Between the 1970s and 1980s, the United Kingdom found itself in a sociopolitical context that permeated the working class with an almost homogeneous malaise. In the early 1970s, the English-speaking world suffered a series of conflicts that led to the tension and mobilization of minorities: the rise in violence in Ireland, racist attacks that increasingly and repeatedly drove the Black population into extreme poverty; the reduction of women's wages, forcing a large part of the female population to leave their jobs to become nurses or home carers; as well as the abolition of their sexual rights or the restriction of their reproductive rights, among other things.
In the midst of creativity and advocacy, in 1974 the feminist magazine Red Rag published an advertisement inviting women to discuss how to challenge the stigma and oppression of women. It was there that a group of three female students from the Faculty of Fine Arts joined together to promote this advocacy, creating See Red Women's Workshop.
The See Red workshop and movement didn't just convey a political message. They sought to denounce and reorient progressive perspectives through creative advocacy, especially the creation of posters. Their posters were imbued with revolutionary messages for the time, through graphic design, and their themes addressed diverse topics, such as women's emancipation, domestic violence, the lack of sexual education, labor inequality, reproductive rights, and the particular vulnerability of Black women. See Red turned this poster-making channel into its tool for advocacy, education, and cooperation among women.
The workshop was funded through contributions from the collaborators themselves and fundraising. All creative proposals were evaluated collectively, and men were not allowed to participate. Self-financing led the workshop to define a very specific graphic style. While over the years the workshop combined various techniques, such as screen printing and collage, its posters were often characterized as monochromatic due to the low budget for ink acquisition, where the weight of its designs rested on color and direct political messages. See Red used red as its central symbol of the feminist struggle and as a resource for raising awareness of women's issues at the time. These ingenious pieces, which also sought to assert the accessibility and utility of creative practice, ultimately grew into a movement that transcended and connected with women from diverse parts of the world. Through the visual arts, the group became part of the underground feminist counterculture. Illustrators, photographers, cartoonists, and designers found in the movement a means of collective protest, enabling them to express themselves clearly, forcefully, and boldly.
“Producing screen-printed posters was, at the time, the most immediate and economical way to convey our messages. Working as a cooperative, without hierarchies, without any one person taking credit, sharing skills and knowledge, and being accessible to all women, was the founding principle behind the workshop's creation. All designs were worked on collectively, without any one person taking credit. We believed that anyone could draw and create a poster, and we actively sought to subvert the concept of the Artist with a capital "A" as the sole individual creator.” Susan Mackie
Member of See Red (Oct 2021. Via /archives.lse.ac.uk/records/5SRW)
The workshop was established on Walworth Road, London, and the space was refurbished by the women themselves, who were then working in the construction trades. Walworth Road placed them in a hostile and dangerous environment, where violence against the workshop was constant: they were subjected to numerous attacks by groups sympathetic to Nazism, often finding the workshop completely destroyed and its telephone lines cut.
In 1983, the workshop moved to a safer location, but also stopped disseminating its exclusively feminist message. The posters created to date continued to be sold, but the movement took a new direction, focusing on providing design and printing services to other community groups until 1990, when it finally closed its doors.
For over 16 years, a total of 45 women participated in the movement, driven by the creation of art and training workshops to express their protests and the sharing of their progressive ideas regarding women's freedom and equality. See Red Women's Workshop, like so many other activist associations made up of both women and men, emerged as resistance groups in response to the problematic lack of awareness among minorities in a United Kingdom where gender, class, and racial solidarity was essential.
Find the only book published to date. A collection of testimonies and all the posters produced, published by Four Corners Books.
See Red Women's Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974-1990
