oppression, set against what they have called ‘the lefty rose-tinted glaze around feminism’. Their works investigate how society has constructed its ideas of feminist progress to consider how enlightened this progress really is. ‘Bad history is everyone’s history,’ writes Lola Olufemi in her essay within the book in which these etchings appear. The works bring to mind also the words of the poet Adrienne Rich about the importance ‘as women committed to the liberation of women, to know the past in order to consider what we want to conserve and what we want not to repeat or continue’.
