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Glampons, Miss World flareups and loo roll laureates – Unfinished Business review

British Library, London
This intriguing history of the women’s movement – from leg-liberating bicycles to the poems Sylvia Pankhurst wrote on prison toilet paper – doesn’t neglect the struggle’s contradictions and blind spots

“We are not beautiful,” say the words on the leaflet, alongside a picture of a raging, cigar-smoking vixen with hairy legs. “We are not ugly,” they continue. “WE ARE ANGRY.” This leaflet was part of the protests against Miss World contests in the 1970s. It features in Unfinished Business, an exhibition that traces the history of the women’s movement through its signature, headline-grabbing flareups, but also through its imagery, philosophy and artefacts, with one eye always on the work left to do.

You can’t help but be struck by the vastness of the terrain: this movement needed its engineers as much as its crusaders, its poets and comedians as much as its scientists. It took a village, in other words, and then a load of other villages. It would be glossing the reality to say that it took all women, but it took enough of us that to tell its history means running headlong into an inconvenient truth: the trouble with women is we don’t all agree.

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