Happy International Women’s Day from Newnham College!
Many readers will already be familiar with ‘The Cambridge Alumnae Banner’ which resides at Newnham, but to mark International Women’s Day, we would like to share the history of the important artifact.
The Banner was designed by Mary Lowndes and worked on by students of Newnham and Girton. It was carried by the Cambridge contingent in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ procession of 13 June 1908 and in several suffrage processions between 1908 and 1913.
On the banner the stencilled irises are for Newnham, the daisies for Girton.
This Banner has always resided in (and been cared for by) Newnham although arrangements have on occasion been made for it to be on show in Girton. It was displayed in the Senate House for the 1998 commemoration of the granting of degrees to women. As a stitched and stencilled textile it is a delicate artifact and is now displayed in a special case at Newnham which provides the necessary environmental protection.
An account of one of the Suffrage marches is given by M. E Holland in A Newnham Anthology. She said: “We belonged to the non-militant movement, not the W.S.PU., and our colours were discreet, red and white. I was one of those allowed to carry one of the poles of the Cambridge banner, and I well remember seeing men take off their hats in salute to the towers of Cambridge as we played along the Embankment.”
The notes in A Newnham Anthology observe that there were impressive Suffrage marches in both these summers. Mrs Garrett Anderson and Lady Strachey led large groups of academic women and they were followed in one of the processions by a male contingent from the University of Cambridge.