The Women’s (Wimmins) Warehouse was established as a women’s collective in 1979. It provided a short-lived and unofficial headquarters for the social and cultural activity of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in Sydney, Australia. The building itself was a five-storey warehouse at 9 Ultimo Road in Sydney’s Haymarket area, that was further divided into a mixture of office and workshop spaces, as well as a cafe.

One of the aims of the Warehouse project was to encourage women to establish various enterprises. Regular workshops were held where women could learn a range of skills, including traditionally male skills such as carpentry. Dances were also held to pay the rent, often featuring a drop-in band of women who had learned to play instruments in the collective’s music co-op. The Warehouse closed in 1981 but some of the projects it spawned continued long after. The group Stray Dags, for example, had some commercial success, while Harridan Screen printers (1981-88) and the Tin Sheds were two enterprises that emerged from the Wimmins Warehouse screen printing collective.

Women's posters tell a story of women speaking up and out about health, child care, lesbianism, violence, nuclear disarmament, the women's movement and the arts. Spurred on by the anti-war movement, the rise of feminism and the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, collectives and community-based groups worked to produced social and political statements in poster form. Women enjoyed the non-hierarchical arrangement of collectives and taught themselves to screen-print – often with little or no art training. Poster makers grabbed the idea of making art enjoyable and accessible to everyone, creating art for the streets that would reach a wide audience, to be sold cheaply and/or distributed through unconventional channels such as feminist bookshops.

Jan Fieldsend taught the screen-printing technique at the Wimmins Warehouse to anyone who was interested. These posters are ephemeral; they peel and tear off and become fragile with time. Changes in printing technology have also led to the demise of the hand screen-printed poster as a vehicle for political expression.