Art comes in many different shapes, sizes and styles. While the women in Khair Khana decided to sew to provide for their family, women in the 1960’s introduced the Feminist art movement. The “second wave of feminism” started after men came back from WWII to find that many women were working the jobs, they (men) had to leave behind. Men unavoidably took back their jobs from women for a much higher pay, highlighting women’s inequality. After WWII a writer named Simone de Beauvoir published a book called The Second Sex which included a quote that said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” She wanted this quote to represent how society believes women should act or behave and how gender roles are pushed upon women.
In the 1970s women became more aware of their oppression in not only the work force but in the art community as well. Women artists when compared to their male counterparts were often over looked and underappreciated. Thanks to stereotypes certain media have been primarily associated with women, this caused textile and fabric arts to be categorized as arts and crafts rather than “fine art”. In the west women’s art was completely ignored, so a woman named Linda Nochlin wrote an article that was published in ARTnews called “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artist.” The article exposed how women’s art has been widely omitted from the definition of greatness in the art community. After the Article was published Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris started the first women’s only art exhibit, the exhibit was able to catch the community up to more than 400 years’ worth of women’s art.
The Feminist art movement of the 1970’s did a lot to educate people of the hardships that many women faced but they were still not where they wanted to be regarding equal representation. This continued oppression made many women very upset, they wanted to have the same rights, pay, and treatment that men have had for thousands of years. Because of their feelings many women wished that they could speak out about their unfair disadvantages, but women almost always faced harsh backlash and other reproductions for speaking out. This generated a group of girls known as the Guerrilla Girls who wore gorilla masks and adopted fake names, so they could go out and speak, preform, or protest against sexism and racism.
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