Linsey Young (RCA) - 2024-25 Students
10048058@network.rca.ac.uk

My Message to the Women of our Nation: feminist posters in the shadow of Thatcher, 1970 - 1989

Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s posters printed by women working individually and in collectives were visible up and down the country in public and private spaces. Largely concerned with feminist consciousness raising they used images and short sections of text to disrupt the dominant political narrative of the time which was shaped by Conservative policy and the individualist market driven agenda of Margaret Thatcher.

While many of the women involved in poster production were trained artists these posters sat outside of the cultural mainstream, produced collectively and sold cheaply. Their circulation relied on networks of women selling them at conferences, making them for protests and organising their own exhibitions that toured nationally in community centres and libraries.

Being ephemeral objects these posters exist only in a handful of archives and personal collections and there is no single comprehensive assessment of their production, authors, exhibition strategies or dissemination. This practice based PhD will attempt to uncover a history of feminist consciousness raising poster work in the UK. In the formal section of the PhD I will analyise a selection of key posters and exhibitions, accumulating data on their production, authorship, dissemination and impact and through the practice based element will explore through creative writing the social and psychic impact of this sub cultural activity on women activists lives.

My practice based PhD proposal stems from a professional and academic unease with ‘the art world’ in which I have participated as a curator in a variety of independent and mainstream institutional roles for the past fifteen years. The more time I spend in this environment the more dissatisfying it becomes, increasingly functioning only for the minute number of super rich global collectors who desire cultural capital and a tax break, for property developers looking for cache or individual ‘stars’ foregrounded by curators from often very similar socio economic backgrounds. Curating the exhibition Women in Revolt! At Tate Britain was a revelation in my practice, allowing me to begin to understand and articulate the ways in which the professionalisation of the art market from the late 1980’s directly aligned with Conservative and Thatcherite policies of the period and played a large role in sidelining the socialist art practices of a wide range of second wave feminist artists work which fundamentally shaping these women’s lives. Uncovering work for the exhibition I have repeatedly come back to the poster exhibition in its multiple forms: ‘straight’ screen printed posters from print collectives, expanded print projects that include performance and exhibitions of laminated boards constructed of printed matter and text. For me they are ultimate ‘up yours’ to the mainstream art world, concerned with anti-nuclear activism, women’s relationship to government policy, anti racism, women’s health or their domestic experiences. They were often collectively authored, cheap to make, cheap to transport and often, helpfully, wipe clean and they often took up space in civic buildings, placing them at the heart of communities where they were needed. Posters were not precious, they criticised and opposed, they snuck through systems set up to exclude their authors voices. I have begun to view their creation and dissemination in the 1970’s and 80’s in the UK as in direct opposition to the positioning of the UK (politically, and socially) by Margaret Thatcher and wish to investigate their role in undermining her focus on individualism and capitalism and the impact this work had on women’s lives.

Principal Supervisor: Professor Rachel Garfield