See Red’s first commission was a flier announcing the International Women’s Day 1975; within a couple years they were filling orders from organizations all over the world. They ran it as a collective, with a rotating crew of volunteer workers—women who in their other lives were not just artists but also teachers, mothers, organizers, psychotherapists. Early methods of production relied on silkscreen printing, or stenciling, an aesthetic and practical choice. This kept the process minimal and mobile, so they could easily set up shop anywhere: in poorly ventilated squats in South London, at community spaces that might not have indoor plumbing or electricity or heating, in parks, at workshops and conferences. Working at times with like-minded organizations like Women in Print, they made prints, T-shirts, cards, calendars; your modern anarchist agenda and radical planner probably owes a certain debt to See Red. The collective acknowledged the influence of the French Situationists, the posters of the Chinese cultural revolution, and art critic John Berger’s challenge to the accepted “way of seeing.”

Mobilized as a sisterhood, See Red’s core members were cognizant of the fact that the women’s movement tended to be white-dominated, and they deliberately allied themselves with women across class and racial fronts—Don’t Let Racism Divide Us, one poster memorably urges. See Red became more racially and ethnically diverse as the years went on, taking in political refugees from Chile, and addressing specific issues such as police brutality against black women, or the mistreatment of female prisoners in Ireland. The year after the collective first formed, Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party. In See Red’s first five years, she would become prime minister, and her face would appear on their signage, a symbol of oppression enacted by the right wing.

Over time, See Red suffered the internal and organizational growing pains of any resistance group as they weathered the changes of the outside world and its very real threats. In the early ’80s, the collective’s headquarters were tenuously located in a part of town where neo-Nazi stickers proliferated. Members arrived at the shop one morning in 1982 to find it had been broken into and vandalized—paint and ink dumped out and spilled, papers ripped and urinated on, a door smashed in, the phone lines cut. Scrawled on another wall was the familiar logo of the racist right-wing National Front organization. The police officer who arrived to file a report suggested it “was probably someone’s initials,” See Red’s members recall in the book. Who could be surprised to hear that “as feminists, we had little faith in the established forces of law and order at the time.”