Tonight's #VintageMagTweets looks at Shocking Pink magazine, a home-made mag put together by a group of very young feminists in the 80s as a direct response to Jackie and similar teenage publications.

http://www.grassrootsfeminism.net/cms/node/165 
The dates were 1981-1982 and 1987-1992. 16 issues were published on topics like contraception, abortion, sexuality, lesbianism, violence against women, women culture / music etc., skill sharing, racism, women's rights etc.

You can download pdfs of the whole magazines using that link.

Here's a typical contents page. Lots on sex, sexual orientation, the practicalities of using contraceptives, getting readers to understand their own female bodies. Lots on world politics too. It couldn't have been more different to what was on the market.

A team of just 10 young women got this magazine off the ground, some aged as young as 16. It's impressive.

There was a very 'fanzine', cut-and-paste style to the layout and not all of it's easy to read. There's a lot of satire directed at commercial mags, some of it genuinely funny and a lot of it pretty savage. These women were angry and wanted to out things right.

In fact the articles on 'looks' are few and far between.

I love this frank, clear explanation of what everyday sexism could be to a girl growing up in the 80s. Girls were told these things, regularly. Education and careers advice was openly sexist.

It's worth mentioning the title. Pink is obviously a colour stereotypically associated with girls and with feminine gender constraints. However, there was also a real magazine called Pink which was like Jackie only madder.

I'm not sure Shocking Pink would have had much time for Cuddle-up Kittens.

This was more their cup of tea: challenging the National Front.

I love their sinister description of the village disco as an exploitative, menacing force.

They talked a lot about growing up a lesbian at a time when all other girls' magazines were either ignoring the subject, or telling readers who wrote in to say they fancied other girls that they were just 'going through a phase'.

To be fair, this is a spot-on deconstruction of those endless pop images of posing girls and boys in bright new clothes.

I love this simple cartoon because it nails the message of Jackie et al completely.

Going to pause there because I have a date with Chris Packham, ahem. I'll add more on Sunday.

Here's a bit more from Shocking Pink magazine, the mag for teenage girls run by young women and teenage girls themselves.

Here's a spoof quiz question, but actually this sort of situation is taken from real life. Lots of girls were barred from doing certain subjects.

And only a remarkable few pursued this discrimination through the courts.

Thanks to those who did that schools can no longer do this. #ThankABoomer

And another genuine situation that girls and women in the 70s and 80s sometimes faced.

Why we need girls-only spaces (here, a music workshop).

I love this cheeky inversion of the Immac advert. Teenage magazines teach girls to be disgusted by their own body hair. Nowadays it's much, much worse than it was in the 80s.

How on earth did this woman think SP was an appropriate read for her 12 year-old??

This is the climate of hostility lesbians often faced in the 80s.
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Auberon Waugh on feminists. Because you knew he'd have *something* to say.

Horrified councillor struggles not to say "lesbians".

What must the inside of that man's head have been like??

One woman's experience of trying to become a camera operator. (1 of 2)

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Very astute summary of what most 70s/80s teenage magazines for girls were telling them.

Let's finish with a cheery, upbeat cartoon. Honestly, the girls who put this magazine together, and those who read it, were amazing.

I'll add some more to this thread on Thursday.

Let's have a bit more Shocking Pink now. #VintageMagTweets

One woman, acting alone with a bunch of hand tools, took out a third of the US's first strike nuclear defence capabilities.

She didn't even have a car.

She served 5 years in prison, during which she studied Law and got into Harvard.

One of Shocking Pink's photo stories. This vital message, so clearly spelt out here, was absent from teenage girls' magazines until Just 17 arrived on the market.

One of the exceptional aspects of SP magazine was the way they told stories from around the world. In that sense it very much reflected the magazine for adult women, Spare Rib. If they saw injustice in another country, they reported on it.

This story is heartbreaking: Namibia's own military firing on schoolchildren. But the students took action and walked out, refusing to go back.

My guess is, SP included this terrible story as an example of young people's protest. The school is still there but the military base is abandoned.

Here is the only information I've been able to find about the school's boycott. https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/126005/bk-country-profiles-namibia-part3-010185-en.pdf;jsessionid=58D69F136040F38B68C5CB118AEDE22B?sequence=29

Using rubber bullets, police actually *opened fire* on protesting students. How brave those children were!

But huge numbers of Namibian adults also joined in the protest.

Moving back to the UK, SP looks at crude attempts by the Conservative government to massage unemployment figures.

Those of who remember the Tories in the 70s and 80s often feel a weary sense of deja vu when Johnson announces yet another fake initiative.

"Written before Section 28" - what a sad comment.

*weeps*

That sounds like an interesting book!

This is properly impressive. I wonder how many men were involved. Do we have any of the original WODGEMs on Twitter?

Inevitably. (1 of 2)

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Good answer!

I don't know whether SP took existing photo stories and tipp-exed out the speech bubbles, or if they shot their own. money's on the former.

And to finish with, here's another of their mad quizzes.

More Shocking Pink coming your way on Sunday night. x

OK, #VintageMagTweets time. And here's something that still crops up: firms charging women more for services than they charge men.

It's not even especially hidden, either. One hairdresser near me currently charges a third more for cutting women's hair than men's, regardless of what the cut is, hair length etc.

You can guess how often I go there.

Here's the police in the late 80s refusing to directly investigate a shop selling Nazi and NF regalia.

Possible origins of International Women's Day. I'm sorry to admit I didn't know either of these stories.

"Well done, dearie."

Good old Shocking Pink, spreading the RadFem word.

I'll be honest, when this mag came out I'd have been in my early 20s and I wouldn't have known what Rad Fem meant.

'What's a wife worth?'

I wonder if nameless Mrs Grimes got any compensation??

The SP team commented that other readers had written in with similar stories.

I love the way she sorts through the rubbish to retrieve it!

Quite impressive for a magazine produced on a shoestring.

This turned out to be a spoof, but for a few seconds it had me agog.

SP looks at sex work around the world. I wonder what the figures would be today.

The magazine is very clear on who's being exploited.

And on the hypocrisy of the law.

This is great: an all-girls skateboarding group to encourage physical confidence and a sense of 'owning spaces'.

Burtons sacked a woman worker because she was pregnant, so she took them to an industrial tribunal and customers boycotted the store. We're grateful to women like Tricia Jennings for standing up for women's rights. #ThankABoomer

That's all for now. More on Thursday.

Hooray, more Shocking Pink now in #VintageMagTweets.

Can you handle rejection by your cat?

Obviously it's a bit of fun, but it does highlight the stupidity of a lot of those quizzes so many of us dutifully filled in every week.

I like their take on a typical problem page too. Am I deformed? No.

I love this. From what I recall, even when the topic of being lesbian (or gay) was looked at in youth media, it was often over-earnest and quite downbeat. But this is joyous.

1 of 2 - Police caught out blatantly lying.

2 of 3. (Previous tweet should have read 1 of 3)

3 of 3. Women are so often painted as violent simply for standing their ground, but here the accusers were caught out by their own stupidity.

SP magazine talked about race and racism in a way that no other teenage magazine did. (1 of 2)

2 of 2. I'm sorry this is so vile. If it's too horrible, let me know and I'll take it down. x

This kind of advert gladdens my heart. Remember, at the time women were routinely refused apprenticeships because "there were no women's toilets on site" or "the overalls weren't in their size".

Plus a lot of schools still prevented girls from pursuing engineering-related subjects. So it's great to see SP encouraging its readers to consider the field.

I love the way the magazine gives its readers some historical context for women's rights.

CHEERING.

This was the state of London in the late 80s. I don't know what the figures are now.

A salute to those Greenham women who put their personal safety at considerable risk to protest against US nuclear weapons sited on UK soil. SP wanted its readers to know about the generations above theirs who were fighting for peace.

They regularly looked at women's prison conditions.

But at the end of the day, they could be pretty much daft as brushes.

Let's end tonight with a great big HOORAY for witches!

'ray, it's more #VintageMagTweets.

This begins as an uplifting story about a very early church blessing for a lesbian couple. Ends weirdly, though.

- "Women do things."
- "True."

A reminder of Shocking Pink's laudable mission. But a readership of '10 and upwards'? 10??

The infamous Judge Pickles jails a woman and her baby to 'teach girls not to get pregnant to avoid prison'.

Census time, and what a surprise, many women are rendered invisible.

How women's unpaid labour holds up economies (but fails to benefit them individually).

A Tory speaks.

Shocking Pink's nutty horoscopes were always a treat.

Isn't it astonishing that the lowest-aid jobs in the late 80s just happen to be women's? I suppose it's because of our Ladybrains and the fact we're just not suited by our womanly nature to earn decent wages.

That reminds me, Phillip Pullman never did come back to me to explain what "womanly essence" was.

A reminder to young 'uns that our right to legal abortion was repeatedly under attack in the 70s and 80s.

I didn't realise that until the very end of the 80s, abortion was illegal in Belgium.

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How dare women have body hair??

Disgusting, I tell you.

I like to think SP would have told porn-informed ideas about shaving female genitals to Get in the Bin.

Here is where our very own @diaphaneite stayed when she was working on SP magazine!

And finally for tonight, two more appalling judges who ought to have been sacked on the spot, but were retained and probably responsible for a great deal of harm against women.

More on Thursday. x