The Artist as Crusader.

"Sylvia Pankhurst made paintings and wrote articles about the condition of women workers. Much of her work as an artist was connected with her human rights campaigns. Sylvia's artwork and imagery gave the Women's Social and Political Union its coherent visual identity. The WSPU is thought to be the first campaigning body ever to use design and colour to create a corporate identity, though Sylvia was not the only artist involved. She designed flags, banners and gifts for sale, and used her artistic skills to decorate halls and meeting rooms for the Suffragettes. After doing time for suffragette militancy in Holloway women's prison (London) in 1907 when she was 25, Sylvia determined to expose the realities of prison life to the press." www.sylviapankhurst.com

SELF-PORTRAIT IN PRISON DRESS
By Sylvia Pankhurst, c. 1907; in pastel and charcoal.

 Rise like lions after slumber

In unfathomable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

That in sleep have fallen on you

Ye are many, they are few.

~ Percy Shelley, 1819.

One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression. William Blake.

The fault is great in man or woman
Who steals a goose from off a common;
But what can plead that man’s excuse
Who steals the common from the goose?

~ Anonymous, in The Tickler Magazine, February 1, 1821.