page_title: Mary Lowndes
section_title: Suffragette movement
hierarchical_section_title: Mary Lowndes / Suffragette movement
caption_attribution_description: English: Suffragette poster designed by Mary Lowndes, 1909, published by Brighton and Hove Women's Franchise. Artists' Suffrage Leage
context_page_description: Mary Lowndes was a British stained-glass artist who co-founded the stained glass studio and workshop Lowndes and Drury in 1897. She was an influential leader in the Arts and Crafts movement, not only for her stained glass work and successful studio-workshop, but also for opening doors for other women stained glass artists. She was an active participant in the suffragette movement, acting as Chair of the Artists' Suffrage League, and creating poster art to assist the movement.
context_section_description: Lowndes became involved in the Women's suffrage movement in the 1890s. In 1899, she attended the International Congress of Women in London. In January 1907, Lowndes established The Artists' Suffrage League (ASL) to create dramatic posters, postcards, Christmas cards, and banners for suffrage events. She became its chair and Barbara Forbes, her companion, was the secretary. 
  Between 1903 and 1914, the methods used by the women's suffrage movement began to change and they began to engage in public demonstrations and other propaganda activities.  Lowndes' training as an artist and stained-glass designer encouraged the use of bold shapes and a love of full, rich colours, using striking combinations of green and blue, magenta and orange.  She wrote a guide in 1910 to help women create their own Banners and Banner-Making, saying of the suffrage banners: "you do not want to read it, you want to worship it.  Choose purple and gold for ambition, red for courage, green for long-cherished hopes ... It is a declaration." Such banners were designed with female images like flowers, lit lamps, shells, sunrays, winged hearts; and to honour female heroines like Boadicea, Elizabeth Fry, Florence Nightingale, Marie Curie, Josephine Butler, Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Brontë and even 'Victoria, Queen and Mother'. These were carried in their hundreds or thousands in London's Pageant of Great Women 1909, Hyde Park Rally 1910, From Prison to Citizenship 1911, Pilgrimage for Women's Suffrage 1913, and later that year at the grand funeral procession of Emily Wilding Davison, the suffrage movement's martyr who threw herself under the King's horse at the Epsom Derby. An album of Lowndes' original banner designs (detailed on paper in watercolour and often accompanied by fabric swatches) resides at the Women's Library at the London School of Economics.  
  Lowndes was also personally active in the national Suffragette movement, including her leadership of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies executive committee.
  She was a member of the committee of the feminist magazine The Englishwoman's Review and contributed regularly to it.
caption: Suffrage poster, 1909
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