Sex Wars Revisited

This historical novel by Marge Piercy is set in the decades that followed the Civil War. It is a fascinating account of the women (Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Victoria Woodhull, & Lucretia Mott) who passionately fought for the right to vote, the right to own property and to manage their own money, and to have control over and understanding of their own bodies.

The spread for this book had never seemed quite complete, so I finally decided to do a little more work on it. The differences are subtle, but I do think they make it look better. I'm posting both the "before" and "after" together so you can more easily compare them. The blah background had always bothered me the most, so I added a little color to it by pulling a blue chalk inkpad across it in places and blending on to the women's pictures. Then I used the darker end of a "Platinum" Brushables marker to shadow the letters in the title, and finished by lightly defining the space between each letter and shadow with a black Pilot P-500 pen. As a calligrapher, I hand write most everything in my journals, but the letters for this title were done with rubber stamps.