“Protest”
In 1974 an advert was placed in a Women’s Liberation publication inviting women in the visual arts to start a group to combat the pervasive and negative images of women in advertising and the media. At the first meeting was a photographer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, graphic designers, artists and a filmmaker. Initially called the Women’s Image Collective soon they agreed the name See Red Women’s Workshop.
In the 1970s radical and left-wing politics was dominated by men and as the fabulous new book See Red Women’s Workshop Feminist Posters 1974-1990 , published by Four Corners Books, says:
The left wing at that time, both the radical and the mainstream branches, didn’t take the Women’s Liberation Movement seriously nor recognise it would become a major part of people’s struggles across the world.
See Red’s first statement of purpose.
Lesbians Are Coming Out, 1982
YBA Wife, 1980
Tough, 1979
So Long As Women Are Not Free – caption taken from an interview in Spare Rib July 1975 with Mme Phan Thi Minh – a former resistance fighter in Danang, South Vietnam.
Lesbian Spirit, 1975.
Disc Jockey, 1973
Womens Day March, 1975
It’s What Your Right Arm’s For, 1977
Bite the Hand, 1978
See Red Women’s Workshop book cover
The historian Sheila Rowbothan in the forward of SEE RED Women’s Workshop Feminist Posters 1974-1990 writes that she hopes:
that new hands will pick up these posters, bear them aloft and act upon them. For there is indeed a great deal that needs to be done.
All posters are the copyright of the See Red Women’s Workshop.
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