Found Object: No. 0027.26, The Lesbian Herstory Archives, New York City, Spre Rib Magazine, No. 94 (May 1980)

Spare Rib, Issue No. 94, May 1980, an original British women's liberation magazine.

A striking snapshot of feminism at a moment when the personal was becoming fiercely political. This issue moves from girls’ lives, women’s health and the gender politics of money and marriage to beauty salons, men’s relationship to feminism, and the experience of Irish women confronting anti-Irish prejudice in England. Its “Off the Boat” feature is particularly resonant, recording Irish women speaking about racism and belonging years before “intersectionality” entered the mainstream feminist vocabulary.

What makes the issue riveting now is its immediacy: these aren’t distant theories but women interrogating the structures embedded in their bodies, work, relationships, money and everyday encounters. Spare Rib was one of Britain’s most important forums for exactly this kind of unfiltered feminist conversation, bringing subjects largely excluded from conventional women’s magazines onto the newsstand. It holds an important place in women's liberation print history.

This is an extraordinary 1980 time capsule of women questioning who retains the power in love, money, beauty, race, health, and liberation.