A Darn Good Idea: Feminist printers and the Women's Liberation Movement in Britain

Print culture was central to the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) that burgeoned in 1970s Britain, with a gamut of flyers and newsletters, posters and pamphlets, magazines and books, and as such it constituted a vital part of this emergent counter-public sphere. New things were being said, imagined and discovered. New discourses were being built and contested. Language was being dismantled as a tool of oppression and words as speech, conversation, poetry, information and polemic were reconceived as instruments of liberation. The primary communication technology by which to disseminate this verbosity, as well as its concomitant imagery, was printing. The women’s movement needed a press, or better still presses, of their own. This chapter sketches out a history of the women printing movement, from the motivations and forms it took to the challenges it faced.