Valentine de Saint-Point - Connection To Futurism

Connection To Futurism

The year 1912 was primarily marked by the publication of the Manifesto of Futurist Woman, which Saint-Point wrote in response to the misogynist ideas in Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism. It was read on June 27 at the Salle Gaveau, surrounded by the figureheads of the movement. The manifesto begins with the statement, "Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are all equal. They all merit the same scorn."

Although she joined the Futurists in celebrating the virtues of virility, she also wrote:

It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women. It is composed only of femininity and masculinity. Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being....

It is the same way with any collectivity and any moment in humanity, just as it is with individuals. The fecund periods, when the most heroes and geniuses come forth from the terrain of culture in all its ebullience, are rich in masculinity and femininity.

Those periods that had only wars, with few representative heroes because the epic breath flattened them out, were exclusively virile periods; those that denied the heroic instinct and, turning toward the past, annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were periods in which femininity was dominant. We are living at the end of one of these periods. What is most lacking in women as in men is virility.

That is why Futurism, even with all its exaggerations, is right.

Saint-Point advocated the concept of the woman-warrior, as opposed to the traditional sentimental feminine ideals such as the "good mother," and she conceptualized the "Überwoman" (sur-femme), as a counterpart to the Nietzschean Übermensch (surhomme). She also addressed the theme of lust, described by Saint-Point as "a force". Saint-Point would develop this theme into a second manifesto, the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, which was published a year later. These writings, translated throughout Europe, were a sensation and put women at the center of the debates of the Futurist movement, which was increasingly popular. But true to her intellectual independence, Saint-Point declared in January 1914 in Hansard: "I am not a futurist, and I've never been, I do not belong to any school."