Articles

Local Paper, International News: Feminist Print Cultures and Women’s Centres Newsletters in 1970s-1980s Belgium, France and Britain

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Abstract

In the wake of the 1970s revival of women’s liberation movements in Western Europe, women’s centres set up by local feminist groups often served as meeting and production premises for newsletter collectives. This article explores the part this form of grassroots feminism played in the transformations of West-European feminist print cultures by interrogating the ambitions and limitations of these local collectives when it comes to transnational circulations of texts and ideas. Drawing on selected archived women’s centres newsletters and archives of editorial collectives from Belgium, Britain and France, this article approaches these newsletters as translocal social movement technologies, and highlights their location at a productive yet sometimes uneasy position in between the local constitution of a women’s movement and the transnational ambitions of that same movement. It explores the circulation of these newsletters by drawing out the spatial contours of their readerships, before examining the diverse inconsistently successful editorial practices aiming to make international news appear on the pages.

Keywords: history of feminism, transnational activism, local feminist media, media history, spatial contours of women's liberation

How to Cite:

Cabadi, M., (2025) “Local Paper, International News: Feminist Print Cultures and Women’s Centres Newsletters in 1970s-1980s Belgium, France and Britain”, DiGeSt - Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies 12(2), 68-84. doi: https://doi.org/10.21825/digest.90478