empire
Feather fashions were the subject of heated debate between the 1860s and 1920s, with feather-wearing women held largely accountable by anti-plumage trade campaigners for the decimation of exotic bird species. The UK Plumage (Prohibition) Bill of 1920, which sought to ban the importation of feathers used in women’s fashion, was the subject of Woolf’s “earliest feminist polemic,” her narrative essay “The Plumage Bill” (1920), which challenged the “injustice to women” implicit in the language of the plumage trade debate.
Doris Lessing’s early essay “The Small Personal Voice” is often considered the fullest elaboration of her realist aesthetics.
In September 1927, Edward McKnight Kauffer’s “One Third of the Empire is in the Tropics” poster set appeared on over 1,000 specially built poster frames across Britain and in capital cities across the British Empire (figs. 1 and 2). Commissioned by the Empire Marketing Board (EMB), an organization established by the British government in May 1926 to increase sales of Empire goods and products, it was the Board’s first modernist poster series.