Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Introduction: manifestos, race, and modernity
- Part I COSMOPOLITAN LONDON, 1906–1914
- Chapter 2 Women's suffrage melodrama and burlesque
- Chapter 3 Futurism's music hall and India Docks
- Chapter 4 Vorticism's cabaret modernism and racial spectacle
- Part II TRANSNATIONAL MODERNISMS, 1934–1938
- Epilogue: Manifestos: then and now
- Index
Chapter 2 - Women's suffrage melodrama and burlesque
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1 Introduction: manifestos, race, and modernity
- Part I COSMOPOLITAN LONDON, 1906–1914
- Chapter 2 Women's suffrage melodrama and burlesque
- Chapter 3 Futurism's music hall and India Docks
- Chapter 4 Vorticism's cabaret modernism and racial spectacle
- Part II TRANSNATIONAL MODERNISMS, 1934–1938
- Epilogue: Manifestos: then and now
- Index
Summary
The militancy of women is doing a work of purification. Nowhere was purification more needed than in the relationship between men and women … A great upheaval, a great revolution, a great blasting away of ugly things – that is militancy … The bad and the old have to be destroyed to make way for the good and the new. When militancy has done its work then will come sweetness and cleanness, respect and trust, perfect equality and justice into the partnership between men and women.
Christabel PankhurstChristabel Pankhurst's definition of militancy in terms of purity and the destruction of “the bad and the old” argues for the modernity of the militant British women's suffrage movement. The future she envisions breaks from the past – defined as “bad,” “old,” and “ugly” – and allows women to join the ranks of the modern vanguard described as “the good and the new.” Through this definition, Pankhurst whitens women as citizens by writing them into national narratives of progress. These narratives repeat the past by reproducing imperial and national structures of power. They do this by excluding cultural and racial differences (the “bad” and the “old”) and sexual desire (the impure) as less than modern. This exclusion shores up the racial and gendered boundaries that define modern subjects, and then these subjects, in turn, define their actions as historical progress (“the good and the new”).
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- Information
- Modernism, Race and Manifestos , pp. 45 - 81Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008