In 1976, artist Mary Kelly made headlines by including controversial material in her work: dirty diapers.
In the piece Post-Partum Document, Kelly, whose archive is part of the collections of the Getty Research Institute (GRI), recorded the first six years of caring for her son. In chronicling the nursing, first words, and tantrums, she wanted to explore the mother-child relationship—an experience of both intimacy and separation—and how it shaped what she called the “feminine psychology.”
Through diagrams, child’s rubbings, feeding charts, and typed transcripts of conversations between mother and son, all laid out in one long line along gallery walls, Kelly explored the complicated dynamics of motherhood.
Inspired by the psychoanalytic theories of French philosopher Jacques Lacan, Kelly was interested in how mother and child, who once shared a body, differentiated themselves over time. For Lacan, the acquisition of language represented the child’s entry into the shared social world, what art critic Lucy Lippard, when writing about Kelly’s piece, called a “cultural kidnapping.” Between 1973 and 1979, in six separate parts completed sequentially during her son’s early years—from birth to learning to write his name—Kelly charted his evolving sense of self as well as her own.
In the early 1970s, new forms of women’s art were emerging. Before that, Kelly says, being both a woman and an artist was "a double negative." To be an artist was, by definition, to be male. Women artists, tired of being excluded from the male establishment, began to mine their own lived experiences for creative inspiration. At a time when second-wave feminists were questioning how unpaid housework disproportionately fell to women, child-rearing, cooking, and cleaning became important material.
“K’s aggressiveness has resurfaced and made me feel anxious about going to work. I can’t count the number of ‘small wounds’ I’ve got as a result of his throwing, kicking, biting etc.,” Kelly wrote as part of her artwork.
The information-dense Post-Partum Document, co-opting the aesthetics of scientific documentation, is an example of conceptual art, a movement that emerged in the mid-1960s that emphasized ideas over tangible objects. Many conceptual artworks, like Kelly’s, often relied heavily on written text. “By applying this rationalist, language-based approach to something previously not considered to be related to the world of thought, Kelly performs a shrewd act of legitimizing female experiences as a subject for art,” says senior research specialist Zanna Gilbert.
In her work, Kelly explored economic questions as well as philosophical ones. In 1971 she was chair of the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union in London, whose aim was “to take action to end sexual and racial discrimination in the arts.” According to the group, “women do not want to simply replace men in art, women want something much more radical.”
Kelly was also part of the Berwick Street Film Collective, whose Nightcleaners documented the lives of women, many working mothers among them, who cleaned offices after hours. This was part of their campaign to unionize. In 1975 she collaborated on an installation called Women & Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry 1973–75, which, in a similar style as Post-Partum Document, detailed the conditions faced by women sheet metal workers through a quasi-scientific display of black-and-white photographs and films, typewritten texts, and photocopied charts.
Today, if women worldwide were paid for their domestic labor, the earnings would total almost $11 trillion, according to a recent study done before the pandemic. The COVID lockdowns further deepened the cracks in a struggling childcare system, where many women are forced to work second shifts. As Kelly, a working mother, wrote in Post-Partum Document: “I’m not the only object of his wrath but I’m probably the source. Maybe I should stay at home...but we need the money.”
