Women for Peace: Banners from Greenham Common, Charlotte Dew

Bringing the banners of the Greenham women into full, living presence—not as relics but as acts of resistance woven in cloth. The book presents more than 200 pages of bold, tactile statements: stitched slogans, pictorial emblems, layered motifs, hand-lettered messages, all born from the labour of women who made art in the service of peace. The banners are photographed with care—frayed edges, raw seams, weathered fabrics, the tension in the stitches—all given space to breathe. Dew frames them not just as protest ephemera but as material culture: visible traces of activism, design, emotion, and communal making.

What makes this volume feel especially Selvedge-worthy is how it invites a slow, embodied gaze: one page might place a banner beside the making table, the hands that wielded needle and thread, archival photographs of its hanging, and commentary that links slogan and shape to moment and movement. The narrative is as concerned with process (who made what, How, where, under what conditions) as it is with symbol or cause. In this way the banners become both object and act—textile as voice, cloth as petition.

About the Author
Charlotte Dew is a curator, researcher and writer whose interests lie at the intersection of 20th-century and contemporary craft, protest art, and material memory. According to the publisher, she is currently Public Programme Manager at The Goldsmiths’ Centre in London, and has held roles at the Crafts Council, The National Archives, The Mercers’ Company, and The Women’s Library.

Publication date: 2021
Publisher: Four Corners Books
Pages: 224
ISBN: 9781909829183