Model Citizens and Millenarian Subjects: Vorticism, Suffrage, and London’s Great Unrest

In the years before World War I, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and F.T. Marinetti developed a strange fascination with the militant suffragette movement. In a series of essays, manifestos, and poems, these artists transform the suffragette crowd into a single figure, now seen as the sole agent of political change. For feminists as well as Vorticists and Futurists, the imagination of a single, idealized revolutionary agent responds to the failures of England’s parliamentary democracy made visible during London’s Great Unrest. Drawing upon the popular press and documentary photographs, analysis of the suffragette census strike shifts emphasis from a single “model citizen” to a more variegated counter-public. This archival turn discovers in the census strike the possibility of collective political action in public and private spheres alike.