When you walk through the doors of the new Women in Revolt show at Tate Britain, you are immediately confronted by a painting. A woman holds a wailing child to her side with grim resolve. The pair of them are trapped between a laundry airer, a kitchen table and hob. A box of washing power draws your eye in.

It’s a claustrophobic painting, but the subjects’ expressions are lit like a Caravaggio: the child, red Mary-Jane kicking into her mother’s stomach, has a perfect ‘o’ for a mouth; there’s such ripe contortion on her face I thought it was a Paula Rego at first glance. The mother’s eyes are weary, her mouth straight. She has had enough, she had enough a long time ago, but there’s no release in sight.

Maureen Scott painted it - oil on board - in 1970. It’s called Mother and Child at Breaking Point. I’d not heard of Scott, and there’s not much online about her, beyond the fact she was born in an air-raid shelter in 1940, and a quote attributed to her: “Unlike some fashionable, thus mega-rich artists who claim they believe in nothing, I am the opposite. I am full to the brim with everything and it over flows onto my canvas. I cannot stop it.”

I take a photo of Mother and Child at Breaking Point and send it to a friend. “True portrait of working motherhood: activated”, she replied.

It’s a big show, enormous, in fact. I was there to have somewhere to go between the baby’s lunchtime nap and bedtime, and fortunate enough to have a members card that allows me to peck away at things freely over a few months that would otherwise cost £19 a pop. I watched films about the Women’s Lib movement while the baby tugged on the headphone cord. I wheeled him around in the pram while I looked at copies of Mama zine and 50-year-old posters that made the same demands we’re on the streets asking for now (equal education and job opportunity; free 24-hour child care; free contraception and abortion on demand; legal and financial independence for all women).

Just before we gave up and went home, I spent several minutes with Women & Work: A Document on the Division of Labour in Industry, 1973-75. It’s a remarkable piece, by Margaret Harrison, Kay Hunt and Mary Kelly: a survey of the working lives of more than 150 at a metal box-making factory in Bermondsey. There’s video and photographs but I was taken by the simple timelines of these womens’ days, many of whom undertook domestic duties for their entire families, including grown sons, around factory shifts. Most poignant was when they made time for “rest” - a rare inclusion, and in some cases a mere 15 minutes. Very few got anything near eight hours’ sleep.

I saw my own privilege here (a husband who shares responsibility in domestic duties, a job that doesn’t make physical demands of my body) and, somewhat grimly, a resonance, too. I tried not to rattle through the shape of my day, or those of the women I know and talk to about the tedious little grievances that pockmark the hours, while reading these litanies. In some ways they would be closer than we’d like to imagine.

On the bus home I read that women will be able to get the pill over the counter in a matter of weeks. It felt like a kind of progress, I guess.

Other good things this week:...