Amy Tobin’s Women Artists Together: Art in the Age of Women’s Liberation provides an important examination of artworks that emerged from debates among feminist artists across the US and UK during the 1970s. Richly researched, engagingly written, and compelling argued, Tobin makes clear the stakes of these historic works for contemporary feminist thought, placing her expertly chosen case studies in conversation with key past and present-day feminist writers throughout the book. 

Focused on dialogues among artists of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Tobin offers a nuanced analysis of the challenges of feminist togetherness. Rather than broach “feminism” retrospectively, as a singular movement with static terms, stable features, and a set timeline, she explores the dynamics of feminist networks as they emerged, developed, and took shape. Examining interconnections among women artists separated by generations and geography as well as varied personal, political, and theoretical commitments, Tobin stresses connectedness over sameness and looks at how the tactics of women artists overlapped and diverged during this canonical period of feminist art production.

Her intervention is premised upon several astute decisions. Tobin takes care to critically engage terms like “woman,” “feminist,” and “patriarchy,” reflecting the debates of the period when these terms were hotly contested much as they are today. Additionally, she explores marginalized modes of art production— such as mail art, artists’ books, magazines, and pop-up group exhibitions— demonstrating their importance to the history of feminist art and placing them in dialogue with painting, sculpture, video, performance, and large-scale installation. Finally, rather than centering canonical works of feminist art, Tobin puts them into relation with less studied works, highlighting points of correspondence and divergence. Through in-depth comparative analysis, she addresses how issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class shaped feminist art and generated difficult, yet productive, examples of collaboration, correspondence, and collectivity.

Through vignettes, conversations, and critical reflections, Women Artists Together offers four distinct chapters that can be read cumulatively or discretely, with chapters designed to be easily integrated into classes on feminist art. Centered on the group dynamics of feminist projects and collectives, the first chapter explores what she calls “feminist infrastructure” or new modes of gathering, corresponding, publishing, and exhibiting forged by the women’s movement. The chapter opens with the W.E.B. newsletter that connected feminist artists across the United States, Nova Scotia, and Great Britain and circumvented art world channels in ways that paralleled the decentralized women’s movement more broadly. However, Tobin focuses the chapter more on intimate informal networks of friends (and rivals) rather than formalized networks like W.E.B., and explores debates among feminist peers regarding practical versus theoretical concerns, insider versus outsider positions, and individual versus collective needs. With case studies ranging from artists’ collectives such as the UK-based Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union (WWAU) and US-based “Where We At” Black Women Artists (WWA) to works such as Howardena Pindell’s Free, White, and 21 (1980) and Hannah Wilke’s Marxism and Art: Beware of Fascist Feminism (1977), Tobin weaves a “web of connections” among feminist artists, activists, and art workers who came together and fell apart, offering support and critique, as they confronted the discriminatory artworld, including biases internal to the feminist movement itself.

In the second chapter, Tobin addresses artists who politicized domestic space. As “homewreckers,” in the best sense of the term, these artists tore down the walls of domestic life and made the home into a strategic space of struggle. Organized around three installations—Womanhouse (1972) by the Feminist Art Program (FAP) in Los Angeles, A Woman’s Place (1974) organized by the South London Art Group (SLAG), and Reflections on Vacancy (1979) in Harlem New York by Candance Montgomery-Hill— Tobin examines how these artists took housing on the precipice of destruction, reclaimed it, and remade it using feminist principles. Opening with the iconic Womanhouse project, Tobin examines it anew as a more complicated history of conflicting perspectives, while also questioning its radicality when compared to A Woman’s Place and Reflections on Vacancy. Tobin effectively argues that the latter two projects addressed forms of subjugation beyond gender hierarchies, such as those experienced by working class, queer, and Black women, while breaking down the containment of the home to offer new models of feminist collectivity. Particularly insightful is Tobin’s analysis of Montgomery-Hill’s work in Harlem as what bell hooks calls a “homeplace” or a site to resist sexism, heterosexism, and racism and claim the “right to a home, to community and to history for Black people” (113). Concluding with an analysis of Montgomery-Hill’s diverse collaborations of the early 1980s, the author demonstrates how the artist’s practice provides a model for feminist togetherness that attends to class and race, enacting what Audre Lorde called “broadening the joining” (126).

Chapter three moves from site-specific works to the distanced interactions of feminist correspondence networks. Examining the rituals, histories, and politics of feminist relationality, Tobin explores correspondence as a strategy that “raises questions about compatibility and distinction between feminist projects” (129). Each part attends to the complexities of feminist togetherness across distance and difference, from Los Angeles-based artist Suzanne Lacy’s mail art project International Dinner Party (1979) that invited recipients to stage their own dinner party on the model of Judy Chicago’s famous work; to New York-based Mary Beth Edelson’s collages of the 1970s that assembled material from the history of art and fellow feminists to invoke goddess spirituality invested in “fragmentation, connection, and morphology”; to the Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña’s artist’s book Saborami (1973), made while living in exile in London with the aim of materializing the “distressed signals of resistance and ad hoc solidarity” (130). Connecting theory to practice throughout the chapter, Tobin explores how these artists developed tactics that resisted biological essentialism as they forged new forms of togetherness. Ending with Vicuña’s works of the mid-1970s, Tobin brings to life the artist’s poetic counter-epistemologies rooted in indigeneity, migration, and anticolonial struggle. Circulating in US, UK, and Latin American feminist networks, Vicuña’s work deftly weaves together feminist concerns with other liberation struggles to stress vulnerability and interdependence over empowerment and individual group agency, acting as “channels for thoughts and feelings otherwise diminished or suppressed” (182).

The final chapter focuses on the 1980s, an era long framed as marking the demise of the women’s liberation movement. Complicating this narrative, Tobin shows how the feminist debates of the decade prior continued in reinvented form. Addressing the divisive issue of sex among feminists, Tobin explores how “feminists had sex, sometimes with each other, but sex also came between feminists” (184). Opening with the “sex wars” of the 1982 conference at Barnard College organized by Carole S. Vance, Tobin explores the “pleasure and danger” dynamic that fueled divisions among feminists. Analyzing the collaged Diary of a Conference on Sexuality that acted as an unconventional program for the event, Tobin explores how it modeled sexuality as a panoply of difference and dispute, embracing discussion of sadomasochism practices and pornography in opposition to cultural feminists’ antipornography stance and their assertion of a binary sexuality that prioritized the feminine over the masculine as the sole means of confronting sexual inequality under patriarchy. With additional texts by Lucy R. Lippard, Laura Mulvey, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde, Tobin frames the personal, political, and aesthetic stakes of sexually charged works by Carolee Schneeman, Hannah Wilke, Harmony Hammond, Ingrid Pollard, Rose English, among others that exposed an array of sexualities which run counter to a polarizing picture of the period. From the heterosexual intimacies of Schneeman’s Exercise for Couples (1972) that anticipate the sex wars of the 1980s to the lesbian activist conceptualism of Ingrid Pollard’s ATTACK (1991) that demonstrates how debates about sex and sexuality continued into the culture wars of the early 1990s, Tobin shows how persistent disputes about sex acts, sexual preference, and sexual differentiation operated in their complex poetic works. Opting out of a formal conclusion, the chapter instead acts as an open ending to which future artists and writers may add.

While we are in a very different moment than the one explored in Tobin’s book, it is striking how it resonates today. Despite emerging as an alternative infrastructure that acted as a provocation from the margins, feminism now wields power within major institutions and therefore, as Janet Halley has argued (Governance Feminism, 2018), we must continually re-ask how feminism is represented, by whom, and toward what ends. To quote Chela Sandoval (Methodology of the Oppressed, 2013), who builds on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, we must resist “social movements that can become retrenched and hegemonic, subsumed to a ‘high feminist norm,’” preferring instead “tactical subjectivity with the capacity to de- and recenter, given the forms of power to be moved.” With patriarchal authoritarianism on the rise, a feminism that prioritizes difference and debate is vitally important. As Tobin models with her book, the success of feminist togetherness hinges on publicly staging conversations about who wins and who loses when certain practices, policies, and theoretical paradigms are advocated at the expense of others, thus carrying on the tradition of a “politics in formation” against manufactured consensus and monolithic solidarities.