“It is a thing to float in the wind, to flicker in the breeze, to flirt its colours for your pleasure, to half show and half conceal a device you long to unravel: you do not want to read it, you want to worship it.” So wrote the artist and suffragette Mary Lowndes in 1909, in her “how to” pamphlet, Banners and Banner-making.
As the struggle to achieve the vote gathered pace, events such as the women’s suffrage march of 13 June 1908 united beauty with political dynamism, as skilfully embroidered banners, and colourful pennants and flags, proclaimed the marchers’ allegiances. The banners infused the processions with an almost medieval sense of dignity and pageantry, no matter that the marchers were abused and insulted by passersby. As the historian Elizabeth Crawford has noted, the air on that day in 1908 was thick with banners depicting important foremothers such as astronomer Caroline Herschel and writer Fanny Burney, banners celebrating the women’s trades and professions, and banners proudly displaying the hometowns of the women marching. Often their slogans were witty and subversive. Portsmouth’s, for example – “Engage the enemy more closely” – appropriated Nelson’s last signal to the fleet at Trafalgar. And East Anglia reversed the famous saying of Pope Gregory the Great, “Non Angli, sed angeli” (not Angles but angels) so that it meant “not angels but Anglians” – that is, not “angels in the house” (to borrow Virginia Woolf’s phrase), but Englishwomen and citizens, who demanded their rights.
On Sunday thousands of women took to the streets in the spirit of these astonishingly brave women; they were participants in a mass artwork called Processions, organised as part of the 14-18 NOW commemorations of the first world war. Taking place in Belfast, Cardiff, Edinburgh and London, the marches were a deliberate attempt to recreate the glorious spectacle of the processions for which Lowndes and others had designed such splendid banners. Women across Britain have been stitching, embroidering, appliqueing and painting banners for months to hold aloft in celebration of those who came before them, but also in acknowledgment of the fact that the fight has only just begun. Women marched for reproductive rights, for an end to period poverty, against the gender pay gap, for equal representation in parliament. As one banner put it: “We have the vote. Now we want equality.”
Just as in 1908, the apparently benign and domestic tools of needle and thread have been employed as the weapons of protest. The banners of 2018, crafted with slow and painstaking skill, are the ultimate in analogue communication, but their effect is paradoxically instant, as pictures and footage are posted on social media. Lowndes – who proclaimed that if you could make a pair of curtains, you can certainly make a banner – would be pleased. She would be less pleased that the fight for women’s equality has so far to go.
