Mina Loy, “The Feminist Manifesto”

Points

• The feminist movement right now needs some serious changes
  • “The only method is absolute DEMOLITION.”
  • No half-measures will suffice.
  • Careers are not enough
• Don’t struggle for “equality” with men
  • Celebrate women for who we are, not for mimicking men
• Marriage is sketchy
  • It turns women into “parasites”
  • Doesn’t allow them to develop positive attributes other than charm
  • Ruins natural male-female relationships
  • Stop thinking about yourselves as mothers or mistresses only
• Mandatory maternity
  • All intelligent women should reproduce for good of the race
  • Motherhood outside of marriage should be promoted
    • No point in ruining male-female relations just to have race go on
• Sex is not sketchy
  • You should enjoy sex to be a complete person and a good mother
    • Stop thinking it’s impure, and you will revolutionize society
  • Without sex, you do not experience all that Life has to offer
  • Should surgically “remove” each woman’s virginity
    • So it’s not such a big part of a woman’s “worth”

Relation to Modernism

• Katherine Mansfield, 1908: “It is the hopelessly insipid doctrine that love is the only thing in the world, taught, hammered into women, from generation to generation, which hampers us so cruelly. We must get rid of that bogey—and then, then comes the opportunity of happiness and freedom.”

Quotes

• On androgyny: “Each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments—free of stress.”
• On love: “Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved.”
• On social change: “The only method is absolute DEMOLITION.”