The Ineffectual Feminist?: Mina Loy and the “Woman-Cause”

This essay explores how Mina Loy's ambiguous personal, poetic, and political status provides a window into the fraught, multifarious nature of British feminist politics between 1900 and 1920. Loy's poetry and polemic intervene in a turn-of-the-century debate being waged over the construction of women's identity categories—a debate that also had implications for the relationship of practical politics to Modernist aesthetics. While women's political movements were already diverse and fragmented before the 1903 split between the Women's Social and Political Union and the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, the period between this schism and the winning of the vote in 1918 was marked by an increased attention to political tactics and strategy. Reading Loy's "Feminist Manifesto" (1914) and her multi-part parodic poem "The Effectual Marriage, or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni" (1915) against the backdrop of the tumultuous development of early twentieth-century feminist movements, this article demonstrates that feminism in this period is best understood not as a struggle culminating in the vote, but rather as a vicious, and often strange, battle over how to build a new rhetoric of women's identity.