Manifesto forms are used as signals of a time, a place and an attitude. Narrative histories and historical research for all mediums engage manifestos as historical registers of the time of their production; they are epistemic catalysts that mark specific events and compose temporal registers of political and social moods. The author’s methodology draws from the work of practitioners who make manifesto works, and this is central to the author’s thinking of the historical and political concepts of feminism as a manifesto form. These practitioners include film‐makers such as Chantal Akerman, Bruce LaBruce, Todd Haynes, Sofia Coppola and Tracey Moffatt, and activists who engage the politics of cultural paradigms, including Riot Grrrl. The author engages the language of the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, whose notion of becoming‐woman problematically, but also usefully, describes the innovative practices of the feminist manifesto, and whose description of the transversal terms of creating change in any field provides a useful philosophy for recognising the manifesto form. The article argues a number of points: first, the author notes that the form of the manifesto is a radical signal of epistemic change; second, the author argues that for the feminist, the activation of time in the manifesto offers a break from the machinic subjectivity of patriarchal systems; and, finally, the author discusses how this regendered temporal mode can manifest the motive power required to move us into a reinvigorated collective feminism.