Between 1910 and 1914, as militant activists faced down physical violence from a variety of state agents in the final years of the campaign for women’s suffrage, the newspapers published by the militant suffragist Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) mobilized brutality as a framework through which to categorize the state’s actions. Their weekly newspapers, Votes for Women (1907–1915) and The Suffragette (1912–1915) argued that state-sponsored brutality against women was symptomatic of a...

When we teach Paris: A Poem, we find ourselves repeatedly facing the same pedagogical question: what do we want our students to see when we read this poem? Hope Mirrlees’s text is at once a personal, lyric exploration of post-war Paris and a work of printed visual art. It is a modernist long poem written by a single author as well as an example of the kind of feminist modernist collaboration possible in small, independent presses. When faced with a poem like this that showcases its intentionally...

Booksellers speak through the books they sell, lend, or promote. After World War II, Sylvia Beach officially retired from the profession of bookselling. Having closed the doors of Shakespeare and Company in 1941 under duress during the German Occupation, she never reopened her bookshop. Entering her sixties in the post-war years, she returned to live in the apartment above where her bookshop had been. Surrounded by her enormous archive, she continued to lend, give away, translate, and promote books and authors. Although she was no longer officially a bookseller, she continued to speak through bo

On July 27, 1927, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf, describing an unexpected encounter: "Today as I was driving down Oxford Street I saw a woman on a refuge, carrying [ To the] Lighthouse. She was an unknown woman – up from the country, I should think, and just been to Mudie’s or the Times, – and as the policeman held me up with his white glove I saw your name staring at me, Virginia Woolf, against the moving red buses, in Vanessa’s paraph of lettering. Then as I stayed (with my foot pressing down the clutch"

When Alice Oswald delivered her final lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in 2023, she (once again) made new the modernist manifesto. Counterblast! (a manifesto for poetry) launches the futurists on a rocket ship back to Homer via stanzas containing questions about how we come to sense each other in a vortex, since “after all humans are dark inland pools full of anguish and panic-stricken love.” As an orientation, poetry becomes an “architecture of profusion,” multiplying and mobilizing...

I have heard proclamations of feminism’s death many times over the years. Nevertheless, it came as a genuine surprise when I encountered it this past July, in an essay on “Sidecar,” the New Left Review blog, by NLR editor Caitlín Doherty. “A decade ago,” Doherty writes of feminism, “a generation of women—now in our late twenties and early thirties—claimed it as a primary political identity, but no longer.” Since then, Doherty argues, feminism has become not a politics so much as a style thanks...

Julia de Burgos (1914–53), one of Puerto Rico’s greatest poets, haunts the American literary imagination from the borders of the modern. [1] Her ghostly presence, desperate and furious, searches for interlocutors on the bridge to Welfare Island, historically a warehouse for the poor, the criminalized and sick just east of the United Nations. Julia’s barefoot figure wandering across that bridge in her bata, just as she describes in letters to her sister Consuelo in 1953, positions her to catch...

In 1932, Tess Slesinger published her most famous story, “Missis Flinders,” a bracingly candid look into the mind of a woman in New York City returning home from her abortion. Slesinger’s story—inspired by her own decision to terminate her pregnancy that year—does not fit neatly into the rhetoric that surrounds our ongoing political and legal debate over women’s reproductive rights. During the Great Depression, economic scarcity meant that abortion, if still illegal, was not policed or stigmatized as bitterly as it would be in earlier or later decades. Neither simply “pro” nor “anti,” Slesinger’s tale instead explores the psychological afterlives of this experience for one woman, trying to reconcile her decision with the feelings that linger after, with her identity as an intellectual, and with her husband’s own intellectual insecurities.

Initially hailed as an ur-text for feminist scholarship upon its first reprint in 1973, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892) has undergone a significant historicist reevaluation, beginning in the 1990s, which condemned the story on behalf of its author’s investments in eugenic feminism, the view that women’s reproductive roles should be weaponized as a tool of white supremacy through the enforcement of “racial hygiene.”

There’s a recent feminist slogan that, no matter how staunch my feminist allegiance, always troubles me. You’ve no doubt seen it in one form or another: the ubiquitous “This is what a feminist looks like” emblazoned on posters, memes, and fashion apparel such as t-shirts, onesies, and, heaven help us, even aprons! I believe I understand the laudable intention underlying this message: to demonstrate visually that feminists come in all shapes, sizes, colors, ages, classes, genders, and orientations, and to help reclaim and destigmatize the term feminist after decades of conservative backlash. Nevertheless, I cannot escape the many unsettling questions the slogan raises for me: Why the emphasis on image and appearance? What does it matter what a feminist looks like? Isn’t it a person’s actions that makes them a feminist? Wouldn't a better slogan communicate what a feminist believes in and stands for, the changes a feminist demands and is prepared to agitate for? And why the stress on the singular feminist? What about feminists as a collective?