20TH CENTURY WOMEN

These ’70s Feminist Posters Are Packed Full of Inspiration For Your International Women’s Day Protest Signs


WomenUnite copy1.jpg
See Red Women’s Workshop

Back in 1974, a small ad placed in a Women’s Liberation publication started a movement. Fed up with the media and advertising industry’s sexist representation of women, a group of women artists met up in London to express their discontent, which they quickly turned into a group called the See Red Women’s Workshop and a barrage of silkscreened signs and posters paraded across the U.K. in both “peace camps” and the streets. Their posters from 1974 to 1990, though, which have just been published in a collection by Four Corner Books, should not be limited to the period in which they were made: slogans like “Our Bodies Our Choice” are more relevant than ever these days, and increasingly in use. And, thanks in part to the group’s inspiration from black and chicana women’s groups in the U.S., they’re also surprisingly intersectional for the time, acknowledging that the campaign for women’s rights is inextricably linked to issues of racism, housing, and income inequality, which the liberals in Britain were then tackling head-on under Margaret Thatcher’s conservative administration. (Even the Workshop’s most explicit signs—”Media & the Men Are Our Enemies,” for example—don’t seem nearly as out-there when you take into consideration that the posh were reportedly wearing buttons reading “I am rich.”) Take a look back at their early posters, and get inspiration for your own on this International Women’s Day, here.

1

“Women Unite,” 1973.

2

“Don’t Let Racism Divide Us,” 1978.

3

“Girls Are Powerful,” 1979.

4

“Capitalism Also Depends on Domestic Labor,” 1975.

5

“Fight the Cuts,” 1975.

6

“Protest,” 1973.

7

“Women Throw Off Our Double Burden of Economic + Sexist Exploitation,” 1975.

8

See Red Women’s Workshop, 1974-1990.