I've had Toby Clark's Art and Propaganda in the Twentieth Century sitting on my shelf for ages, but only finally started reading it.  There were two stories in the women's art section that I thought were especially interesting and worth sharing with readers of my blog.  The book appears to be out of print, but I'm thus far enjoying it, and would recommend tracking down a used copy if you're into art and politics.  Here's excerpts on two people I liked, with the accompanying imagery:

Most of those who produced propaganda for the suffrage movements were not professional artists, through the implications of their work sometimes challenged dominant ideas about art.  Some even took on the art institutions directly, and adopted them as the stage for political actions.

The British campaigner for women's suffrage Mary Richardson did this in 1914 when she took a small axe into the National Gallery in London.  She used it on The Rokeby Venus (c. 1650) by Diego Velazquez (1599-1660), smashing the glass and slashing the painting a number of times before being restrained and arrested.  She explained at her trial that her motive had been to draw attention to the treatment of the suffragette leader Emily Pankhurst, who had been on hunger strike in London's Holloway Prison.  It was not an isolated event but one of many propaganda activities which the militant wing of the suffrage movement had carried out in Britain since 1905 to gain the vote and oppose wider discrimination against women.  The attack on the painting would have been partly understood as an extension of the suffragettes' tactic of smashing department store windows, which assaulted the feminized spaces of consumerism like a parodic inversion of shopping.  By moving the battle to the nation's foremost art museum, Richardson brought the values of the state's guardians of culture into the line of fire, and choosing a famous picture of a nude woman, she targeted the point of intersection between institutional power and the representations of femininity.

Richardson's act provoked a complex set of meanings and effects.  At first sight, it looks like an attack on the control and exposure of the female body as an object of male erotic pleasure.  Richardson remarked that she had disliked the way the way men in the gallery had "gaped" at the picture.  But she admired the painting itself, comparing Velazquez's Venus with her own political heroine, saying, "I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful women in mythological history as a protest against the Government destroying Mrs Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history."  Yet Richardson had not destroyed the picture, but altered it, making a new image - the slashed Venus - which was widely reproduced in photographs in the national press, as Richardson had surely anticipated.  Though the newspapers' response was hostile, demonizing "Slasher Mary" as a monstrous hysteric, Richardson had succeeded in using the mass media to disseminate "her" picture of a wounded heroine, in effect a metaphorical portrait of the martyred Plankhurst and of the suffering of women in general.

And:

Born as Lucy Schwob to a family of Jewish intellectuals, [Claude Cahun (1894-1954)] engaged in a varied career of art, acting, poetry, and political activism.  She became involved with the Surrealists after meeting them as members of a group of communist artists in 1932.  At this time, there were serious tensions in the Surrealists' relationship with communism.  [...]

Cahun left the communists in 1933.  Much of her artistic activity depended on the radical transformation of her own appearance.  She had worked on montages and photographic self-portraits since 1914 as a student at the Sorbonne, and from 1919 she wore dramatically short hair, sometimes dyeing it pink, green, and gold.  Alongside her adoption of various pseudonyms, her self-portraits explore a repertoire of playfully shifting identities, portraying her as a soldier or convict with shaved head, or as a wild parody of the Hollywood good-time girl, or as a circus acrobat.  Like Hoch's art, Cahun's work was closely allied to her lesbianism and to a practice which involved a parodic masquerade in a series of stereotypically feminine roles which only emphasized her adamant refusal to conform to them.  Until recently, these activities lacked a context through which they could be widely understood as "political."  As a form of propaganda, they are certainly oblique, although at an everyday and popular level the adoption in public of a non-conformist appearance has been readily understood as a form of political statement since long before the age of the hippies and punks.  As it transpired, Cahun's most explicit propaganda work would be as a member of Resistance forces against the Nazi occupation of Jersey, where she lived during the war, engaging in four years of anti-Nazi activities which included flying a banner from a church which read, "Jesus is great, but Hitler is greater - for Jesus died for the people but people die for Hitler."  She was arrested in 1944 and condemned to death by the Gestapo.  Despite a reprieve, she spent nearly a year in prison from which she never fully recovered, physically or mentally.