Shrew

Title: Shrew	Dates: 1969-78
Periodicity: c. monthly	Price: 6d for women; 9d for men ‘until equal pay’ (1969); 10p (1973); 30p (1977)
Circulation: Initial print run 300; 3,000 by December 1971 (but copies not selling out); circulation figures grew to c. 5000	Place of Publication: London

Description

Shrew was an influential feminist magazine of the early years of the British women’s liberation movement (Bouchier 1983, 58). It acted as the outward-facing publication of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop – the umbrella organisation that co-ordinated small women’s groups across London, formed in 1969. Unlike the London Women’s Liberation Workshop Newsletter, Shrew ‘was identified as the publication that would represent Women’s Liberation ideas to women outside the movement’ (Setch 2002, 173). The ‘heady fusion of American-style consciousness raising with New Left politics […] led to the formation of the first Women’s Liberation Workshops and the production of Shrew‘ (Bazin 2020, 249). Each issue of Shrew was produced by a different group of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop (the Tufnell Park women’s group, the Peckham Rye women’s group etc) and thus its content is often highly local. As Victoria Bazin puts it, ‘Shrew was radically reinvented by each collective that produced the journal to reflect their particular interests’ (2020, 248). There is no single editorial or political line: Shrew expresses diverse, often conflicting and always heterogeneous perspectives.

Shrew‘s Mission Statement

A ‘monthly newsletter designed to break down the isolation between women by discussing the ideas and aims of the Women’s Liberation Movement’.

_{Shrew, January 1970}

‘The Women’s Liberation Workshop believes that women in our society are oppressed. We are economically oppressed: in jobs we do full work for half pay, in the home we do unpaid work full time. We are commercially exploited by advertisements, television and press; legally we often have only the status of children. We are brought up to feel inadequate, educated to narrower horizons than men. This is our specific oppression as women. It is as women that we are, therefore, organizing.

[…]

The magazine, SHREW, is produced by a different group each month. Thus, to a certain extent, it reflects the preoccupations of the group producing it. W.L.W. meets monthly, the small groups weekly. We come together as groups and individuals to further our part in the struggle for social change and the transformation of society’

_{Shrew, February 1970}

_{Shrew magazine masthead, Vol 4, No 2 April 1972}

Key Campaigns

Special issues on themes including:

Women and work
Psychology
Goddess feminism
The Night Cleaners’ Campaign
The family
Female sexuality
Women of the Global South (known then as ‘Third World’ women)
Radical feminism
Marriage
Non violence

Prominent campaigns included

The Miss World protests 1969 and 1970
The Night Cleaners’ Campaign
24 hour childcare
Access to abortion
Domestic labour
Equal pay
Contraception
Housing
Anti-nuclear activism

TRIAL FOR THE MISS WORLD DEMONSTRATORS - Shrw, December 1970

Magazine Aesthetic

While the very earliest issues of Shrew are very newsletter-like in terms of look and production, by October 1970 more sophisticated cover designs and increased use of visual artwork began to edge this publication closer towards what we might think of as a ‘magazine’.

Shrew’s format was not consistent: issues such as ‘Psychology Shrew’ experimented with a larger, newspaper style layout (vol 4 no. 2 April 1972).

The Night Cleaners’ special issue (vol 3 no. 9, December 1971) marked a turning point in the production values and format of Shrew. The aim was to regularise Shrew’s layout to make it into more of a ‘tabloid newspaper’, and to include more content on relevant events and theory. In other words, to make the magazine more outward-looking, and to broaden its focus out from small group consciousness raising. The aesthetic of this issue is far less home-made, and far more text-heavy and formal, than previous issues: there are no cartoons, only black and white photographs, chronologies and tables.

The cover of Shrew vol 5 no. 3 (Aug/Sept 1973) is particularly ambitious: an intricate, circular cartoon surrounding a bold, bright-red pop-art version of Shrew’s title. As of Autumn 1976, the newsletter underwent another redesign.

_{Shrew magazine cover cartoon, artist unknown, Autumn 1974}

_{Shrew magazine cover cartoon, artist unknown, August/September 1973}

Historical Contexts

Shrew‘s first issue came out the year after the fiftieth anniversary of women’s suffrage in Britain; and two years after the legalisation of abortion. In 1970, the Equal Pay Act was passed; and in 1975, the Sex Discrimination Act which (on paper) outlawed discrimination at work on grounds of sex or marital status. It continued to publish throughout the dynamic years of feminist organizing in the 1970s, during which time a host of other feminist magazines from Spare Rib to Red Rag to Women’s Voice were set up. It folded in the same year as the dramatic split in the UK women’s movement between socialist feminists and radical feminists, precipitated by the last national conference in Birmingham in 1978 (see Rees 2010). A year later, Margaret Thatcher became the first (and divisive) female prime minister of Britain.

_{Shrew magazine cover cartoon, artist unknown, Summer 1974}

Editors

Small groups of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop. In December 1971, the Shrew Collective was established to look after the day-to-day running of the magazine.

_{Shrew magazine cover detail, December 1970}

Printers, typesetters, publishers and distributors

1969: Women’s Liberation Workshop, 9 Stratford Villas, NW 1 April

1973: Women’s Liberation Workshop, 3 Shavers Place, Piccadilly, London SW1Y 4HE; printed by SW Litho Ltd, 6 Cottons Gardens, London E2

1976: Typesetter Jenny Pennings, printed by Women in Print, published by Shrew Collective c/o Women’s Liberation Workshop, 38 Earlham St, WC2

Shrew logo

Business model

Produced on a voluntary rolling basis by different women’s groups across London

Connections to other feminist magazines

Many of the women who wrote, drew or otherwise contributed to Shrew went onto contribute to other feminist magazines such as Spare Rib and Red Rag.

Further Reading about Shrew

On Shrew, see:

David Bouchier (1983), The Feminist Challenge: The Movement for Women’s Liberation in Britain and the USA (London: Palgrave)

Victoria Bazin (2020),’”It’s Capitalism, Not Me, Sweetheart”: Women’s Activist Magazines on the Left’, in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain 1940s-2000s ed. Laurel Forster and Joanne Hollows (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 245-260

Eleanor Careless and Jess Cotton (2023) ‘No Woman is an Island: The Politics of Loneliness, Spare Rib and the Women’s Liberation Movement’, 1969-1993, New Formations, 2023(109), 10-28

Eleanor Careless (2026) ‘“Unions, orgasms and more..”: tracing the long arc of the feminist strike in British women’s movement magazines 1971–1988’, Journal of Gender Studies 1-25. [see section From school magazine to tabloid newspaper: Shrew’s Night Cleaners’ issue]

Sarah Crook (2020) ‘Writing about Mothering and Childcare in the British Women’s Liberation Movement, 1970–85’, Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1940s–2000s, ed. Laurel Forster and Joanne Hollows (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 351 – 365

On the split in the WLM in 1978, see:

Jeska Rees (2010), ‘A Look Back at Anger: the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1978’, Women’s History Review, 3:19 (July), 337-356

HOW TO CITE THIS PAGE:

‘Shrew‘, Liberating Histories Periodicals Guide, Liberating Histories <https://liberatinghistories.org/resources/periodicals-guide/shrew > [accessed dd/mm/yyy]