The Lamp and the Flame

Artist Jenni Mitchell designed Graduate Women Victoria’s logo. The purple lamp with the green flame is based on the IFUW logo designed in 1924, which shows an antique lamp representing the light of learning on a blue background. Around the central disc was an interlinked chain symbolizing the bonds of friendship linking IFUW members throughout the world. The chain was later dropped and the lamp came to be known as the lamp of friendship.

For Graduate Women Victoria, the lamp signifies both meanings:  the body of the lamp represents the cooperative efforts of women and the green flame represents the light of knowledge these efforts produce. The flame rises upward, to show the spread of knowledge in the world.

The purple, green and white colours were chosen in honour of the early feminists who campaigned for votes for women in Britain before World War 1. They chose purple to represent dignity and that self-reverence and self-respect which renders acquiescence to political subjugation impossible; white for purity in public as well as private life; and green for hope of a new spring tide in women’s history.