© See Red Women's Workshop

The Haight Street Art Center is honored to present See Red Women's Workshop: Feminist Posters, London, 1974-1990. The exhibition opens in December of 2024, with special events planned in January and February (stay tuned!).

The 1970s was a decade of tremendous activity on the part of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United Kingdom, resulting in a string of successes affecting women’s rights. The See Red Women's Workshop of London was an important part of this movement, giving voice, on a grassroots level, to the struggles of women living in a patriarchal society—the gender of the nation’s then-monarch notwithstanding.

Founded by Pru Stevenson, Suzy Mackie, and Julia Franco, See Red posters encouraged women to reject the gender-normative boxes society was forever forcing them into; to demand control of their bodies; and to join with other women in the fight against the corrosiveness of everyday oppression. Using eye-catching graphics, See Red posters could be polemic or humorous—many were often both. Thus, some See Red posters resembled enlarged editorial cartoons, whether the topic was the pharmaceutical industry reaping enormous profits from the sale of drugs such as Valium (prescribed to medicate women into domestic submission), or a girl in a child’s reading primer questioning her future as, essentially, a housekeeper with benefits.

Other See Red posters advertised specific events such as the Women’s Day March of 1975 and rallies to oppose proposed restrictions on abortions. More than a few See Red posters openly celebrated the companionship—sexual and emotional—that women could give each other, as opposed to the false promises of happy heterosexual marriages, a subject that was employed to produce some of See Red’s most biting and witty posters. And then there were the See Red posters that railed against the fascist rhetoric of the National Front, broadening the workshop’s portfolio to include race as well as gender.

From the vantage point of the other side of the Atlantic, in 2024, See Red is a tonic, in which “protest” is the most active of verbs rather than the gloomy tenor of a society under which we must grudgingly live. As such, the See Red Women’s Workshop has much to teach us as we gird ourselves for the next four years. Here’s hoping we learn.   

Special thanks to Pru Stevenson and Suzy Mackie of See Red Women’s Workshop, and Elinor Jansz and Richard Embray of Four Corners Books.