The Politics of Aesthetics and the Woman Question

Abstract

This chapter looks at artwork specific to the output of suffrage and anti-suffrage movements, and includes examination of the shift in both perception and actuality of a woman’s role from 1908 to 1918, particularly after the onset of the First World War. In addition the political polemics relating to female emancipation, as well as the manifestos associated with Modernist art movements, especially Vorticism and Futurism, are explored, including the positioning of both pictorial and theoretical perspectives within a long genealogical chain. Within the associated imagery recurring motifs are considered, including the incorporation of a visual construct such as William Hogarth’s line of beauty.