blog#1 Mina Loy

I thought it was very interesting that Mina Loy was never published during her lifetime. She seemed to be a very independent woman, and even though many women weren’t published during her years (1886-1966) I would have expected her to be due to her outgoing personality. Loy seemed to be all about free expression and life choices. In her “Feminist Manifesto” she has a direct audience of women. Her language was independent, and brutally in your face. In this “conversational” journal-like piece, Loy dismisses the government suffrage movement, and blames women for not doing enough for their own goals. In stating, “Seek within yourselves to find out what you are,” she explains that if you try to conform to already established society it won’t work because you can’t look to others to define yourself. I found it interesting she saw women’s choices to be parasitism, prostitution, and negation. She made it clear women were not considered equal, only parasites on men despite what they tried to become, setting up women and men to be only enemies. Defining women as only mistresses and mothers. Mina Loy expresses herself bluntly by defining masculine and feminine aspects, and her main opinion she wanted to state was that women should grant themselves their own choices beyond marriage and childbearing.