Tell us a bit about the background of See Red Women’s Workshop (SRWW). See Red was founded in 1974 by three former art students who met through an advertisement placed in a radical feminist magazine. The cooperative set out to subvert, challenge and explore stereotypical images of women, question women’s role in society, challenge the male art world from a collective angle, and empower women by setting up a women’s collective.

It was an extremely exciting time. We wanted to produce propaganda for the women’s liberation movement. The movement was blooming—fast—and all the members of the cooperative belonged to women’s groups and actively participated in radical, alternative organizations. Our posters grew out of this involvement. It was essential that the posters reflect issues of importance to women and be immediately understood and accessible to all.

At any one time, a core group of five women ran the workshop part time and without pay. Most had part-time paid work and/or childcare commitments. Funds came from the sales of our posters and calendars and by supplying printing services for women’s and community groups. Our initial equipment was donated, shared or bought secondhand.

We were driven by immediate and ongoing political imperatives at home in Britain—women and children were under attack on all fronts, both from Thatcher’s cuts on spending for government programs and from Victorian values and ideas about a woman’s place in society. At times, that meant we were in danger. In the early ’80s, the National Front attacked our premises. They trashed posters, broke our equipment, spilled ink, and pissed over our paperwork and screens. In response, we said in an article in Outwrite magazine that “we see these attacks on us as part of a growing trend from the extreme right who now see women’s organisations as sufficient threat as to want to intimidate and attack us.”

As we grew, we worked with other groups of women in order to represent a range of political and global women’s issues. Currently, “intersectionality” is rightly high on the feminist agenda. Though it wasn’t called that at the time, we tried to consciously address issues of race, sexuality and class within the collective by actively seeking new members and by working with other groups to produce posters that raised and reflected issues of black women, lesbians and working-class women, recognizing that real feminism has to be more than just homogenous white feminism.

Over sixteen years, more than 45 women worked in the cooperative. The workshop ceased producing original feminist posters for sale in 1983, concentrating on service printing for the community. It closed in 1990.

How did your process for producing posters shift from the ’70s to the ’90s? Working collectively was central to the ethos of See Red, as was sharing skills and knowledge. The guiding principle behind the founding of the workshop was to work as a cooperative, with no hierarchy and no one individual taking credit, sharing skills and knowledge and being accessible to all women. It meant lots of discussions about ideas, politics and designs—once a design was agreed upon, many hands were involved in creating the finished product. We often found that making decisions about the wording and slogans was the most difficult part of the design!

In the 1970s, screen printing was the most immediate and the cheapest way to get a poster designed, printed and in circulation. We started by printing on tabletops with our own handmade screens. When we could afford it, we graduated to handling a large screen-printing desk; later, we built our own darkroom so we could make posters with photographic images. We had a mail order catalog through which we sold our posters to individuals, radical bookshops, groups, schools and colleges, some of them abroad. To mail our posters, we used to pack them in cardboard tubes that we found at our local street market before taking them to the post office in our shopping trolley! Things have changed in this area to include more digital tools, and we are delighted by the role that do-it-yourself media and new technology have in the circulation of ideas and posters that seek to inspire action today.

Did your work regularly play off mainstream imagery and copy/slogans? Several of our posters addressed the exploitation of women’s bodies and women’s images by commercial and mainstream advertising and publishers:

1) Which one are you? (1974) was purely a copy of a contemporary sheet of Letraset showing stereotyped images of women. We just reprinted it, plain and simple.

2) Underneath they’re all Lovable (1978) was an actual slogan for Pretty Polly tights. Our poster was inspired by contemporary feminist graffiti that people used to spray paint on these poster advertisements, and it hopefully inspired others to take up graffiti.

3) Right on Jane (1977) was based on the Key Words Reading Scheme children’s book series, published by Ladybird Books and featuring the characters Peter and Jane. The first three frames of this poster used actual copy from an original book. In the fourth frame, we zoom in on Jane as her expression changes from one of quiet acquiescence to quizzical anger. As she questions both her role in the story and the books’ sexism, we use a change of text: “Jane thinks: stuff this!”

What role did humor play in your work? We wanted to make posters that were consciousness raising, humorous and eye catching. If they were not accessible to everyone, they were not serving their purpose. Humor was key—from the start, our posters were designed to look good. We wanted people to want to look at them and put them up at home, in school and in the workplace. No one wants to live with a relentlessly depressing image! Many of our posters used humor, where appropriate, to present our ideas in an accessible way, encouraging women to challenge the status quo. The use of humor deconstructed the received ideas about political posters being aggressive, functional and serious. We also wanted to confound the frequent accusations that feminists were humorless!

Why was closing SRWW in 1990 the right choice for the group? By 1990, the rise of cheaper and improved technology, such as offset lithography, combined with the cumulative effects of the government cuts and the loss of funding for many community groups and projects. We were solely focused on providing printing services for community groups at the time, and we just weren’t getting enough work. Costs were getting higher, and we couldn’t afford to continue.

We’re seeing a rise in animated posters today. Do you think the art form loses or gains anything when it moves from the realm of print to digital? We’ve always loved the deeper quality of the ink and the more vibrant, richer tones and colors you get with screen printing. But nowadays, if care and funding are there, the quality of digital reproduction can be great. It also depends on what the poster is for—will it go on a wall, be fly posted, reproduced in huge numbers, put online... ?

Has the way that women are portrayed in advertising and the media gotten any better? Yes and no. People are more aware of the effect that degrading and offensive advertising can have on women’s confidence and self-esteem, and they are more confident in challenging sexism. Young women’s groups use social media to start campaigns and to get organized. And women’s rights are now legal. When we started out in 1974, there was no legislation to back us. Many strands of protest continue to be relevant, but we can acknowledge that some things really did change because of the “second wave” feminism of the ’60s through the ’80s. For example, many feminist ideas about equality have become part of the curriculum in many educational contexts and also when it comes to some employment rights.

However, while there is more awareness of the damage done through stereotyping women, the exploitation of young women through the use of degrading images is still endemic in the media. Violence against women in the home and the community is still rife, and sadly, some hard-won rights around reproduction and sexuality are now under threat again.

Many of the gains tended to benefit white, Western, middle-class women much more than others, and the current picture is hard to summarize. The feminism of “more women in the boardroom” is a long way from street activism.

What was your reaction to the 2017 Women’s March? The Women’s March was an exciting global event, very much like the good old days. Protesters from all over the United Kingdom marched in the thousands. Trump hit so many raw nerves with his degrading racism and his sexist behavior that many women who might never have participated in demonstrations or made posters before were there. The posters and slogans were clever and angry—and funny! Humor combined with anger was strongly in evidence, and we were all angry and insulted enough to show up with amazingly original stuff.

During the march, we were extremely proud to come across some young women who had redesigned our poster So long as women are not free, the people are not free (1978). They had updated the image of the group of women, and it looked fantastic.

Have any reactions to your work stuck with you? In the early days, the delight and pride we saw in women’s faces as they pulled their first screen prints off the press! We encouraged women to make their own posters and designs and print them, too. Any woman can design and print a poster.

In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of interest in our posters, from galleries and museums to zines and design festivals and—especially closest to our hearts—from young women artists, activists, students and women’s groups. We have also recently written a book: See Red Women’s Workshop: Feminist Posters 1974–1990, published by Four Corners Books in 2016. Our posters seem to speak to different generations, although this indicates—as if we were in any doubt—that the struggle for women’s freedom and equality is far from won.