Graduates of London University

Mary Lowndes designed the "Graduates of London University" banner for the Artists' Suffrage League, and marchers carried it in the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies procession through London in June 1908. The London Museum, which holds the banner in its permanent collection, identifies Lowndes as the League's founder and principal designer and places the banner in an occupational series honoring London University, the first British university to grant women degrees. The Archives Hub, a national archive catalog run by Jisc, reports that Lowndes founded the stained-glass firm Lowndes & Drury in 1897 to give freelance artists studio facilities independent of commercial glass firms, and its record draws on Nancy Armstrong's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lowndes later chaired the League and designed its banners, posters, and postcards. In this way, she participated in the public sphere by using the banner to visually communicate her feminist advocacy, making her political claim visible to people outside formal political spaces.

Regarding gender, the museum credits Lowndes by name as the sole designer in 1908, decades before women became the largest group of graphic design students, a shift Elizabeth Resnick reports in her 2025 Bloomsbury collection, Women Graphic Designers. Resnick, a design educator and the volume's editor, also notes that the canon still underrepresents women. Lowndes's case fits both points, since she's an example of a woman who received credit early, yet the field's history rarely discusses her. This suggests the later shift to a female majority was built on earlier work like hers rather than a sudden shift.