Girl Zines: Making Media and Doing Feminism by Alsion Piepmeier - Suffragette Design - Research-led Brief

This book discusses feminist zines and their uses and origins throughout history. I collected some notes on the types of publications women created at the beginning of the 20th Century.


First Wave Origins:

• Scrapbooking - 19th Century, 'a material manifestation of memory.' - 'offered a space to comment on mainstream culture and also construct community and solidarity' pg 30
• Allowed women to construct their own legacy and public identity. pg 30 Publications could reframe and reprioritise mainstream media reporting.
• 'While allowing space for personal expression, often served a more colonising interest, incorporating people into a commodity market place rather than providing a site for resisting the market place.' pg 32 - scapbooking also taught women how to read advertising and fitted the creators into capitalism. Or is this marketplace literacy that they can use to critise the marketplace?
• Margaret Sanger 1914, she published her own paper - 'woman rebel' offering information about sexuaity and contraception. Illegal under the comstock law so fled to Europe. 
• 100,000 copies of the pamphlet 'Family Limitation' were produced and distributed, covering contraception, vaginal suppositories, woman's sexual pleasure. This was an outlet created outside of existing media. pg 34
• These pamphlets did require printers and a sizeable budget, as no inexpensive technology available. Changes in tech meant multiple copies could be made, similar to zine production.

This publication could be something I rebrand in a modern feminist way. - looking at modern styles of feminist design and applying them to old ideas.