Odette Dulac, photographed by Reutlinger, 1903

Odette Dulac (14 July 1865 – 3 November 1939) was a French actress, singer and diseuse in the manner of Yvette Guilbert.

Background

Dulac was born in Aire-sur-Adour. She became a militant feminist and novelist. La houille rouge: les enfants de la violence (The Red Coal, 1916) narrated the horrors of raped and impregnated Frenchwomen at the time the First World War was being waged, in an anti-abortion polemic of triumphing French nationalism.[1] She became a member of the Ligue des droits de femme (League for Women's Rights).

At the start of her public career, as a singer-actress, she appeared in light opera at Antwerp in 1895 and was soon a star at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens,[2] where she appeared in André Messager's operetta, Les p'tites Michu (1897). In London, at the Empire Theatre, she had a hit with The Honeysuckle and the Bee.[3]

Turning her hand to modelling witty caricatures, she performed Don Juan of Boulevard X at the Salon Humouriste, Paris 1908.[4]

Aside from La houille rouge, she published Le droit de plaisir (1908), her first novel; a feminist erotic text, Faut-il? (1919), a case of love for a mutilated soldier; Les Désexués: roman de moeurs (1924) co-authored with Charles-Etienne about the downfall of a gay man in 1920s Paris; Tel quel (1926), denouncing social and religious hypocrisy and encouraging women to speak up for themselves;[5] and Leçons d'amour (1929).

Notes

  1. ↑ Susan R. Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and, (UNC Press) 1999, "The maternal body as battlefield" pp. 73–77.
  2. ↑ The New York Times Illustrated Magazine Supplement, "The drama", 21 May 1899.
  3. ↑ Ernest Henry Short and Arthur Compton-Rickett, Ring Up the Curtain: Being a Pageant of English Entertainment..., (London) 1938:121.
  4. ↑ It was illustrated in The Bookman 27, March–August 1908 p. 588.
  5. ↑ Alexandre Destais
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