'Unions, orgasms and more..': Tracing the long arc of the feminist strike in British women's movement magazines 1971-1988

This article examines visual and textual mediations of women-led strike action in three left-wing feminist magazines of the 1970s–1980s published out of Britain, where a militant labour movement combined with a vibrant feminist print culture – not uniquely, but representatively – and situates these case studies within an increasingly global network of feminist print media. Strikes are ‘heavily mediatised’ (as Hart & Kelsey argue, 2019), and where mainstream media often seeks to delegitimise or undermine organized labour, activist media such as feminist magazines provide an alternative discursive space that seeks to support and sustain industrial action. In turn, the strike precipitates shifts in representational strategies and political aesthetics. The ‘event’ of the strike as mediated (following Bazin & Waters’ use of this term, 2016) by the magazine is the ‘transition’ which this article examines. Through relational readings of three periodicals – Shrew, the London Women’s Liberation Workshop newsletter; Red Rag, a Marxist-feminist magazine; and Outwrite, an internationalist feminist newspaper – I trace the symbolic and practical evolutions of a series of cleaners’ strikes via the changing print technologies by which they were mediated. As I argue, to trace the long arc of the feminist strike is to witness feminism itself in transition.