Category Archives: perSISTERS designs

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs, Wearables

Thinking about Harriet Tubman

In this post I am pulling together info and shopping links for the works I have made for Harriet Tubman. I have written here about the creation of these designs.

I have some friends who are leading a special Harriet Tubman tour in Maryland this November (2025) to celebrate Maryland Emancipation Day. You can sign up for the tour at this link. Maryland Emancipation Day marks the anniversary of the state’s 1864 abolition of slavery, an act that predated the 13th Amendment.

On Saturday, November 1, and Saturday, November 8, 2025, professional guides Lauri Williamson and Ella Schiralli will lead guests on a full-day, immersive experience through the landscapes that shaped Tubman’s courage and calling.

Here are the works I have made for Harriet Tubman, and links for you to purchase.

FEAR LESS Shirt for Harriet Tubman

Made in England from my original design. This is digital fabric printing, then cut and sewn. The fabric is a soft wicking recycled polyester. These European sizes run small, so size up when ordering. The cut is a ladies style. While supplies last, since I probably won’t be able to reorder from England at the same cost. Here is a checkout link, I don’t have these on Etsy.

All-over print, cut, and sew, made in England.

FEARLESS shawl and scarf for Harriet Tubman

These stunning FEARLESS shawl and scarf are based on the life and message of Harriet Tubman. You own your own body. It depicts photographs I made in the Eastern Shore region of Maryland (where Tubman was from); the word “FEARLESS”; a facsimile of the advertisement Harriet’s enslaver took out in the newspaper after she fled for freedom the first time; a printer’s dingbat depicting a fleeing enslaved woman that was regularly used in such advertisements; the shape of hands enclosing the image of sun streaming through trees; and the words “I looked down at my hands to see if I was the same person.” This last quote is from Bradford’s biography of Harriet Tubman. When Harriet emancipated herself for the first time, she crossed over the water into Pennsylvania, “and there was sun coming through the trees and glory over everything, and I looked down at my hands to see if I was the same person.” And she wasn’t, because she owned her own body for the first time in her life. A portion of the proceeds goes to Polaris, a leader in the global fight to eradicate modern slavery. This shawl and scarf is digitally printed in the USA in small quantities. The material is a lightweight and diaphanous poly chiffon. The edges are finished in a rolled serged hem. Approximately 36 inches high and 90 inches long (shawl) and 16 inches high and 90 inches long (scarf). Machine wash gently, hang dry.

Link to purchase shawl or scarf.

FEARLESS shawl for Harriet Tubman, photo © Suzanne Kulperger
“Fearless” shawl honoring Harriet Tubman
“Fearless” scarf honoring Harriet Tubman

FEAR LESS print designs for Harriet Tubman

This print design I made in 2017, inspired by the visiting card photo that had been recently discovered. I have prints, stickers, and magnets based on this design. You can order from this listing.

FEARLESS for Harriet Tubman, a perSISTERS print in the Female Power Project

FEARLESS print design for Harriet Tubman

Here is a print design based more on the shawl design. You can order it here.

FEARLESS for Harriet Tubman, a perSISTERS print variation in the Female Power Project read about it

FEAR LESS tote bag too!

A mix of the print design and the shawl design, like the shirts. Photos show both sides of the tote bag on my mannequin, Mrs. Jones. Made in the U.S. Digital print on poly canvas, adjustable strap. Can be worn cross body or over the shoulder. This is a roughly 18 inch square bag, ~3 to 4 inch wide, open at the top, with a zippered compartment inside, and two small open sleeve compartments. I put my wallet in the zippered pouch, my phone in one of the sleeves, and my keys in the other sleeve. I make only a few at a time, so limited edition. You can order it here.

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

MOTHER for Marsha P. Johnson

MOTHER for Marsha P. Johnson. You can purchase this print at THIS LINK.

Marsha P. Johnson (August 24, 1945 – July 6, 1992)

“I may be crazy but that don’t make me wrong.”1

In 2022 I decided I wanted to make a perSISTERS print for an out trans person. I knew a little about Marsha P. Johnson and so started some research on her. Through Marsha’s story I learned about Sylvia Rivera. Here were two BFF trans people, active and well-known and key to the beginning of the gay rights movement in the U.S. I decided in 2022 to do a piece on Sylvia instead. Although she was an activist and famous in her community, Marsha’s story was so sad and I couldn’t figure out a message. From my research, Sylvia appeared to have been much more active and effective in the gay liberation movement, which is a movement for justice, even though her story is also sad.

But I kept thinking about Marsha, I knew there was a message there for me to find, and also she just kept coming up. Marsha’s name and picture continue to be used for many, many things. She is an icon. I’ve realized that Sylvia’s power comes from what she did and Marsha’s power comes from who she was. There are just some people that enter the imagination of the culture, are adopted/adapted, and live on in many of us, and Marsha is one of those people. (Another example is Frida Kahlo, see Queer Trickster Medicine, Making My Peace with Frida Kahlo).

First, a note on terminology. Both Marsha and Sylvia called themselves transvestites and drag queens, and they used feminine pronouns. I don’t think Marsha called herself a woman. Transgender was not a term when they were young and still forming their identities. Marsha would probably say when referring to precise terms for her particular kind of gender-non-conformity: “Pay It No Mind”. She just knew who she was, she chose her name, she chose her fam.

Pay it no mind is what the “P.” is for in the name, Marsha P. Johnson

“Because I try and pay a lot of those little things that happen to me in life, absolutely no mind.”2 On the one hand, this might sound like adaptive dissociation. (There was trauma in her early life.) On the other hand, this could be spiritual detachment. Without a doubt it is humorous. There is a story about when Marsha had to appear before a judge and when she told him what the P. stands for, he laughed and dismissed the case against her.

In the documentary, “Pay It No Mind—The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”, many people describe Marsha as a kind of saint, a holy fool, or a bodhisattva. In the first place, she was exceedingly nurturing to the other street queens and sex workers, and immensely kind to everyone, and she radiated joy and humor, and seemed to do whatever she pleased. Usually, that is, unless she was in a dark and violent funk (interesting that at these times she would present more as a man). She lived so far outside the norms of respectability, as an unhoused, HIV-positive, be-sparkled and be-ribboned and be-flowered, gender non-conforming, occasionally psychotic person when not on meds, drag performer, sex worker, and Black person. She was so “othered” that she fell into this kind of beyond-category/hyper-marginalized personhood seen as divine by some people, because she was also charismatically kind and loving. She was a neighborhood character, someone that people recognized. She was at all the gay rights protests, all the marches, all the sit-ins, all the parades. “I want my gay rights now” she shouted into the microphones held to her face. She sat with and nursed the people who were dying from AIDS so they would not die alone. She prostrated herself before altars in churches. She described herself as a bride of Jesus.

Sylvia said that Marsha saved her life. Sylvia was only 11 in 1962 when she came to New York and turned to survival sex work. It was illegal to “cross dress” in New York and AMAB people3 were regularly arrested just for wearing makeup. Marsha was six years older and hadn’t been on the streets much longer, but she was a mother to the queer street kids around her. She would protect them, teach them, show them love. It was Sylvia’s idea to create STAR with Marsha (Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries) which was mostly a way to house these kids in run down buildings. It was also a banner and group identity for protests and parades. It was tough to get funding and housing so it didn’t last very long. Many of the young people didn’t survive after STAR fell apart.

When I began this series of prints, the perSISTERS, I had to refine the purpose I was aiming toward. When I was doing a piece about Sophie Scholl I realized clearly that I am not talking about “role models.” For example, I didn’t want to encourage people to have their heads chopped off while resisting fascist tyranny. I am talking about exceptional people, sometimes in extraordinary circumstances, in whose stories I could find messages that might give us courage. Because they were women’s stories, they might be particularly encouraging to women, and tell us something about women. Also I hope the build up of all these power messages might lead iteratively to a working definition of what Female Power is. I think these stories should be interesting to EVERYONE and I say to men who hesitate to enter the Female Power situations, “Female Power is for everyone.”

“If women aren’t perceived to be within the structure of power, isn’t it power itself we need to redefine?” —Mary Beard, Women & Power, A Manifesto

It’s been forever that women have been hearing that their highest calling is being a mother. Here I am showing that “mother” is also a verb that can be conjugated for all pronouns. Language shows us how our minds work or can work, how what we thought were rules can be flouted, and meaning can still be preserved, and maybe subcultures and poets show us how to make language into a bio-engine of justice. In which case I proclaim this piece (the print, I mean) to be a work of concrete poetry.

“She was a good queen,” a cop smiled and said when he helped close off the street to traffic so the funeral procession of hundreds could make it to the river to scatter Marsha’s ashes.

There is much more to Marsha’s story, many more funny, charming, inspiring and sad details. You can look it up on Wikipedia. You should watch the documentary, “Pay It No Mind” on YouTube. You can look at the resources I mention below. You can Google her name and see the artworks and institutes and programs inspired by Marsha P. Johnson. 

1. Marsha quoted in “Pay It No Mind—The Life and Times of Marsha P. Johnson”, a documentary by Michael Kasino on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjN9W2KstqE

2. ibid.

3. AMAB = “assigned male at birth”

OTHER RESOURCES

https://www.advocate.com/exclusives/2022/9/02/why-these-queer-artists-are-honoring-lgbtq-people-unseen-history

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/marsha-p-johnson

https://www.tatler.com/article/who-is-marsha-p-johnson-drag-queen-gay-activist

Female Power Project, perSISTERS designs

REWRITE the default, for Hansa Mehta

REWRITE the default, for Hansa Mehta, perSISTER print in the Female Power Project.
You can purchase this print HERE.

“As India’s delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1947–52, [Hansa Mehta] championed the case for a gender-neutral phrasing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mehta proposed the name of Eleanor Roosevelt as Chair of the committee that founded the Human Rights Commission and undertook the writing of an International Bill of Rights. The initial wording of Article 1 was ‘All men are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ Roosevelt’s biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook (2006: 558) writes that Hansa Mehta, the only other woman on the Commission, ‘significantly transformed the document by her insistence that the words “all men” would in much of the world be taken to exclude women. Hansa Mehta influenced ER in many ways. The commission adopted her inclusive formula “all human beings” during its June 1948 session, and women’s equality was forevermore affirmed in UN literature.’”
from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2022/09/12/hansa-mehta-an-early-indian-feminist/

“If not for Hansa Mehta, according to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ statement from December 2018, ‘we would probably be speaking of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man rather than of Human Rights.’”
from https://thepaperclip.in/hansa-mehta-all-human-beings-are-born-free-and-equal/

Hansa Mehta was born on July 3, 1897, to a privileged household in the princely state of Baroda, now part of Gujarat state along the western coast of India. Hansa pursued an education beyond what was typical of a woman at her time: she graduated with honors from Baroda College with a degree in philosophy; she studied journalism and sociology at the London School of Economics; and she participated in an exchange program in San Francisco. While in London, Hansa became friends with feminist, poet, and Indian independence activist Sarojini Naidu, who was friends with and worked closely with Mahatma Gandhi. Through this friendship Hansa also became close to Gandhi. She and a group of women visited Gandhi jail and this visit had a profound affect on Hansa.

It would be hard to overemphasize the effect that Gandhi’s ideas about non-violent resistance have had on global freedom struggles. (For example, perSISTER Pauli Murray engaged with these ideas when she refused to leave her bus seat, and when she participated in lunch counter sit-ins with other Howard University students in Washington DC.) 

Hansa married a man of a lower caste than hers, which caused a stir. She worked for women’s rights and Indian independence from England, organizing boycotts and participating in demonstrations. She and Kamala Nehru shouted revolutionary slogans in the Delhi train station, causing the British to blast the train whistles non-stop to drown them out. The increasing number of women revolutionaries caused trouble for the British rulers. Hansa was arrested and spent some time in jail. 

Upon release from jail, Hansa became involved in electoral politics in India, running for provincial office and winning a seat. She worked toward social, economic, political, educational, and reproductive justice for all people. 

Hansa worked within the All India Women’s Conference and became its president in 1946. There she drafted the Indian Woman’s Charter of Rights and Duties, which demanded education, equality, and civil rights for women. You can read this document at this link: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1494728?ln=en

Starting in 1946, Hansa Mehta served as a member of the United Nations sub-committee on the status of women before she became the vice-chair with Eleanor Roosevelt of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights Committee. 

From 1946 to 1949, having been elected to the Constituent Assembly, Hansa sat at the tables to hash out the fundamental rights of the people of India and other details for their new constitution. Mehta was one of the 15 women framers of the Indian Constitution.

In the first few minutes of August 15, 1947, Hansa Mehta presented the new flag to the Constituent Assembly of the new nation of independent India, as a gift from the women of India. “It is in the fitness of things that this first flag that will fly over this august House should be a gift from the women of India!” She also presented “a list of nearly one hundred prominent women of all communities who have expressed a desire to associate themselves with this ceremonial” and stressed that there are hundreds and hundreds of women who want to contribute to the function of the government of the newly independent India. You can listen to her speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFC6_5yqM-U

Hansa Mehta served in many high caliber positions in academic administration in India, on the board of UNESCO, and she was also an author and translator. She died on April 4, 1995.

DESIGN NOTE
When looking for photographs of Hansa Mehta I found some examples on Ebay of printed postcards with her image, from the 1930s. I love the texture and color of this rather low-quality printing (by current standards). This led me to look up images of Indian vernacular typography like hand painted signs, match book printing, painted trucks. The bright colors, shadowed type, misregistered (not lined up) colors, blotchy halftone dots, I love it all. So this mode influenced my design for this print in the perSISTERS series. 

See ebay print here (for a while, anyway: https://www.ebay.com/itm/404345693088). Also I found such good stuff to inspire me on Pinterest and you can too. Search for: Indian Street Signs, Truck art, match books.

The bars of color in the background (and the clor scheme of the print) are from the national flag of India, and the star burst shape is a riff on the Ashoka Chakra, also from the flag.

RESOURCES
https://indianexpress.com/article/gender/hansa-jivraj-mehta-freedom-fighter-reformer-india-has-a-lot-to-thank-her-for-5034322/

https://thewire.in/history/hansa-mehta-jivraj-sarojini-naidu-mahatma-gandhi-united-nations

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13540661221115957

A blog on hand painted signs in India

https://www.un.org/en/observances/human-rights-day/women-who-shaped-the-universal-declaration

https://ardra.medium.com/the-women-who-shaped-human-rights-at-the-un-3464a158e959

https://www.constitutionofindia.net/members/hansa-jivraj-mehta/