Margaret Harrison - Women of the World Unite, You have Nothing to Lose but Cheese Cake

• Title: Women of the World Unite, You have Nothing to Lose but Cheese Cake
• Artist: Margaret Harrison (1940-)
• Date: 1969
• Medium: Acrylic on canvas
• Dimensions: 88 x 53 cm
• Location: Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London, England, UK

"Women of the World Unite, You have Nothing to Lose but Cheesecake" is a 1969 painting by Margaret Harrison, a British feminist and activist artist. Its title is a deliberate riff on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ famous slogan from "The Communist Manifesto": “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

Here, “workers” becomes “women” and “chains” becomes “cheesecake”.

By saying women have “nothing to lose but cheesecake”, Harrison is jokingly suggesting that what women stand to give up is their role as decorative, consumable objects – the sugary images that serve the male gaze. The painting suggests that sexual objectification is itself a form of “chain”, a constraint of women’s social role, just as real as economic exploitation.

Visually, Harrison paints a highly sexualized, pin-up-style woman in the manner of commercial photography of the 1950s and 1960s (cf. Alberto Vargas-style illustrations), also called cheesecake style. The woman in the painting looks like a standard pin-up: glamorous, sexy, compliant. But the slogan around her is a call to collective feminist struggle.

The historical context is that, in the year 1969, feminism was on the rise, so was activism post the events of 1968, and parrallels were drawn between feminism and socialism.

The painting uses humor and irony to expose and critique how women’s bodies were represented in the media by imitating the same codes. It is a call to action to all women which had and still has a strong visual impact.