Mina Loy's "Feminist Manifesto" and her other similar non-poetry of the time period beautifully demonstrate her perspective, as a woman, on Futurism. Futurism was a Modernist movement which blatantly rejected society's propensity to turn to the past to solve its problems. Instead they believed that every great thinker or artist has a shelf life which must be enforced. They also detested museums, archives, and libraries as contrary to their purpose. Futurists are known for writing uber-modern poetry which includes unusual punctuation, word associations, and political content. In her non-fictional writing, Mina Loy carries on the Futurist tradition, but she overtly criticizes the Futurists -- with whom she later broke completely -- for their obvious gender bias. She uses her artistic voice to draw attention to feminism in the U.S.
Her "Feminist Manifesto" is structured iconoclastically. She is known for her bizarre printing and punctuation. In this case and in many of her other works published in the Lost Lunar Baedecker, she uses larger font sizes in bold to emphasize specific words or phrases. Conflict is a huge part of her writing, one which she often emphasizes by spacing words oddly. She'll leave large spaces between two words of a sentence, right in the middle of a paragraph. According to her formatting theory, Loy believes that an author should be able to communicate much more than the blank words on a page.
In her "Feminist Manifesto" Loy writes about the tradition of oppression of women in the United States. She dwells upon what she calls the "myth of virginity" which basically explains how women are expected to be chaste virgins but still in order to marry a man and provide for themselves they must first dish out large dowries and serve men whose interests are in contrast to their own. Women's chastity is treated as their only commercial value. Loy urges women to stand up for themselves by intentionally choosing when to lose their virginity -- before having a husband. This may lower the woman's immediate expectation of marriage, but she will now be able to concern herself only with matters of how to provide for herself and only with men who will treat her as an autonomous being.
