A sharp, satirical 1900 essay by Octave Mirbeau on women’s emancipation, featuring his trademark wit and controversial views on gender roles.
Don’t think from what follows that I’m an enemy of women. On the contrary, I’m such a friend to them that I detest all these crude demands that defeminise them, and I can’t help but feel deeply saddened seeing how many of them, driven by stupid pride, want to abandon that superior and magnificent human mission of being the creators of life.
⁂
Women who have monopolised the post offices, telegraphs and telephones—to the great detriment of these vital services—are now about to enter the committee of the Society of Writers as well. They will make their glorious entrance in the person of Madame Daniel Lesueur, who is a charming woman and a fine writer—unless it’s Madame Henry Gréville, or perhaps Madame Camille Pert or Madame Jane de la Vaudère, who are also—it goes without saying—charming women and fine writers. The contest will be fierce, apparently, as each of these ladies enters the electoral arena with a respectable number of supporters. But it hardly matters who the chosen one will be; what matters is that there will be a chosen one.
It’s only the first woman that’s difficult. Once the principle’s established, all the ladies who write will soon be joining this committee, and men, finally defeated, will have no choice but to retire to their homes where they will henceforth tend the pot-au-feu like housewives and bottle-feed the babies like dry nurses. An admirable result, really, since children, freed from women’s exclusive education, from all women’s sentimental prejudices and Catholic superstitions, might perhaps manage to become men… Yes, but will there still be children? That’s the question. Where will women, busy with so many things and sitting on so many committees, find the time to make them? And if they bring to this committee the same nervousness, the same capriciousness, the same spirit of petty squabbling they bring to the households they dominate and the various public offices where they are employed, one can predict the meetings will be jolly… oh, absolutely jolly! They will treat literary questions the way they treat their husbands or lovers at home, the way they treat the poor telephone subscriber and the passer-by who comes to the post office counter asking for information or simply a stamp. And it will be delightful!
Where will women’s emancipatory rage end? One can’t say. But we must expect the most astonishing developments… The other day, I met a woman who demands even more. She absolutely insists on being given the male sex. She is founding groups, associations, all sorts of committees to spread and obtain—even by force—this essential and unnatural demand.
“And I won’t stop agitating,” she told me with violent energy, “until the day women can finally wear not just men’s trousers, but what goes inside them.”
You doubtless know that exquisite story about the lady who never appeared in public except in men’s clothes… One evening, dressed thus, she was in a drawing room and, hands in pockets, cigarette between her lips, was holding forth scandalously when a gentleman approached her and, clapping her on the shoulder like a chum, said:
“I say, old boy… how about we go for a piss?”
Ah! You will see—they will soon be doing that too!
⁂
I have just read “Lilith” by Rémy de Gourmont, and I strongly urge the members of the Society of Writers’ committee to reread this delicious prose poem—old now, but still so modern! Besides enjoying a rare feast of beautiful style, powerful irony and delightful blasphemy—for only Catholics can still blaspheme their God, no doubt because they know Him better than we do—they will see by what strange process Jehovah, in a moment of remorse, decided to create woman.
According to Rémy de Gourmont, good old Jehovah had just created man. He wasn’t terribly pleased with his work. Having moulded him from clay, he found that man smelt of mud. Still, he had released him, as was, into the Garden of Eden, under the guardianship of the angel Raziel, who was charged with his education… The angel Raziel showed man his organs and explained briefly but clearly what they were for.
“This for walking…” said the angel… “this for grasping… this for hearing… this for seeing… this for eating… this… oh! this, now! I haven’t a clue!”
“What? You don’t know?” replied man, disappointed. “Of all my organs, it’s the one that troubles me most… I’d really like to know what it’s about and what use I can make of it! Come on… surely you must know!”
“No, truly, I don’t know!” answered the angel, sincere and troubled. “But don’t get impatient like that… I’ll make enquiries!”
Left alone, man grows bored. He lies on the grass, turns this way and that, stretches his arms, his legs, yawns, sighs, doesn’t know what to do… He is prodigiously bored. But Jehovah, to whom these things are faithfully reported, takes pity on him. He grumbles, in his gruff kindness:
“Ah! Man! What a misery-guts! And why did I have the bizarre and ridiculous idea of bringing him into the world? I’ve got nothing but trouble from it… So has he, for that matter! He’s bored… yes, yes, obviously! It was bound to happen, blast it! I knew it! He can’t help being bored, always so alone! And then, I’ve endowed him with an imperious and troublesome organ without giving him the means—honest ones, at least—to satisfy it! Let’s finish the job then! And create woman! But what troubles am I bringing on myself now? Well then! Haven’t I set aside a bit of clay?”
He finds, at the foot of a fig tree, the scraps of clay that served to model man, and, getting back to work, he fashions, hastily but precisely, a new form… Soon, the radiant belly appears; the firm, sweet hips emerge, broadening harmoniously; the powerful breasts project their double globular radiance like a glory… With obvious and mischievous satisfaction, Jehovah heaps clay on the sumptuous parts of the new form, so much so that when it comes time to model the head, the clay runs out.
“Blast it!” cries Jehovah; “I’ve no more clay… This is most annoying… I can’t very well leave this form without a head… However small I make it, I must give her one! What to do? Ah! Here’s a pretty pickle!”
Then, after making a gesture across primordial space that seems to say: “Well, too bad!”, he plunges his hands into the belly, where a hole forms, and with this handful of clay, he gives woman a brain!
⁂
The symbolic genesis of woman, as interpreted by Rémy de Gourmont, accords exactly with the conclusions of anthropological science. Woman is not a brain: she is a sex, and that’s far more beautiful. She has but one role in the universe, though a grandiose one: to make love, that is, to perpetuate the species. According to nature’s inviolable laws, whose implacable and painful harmony we feel better than we can reason it, woman is unfit for anything that is neither love nor maternity. A few women—very rare exceptions—have managed to give, either in art or literature, the illusion of creative force. But these are either abnormal beings, in revolt against nature, or simple reflections of the male whose imprint they have retained through sex. And I prefer what we call prostitutes, for they, at least, are in harmony with the universe.
The day women have conquered what they demand, the day they are everything except women, the balance of human life will be done for. And Lilith will reappear, with her forever sterile womb, in a defeated world…
1900.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 