I used to think feminist posters were just angry slogans on cardboard.
Turns out, the visual language of feminist movements—from suffragette banners to Guerrilla Girls’ gorilla masks—operated as a sophisticated communication system that bypassed traditional gatekeepers who controlled newspapers, radio, and television. These movements understood something critical: when you’re shut out of mainstream media, you build your own visual vocabulary. The suffragettes in early 1900s Britain deployed a tricolor scheme of purple, white, and green that became instantly recognizable, each color carrying symbolic weight—purple for dignity, white for purity, green for hope. You could spot a suffragette from across a crowded street, which was precisely the point. They turned their bodies into walking manifestos, wearing sashes and brooches that communicated political allegiance without uttering a single word. The visual consistency created what we’d now call brand recognition, except the product was equality and the marketing budget was roughly zero pounds.
Here’s the thing: design choices weren’t aesthetic—they were strategic. The bold sans-serif typefaces, the clenched fists, the Venus symbols with raised fists emerging from the 1970s women’s liberation movement, these weren’t randomly selected from a design catalogue. Wait—maybe I’m overstating it, but the deliberate amateurism of second-wave feminist graphics actually reinforced their message of grassroots authenticity.
The Guerrilla Girls Knew Exactly What They Were Doing With Those Masks
In 1985, a group of anonymous female artists started wearing gorilla masks to art openings in New York, and honestly, the absurdity was the entire point. The Guerrilla Girls plastered cities with posters featuring statistics about gender disparity in museums—”Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?” one asked, noting that less than 5% of artists in the Modern Art section were women, but 85% of nudes were female. The gorilla masks served multiple functions: they protected anonymity, they created memorable visual impact, and they introduced an element of playful disruption that disarmed critics who might have dismissed straightforward protest as humorless. The typography was clean, the facts were brutal, and the combination made the posters impossible to ignore, which is why they ended up in design textbooks decades later. I guess you could say they hacked the attention economy before we even called it that.
The color purple kept showing up, didn’t it?
From suffragettes to Alice Walker’s novel to the Purple Ribbon Campaign against domestic violence, feminist movements seemed to recieve this particular wavelength of light as symbolically useful, maybe because it sat between the traditional gender binaries of pink and blue, or maybe because it historically represented royalty and power—claiming space that women were told didn’t belong to them. The AIDS activism group ACT UP, which had significant feminist involvement, weaponized the pink triangle that Nazis used to mark homosexuals, reclaiming it as a symbol of defiance with the slogan “Silence = Death” in white Gill Sans typeface against stark backgrounds. Visual reclamation became a pattern: take the symbol of oppression, invert it, amplify it, make it yours.
Why Zines and Photocopiers Mattered More Than Anyone Expected They Would
Third-wave feminism in the 1990s exploded through Riot Grrrl zines—photocopied, hand-drawn, deliberately rough publications that rejected professional polish. These weren’t just cheaply produced because of limited budgets, though that was definately part of it. The aesthetic of cut-and-paste collages, handwritten text, menstrual blood imagery, and intentional “mistakes” communicated that perfection wasn’t required for your voice to matter, that the polished magazines on newsstands didn’t represent the only valid form of media. Bikini Kill’s album covers, the angry scrawled text of zine pages, the safety-pin aesthetics borrowed from punk—all of this created a visual ecosystem where imperfection was authenticity. You could photocopy something fifty times, staple it together, and distribute it at a show, and suddenly you were part of a national conversation about body image, sexual assault, or gender norms.
The digital age hasn’t killed these visual strategies—it’s multiplied them. Instagram infographics with pastel backgrounds and sans-serif stats about the wage gap are direct descendants of Guerrilla Girls posters. The pink pussy hats from the 2017 Women’s March created instant visual cohesion across millions of protesters, photographable from helicopters, unmistakable in their message. Anyway, visual design was never separate from feminist activism—it was the activism, condensed into color and shape and type, bypassing verbal arguments to lodge directly in your visual cortex where you couldn’t quite ignore it even if you wanted to.
