To celebrate International Women’s Day, myself and two our fantastic volunteers – Hannah Ellul and Alice Andrews – set up a little exhibition in Dundee Central Library. The exhibition featured a series of posters created by the Poster-Film Collective in 1983. The Poster-Film Collective was established when a group of students and ex-staff artists, photographers and film makers, initially from Slade School of Art, but later also from elsewhere, came together in the 1970s to create posters for various left-wing and socialist causes. The series of posters was commissioned as a special educational series on women’s history. To update the series we created our own poster, as a way of reflecting where we are today and what kinds of things may affect the social position of women in the future.
We were contacted by Claire Mackay from Dundee College who set her students an assignment using the exhibition. They were asked to pick a poster and describe what message they thought the poster was giving and if the message fitted with women in today’s society and, if not, why. We thought this was so great that we’d feature their work on our blog, so here it is! With many thanks to Jennifer, Kayleigh, Emma, Gemma, Mhairi and Ryan, Claire Mackay and librarians, Shona Donaldson and Christine Fergusson for having us.
This poster is an important part of history because; this marks women as being part of a medical field. They used herbs and had knowledge from observing other women and having the life experience to help guide other women while giving birth. In the past women were first and foremost housewives who were meant to cook, clean and look after their husband and children. Women living in the country had to be self sufficient so that meant baking all the bread and brew beer; they also had to make their families candles and soap to wash with. Women were only allowed to have medical knowledge that would benefit her family if they were very ill; otherwise they had to go to a “wise women” who would give help and advice. Therefore this is important because women were starting to be educated about different things like medical care, this started empowering women however they were still much lower than men and still had to suffer in silence and still had to suffer inequality for many more years until women stood up for themselves after world war 2.
This message still applies today because women are still part of a medical field and have now grown to have important roles in medical care such as doctors, nurses, surgeons and midwives which are high paid and respected positions. Women today have rights and responsibilities which women in the 17-18 century didn’t have like to work and to vote when the election happens; women have the same rights as men and are treated as their equals. This shows how societies attitude towards women have changed for the better.Jennifer Sweeney and Kayleigh Fordyce
The message some what fit in with todays society, as women still care for other women. But it is also very different in many different ways, Such as women are not seen as witches and the church now does no longer frown upon women being doctors or midwifes. Society turned against “witches” because they were independant smart women who had a mind of thier own, and came up with new forms of medicine to help women in labour, an society was not used to women thinking for themseleves. There is no longer just herbal medicines for going through labour, there is now lots of different drugs you can take to ease the pain.
Emma and Gemma
I think this poster marks a very important moment in society as it is about what the war had gained for women. During the war the women were the ones who were left to engineer and assemble the planes and weapons. This was the first time women were allowed to work and didn’t need to stay at home all the time to do housework, cooking and caring for the children. Many women did not enjoy life as they had to stay at home all the time. Working in the war women felt they had a purpose and that they were doing something with their life that they can do well. After the war women demanded that they wanted to carry on working. They protested for this and many people gave up so much to gain this, including one’s life. If this didn’t happen then women still would have been stuck in the house to be the perfect slave wives/mothers, who would be treated as second class citizens. Therefore this poster marks a very memorable moment in history, and without this, our society would be different today and women would still be treated lower than men. This shows that women could work just as well as men and that we fought for what we believed was right, and we had the proof to back this up. In this day and age, most women work and both men and women share their responsibilities equally.
I think this message does fit in with women in today’s society as we still expect to be treated the same as men. In this society, if a man treated you lower than them there would certainly be something done about that. (E.g, woman football presenters. A male workmate was caught being sexist against a female football presenter on air and was sacked immediately.) Women are given equal rights to men, including in the workplace. So I think this message has definitely carried on in today’s society.
Mhairi Paton
This poster really stood out to me compared with the rest because it shows what women were going through to get equal rights like the vote and equal pay etc. It also shows us that women from the past have fought for woman in today’s and in some ways have made the world a far better place for them to live. That’s why the past and future of this photo links in so well. There were a lot of pictures of protests from the past which were very interesting to see, also a recent picture from the sun newspaper which shows why equality for woman’s rights still needs being fought for still. Plus this poster was appealing to us because it showed us both sides of the past and the future, and some of these rights these women fought for will last through out the future and some of the fights for rights will carry on well into the future.
Ryan McAuley
