Here at The Women’s Library we have an enormous selection of posters. From the political to the absurd, they cover centuries and hundreds of campaigns. There are posters from the See Red Workshop, posters from Votes for Women, posters from Edinburgh Women’s Liberation Group and posters from The Women’s Land Army.
Olivia Plender has responded to this element of the collection with her own poster, which you can see first here, you lucky people:
See? A SNEAK PEEK – isn’t the internet marvellous?
Here are just a couple of our favourites from The Women’s Library collection:
This screen printed poster from 1978 was produced by the See Red Women’s Workshop; a second wave feminist publishing collective that ran from 1974 to 1984. The workshop not only produced striking, challenging and often humorous posters, postcards and calendars; it also held talks and demonstrations to give other women the tools they needed to spread their own message. Over the ten years that the workshop was active, they produced posters covering a huge number of feminist subjects including women and sexuality, health, childcare, domestic politics, domestic violence, sexual equality for girls and women, male sexist attitudes, sexist and degrading treatment of women by the media, and the oppression of women in a wider political context.
Parity Begins at Home is a poster produced by Women’s Posters, Brighton in 1974. The poster is an example of the creative and often humorous approach of much of 1970s and 80s feminism in addressing the traditional and circumscribed roles of women as mother, housewife and domestic worker. Second wave feminism of the seventies and eighties aimed to unite all women in to a ‘sisterhood’ demanding equal pay for equal work, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand and free 24 hour nurseries under community control. Sadly, the Women’s Liberation Movement became increasingly beset by fragmentation as time went on, while some of these ambitions were never fully realised. The history of the Women’s Liberation Movement was explored in The Women’s Library exhibition Ms Understood.
