Parents Must Unite + Fight

This is the first monograph dedicated to the Hackney Flashers collective, a group of nine women activists who practiced agitprop from 1974 to 1980 in London’s working-class Hackney district. It brings together and reproduces all three of their series, Women and Work (1975), Who’s Holding the Baby? (1978) and Domestic Labour and Visual Representation (1980).

Their works denounce the inequality of pay between women and men, the double working day for mothers and the half-infantile, half-glamorous images of women disseminated by the media of the time. Photographer, journalist, editor, graphic designer, illustrator: the profiles of this socialist, single-sex feminist group have given their singularity to a practice of posting in public spaces panels composed of images, text, slogans and illustrations.

The Hackney Flashers produced a form of propaganda, as they put it, addressing a whole range of social discriminations: in other words, an intersectional practice before its time.