“Can we make the banner ourselves?” A question that was often posed to Mary Lowndes, as she writes in her text Banners and Banner Making published in the early twentieth century. Lowndes, artist and suffragist and member of the Artists’ Suffrage League in England, wrote a poetic manual on how to approach the act of making a banner, offering insights that range from colours and sizes to the meaning and purpose of the banner itself.
During the suffragette movement, banners were never merely signs. They were carefully designed objects that carried a political dimension, not only through their words of protest, but also through the act of making them. Collectively crafted with care, banners allowed beauty to become a form of resistance.
Women designed, stitched, painted, and embroidered banners themselves, transforming traditionally feminine skills into tools of protest. The collective act of banner-making became part of the social organisation of the movement for women’s right to vote, challenging the idea that women’s work belonged solely in the domestic sphere.
The activism of artists sharing skills and organising the suffragette movement into a visual language exemplifies how art and design can be mobilised for social change. Art was not decoration but organisation.
During my residency at IASPIS, through conversations around the kitchen table, I returned to this question and posed it to my fellow women residents: “Can we make the banner ourselves?” Together with Åsa Norman, textile artist; Frida Hållander, craft artist; and Katarina Burin, artist, we sat together to share our research inquiries, tracing similarities, alliances, and points of connection.
We read Banners and Banner Making while collectively producing a banner that wove our individual practices and interests into a shared statement: Vi har alternativ – We have alternatives. The words were inspired by a protest motto from the play Fabriksflickorna, which Frida Hållander and Åsa Norman are revisiting in their research on the textile workers’ movement in Sweden during the 1980s.
