French dancer, writer, and painter Anne-Jeanne-Valentine-Marianne Desglans de Cessiat-Vercell (better known under the pseudonym Valentine de Saint-Point, 1875-1953) was part of the Futurist Movement from the beginning. In this manifesto, she explained her radical vision of femininity. She left social themes in the background to focus on complete sexual freedom.
Download original manifesto in Italian (PDF, 2.5MB)
We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”
–First Manifesto of Futurism
Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are equal. Both merit the same disdain.
The mass of humanity was never anything other than the cultivated field from which the geniuses and heroes of both sexes have sprung. But in humanity, as in nature, there are certain moments that are more propitious to their flourishing.
In the summer of humanity, when the earth is warmed by the sun, geniuses and heroes abound. We are standing on the verge of springtime: we need an outpouring of sunlight, which is to say an outpouring of blood.
Women, like men, are not responsible for that sense of blockage that the truly young, rich in blood and energy, are suffering from.
IT’S ABSURD TO DIVIDE HUMANITY INTO WOMEN AND MEN; it is composed only of FEMININITY and MASCULINITY.
Every superman, every hero to the extent that he has epic value, every genius to the extent that he is powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an era precisely because he is simultaneously composed of feminine and masculine elements, femininity and masculinity: which is to say, a complete being.
An individual exclusively male is nothing more than a brute; an individual exclusively feminine is nothing more than a girl. There are moments in the life of humanity, collectivities, just as there are in individuals. Fecund periods, in which a greater number of geniuses and heroes spring forth from a cultural terrain in ferment, are periods rich in masculinity and femininity.
Periods which had wars that produced only a few representative heros, because its epic blast annihilated them, were periods exclusively virile in character; periods that have denied the heroic instinct, looked back toward the past, and annihilated themselves in dreams of peace, were ones in which femininity dominated.
We live at the end of one such period. WHAT WE MOST NEED, WHETHER MEN OR WOMEN, IS VIRILITY.
That is why Futurism, with all its exaggerations, is right. To restore a certain virility to our races benumbed with femininity, we have to compel them to virility, even to brutality.
On women and men equally we must impose a new doctrine of energy in order to arrive at a period of superior humanity.
Every woman must possess not only feminine virtues, but also masculine ones; otherwise she is a girl. And the man who has only male force, without intuition, is just a brute. But in the period of femininity in which we live, only the opposite exaggeration will be healthy. AND IT IS THE BRUTE THAT MUST BE PROPOSED AS A MODEL.
No more women who come with arms full of flowers and cling to soldiers’ knees on the morning of departure; nurses who perpetuate weaknesses and senectitude, domesticating men for their personal pleasures or material needs! No more women who make children only for themselves, shielding them from every danger, every adventure, all joy; who quarrel with their daughters over love or with their sons over war! No more women, octopuses of the hearth, with tentacles that drain the blood from men and turn children into anemics; WOMEN BESTIALLY AMOROUS, WHO DESTROY THEIR POWER OF RENEWAL IN DESIRE!
…
But let us leave Feminism aside. Feminism is a political error. Feminism is an intellectual error on the part of women, an error which their instinct will eventually recognize.
IT ISN’T NECESSARY TO GIVE WOMEN ANY OF THE RIGHTS DEMANDED BY FEMINISM. TO ACCORD THEM THESE RIGHTS WOULDN’T PRODUCE ANY OF THE DISORDERS SOUGHT BY THE FUTURISTS, BUT ON THE CONTRARY WOULD BRING ABOUT AN EXCESS OF ORDER.
Giving duties to women is equivalent to making them lose all their fecund potency. Feminism’s reasoning and logic will not make her lose her primordial fatality; it can only falsify and force her to manifest herself by means of deviations that lead to still worse errors.
For centuries people have been tilting against woman’s instinct, and nothing is more esteemed in her than grace and tenderness. Anemic man, eager to preserve his own blood, doesn’t ask her to do more than be a nurse. Woman has allowed herself to be tamed. But cry out a new slogan, launch a shout of war, and woman, once again riding upon her instincts with joy, will proceed to unexpected conquests.
When you take up your weapons, women will furbish them. Once again she will contribute to the selection of the race. If women have not always known how to discern genius, since they have judged by passing renown, they have always known how to reward the strongest, the victor, he who triumphs with his own muscles and courage. Woman cannot err concerning this superiority, which imposes itself brutally.
LET WOMAN REACQUIRE THE CRUELTY AND VIOLENCE THAT LETS HER FLY INTO A RAGE OVER THE DEFEATED, PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY ARE DEFEATED, up to the point of mutilating them. Stop preaching spiritual justice to women, who have tried to acquire it in vain. WOMEN, ONCE AGAIN YOU SHOULD BECOME SUBLIMELY UNJUST, LIKE ALL THE FORCES OF NATURE.
Freed from every constraint, with your instincts rediscovered, you will retake your place alongside the Elements, setting fatality in opposition to the conscious will of man. Be the ferocious and egoist mother, WHO JEALOUSLY GUARDS HER CHILDREN, possessing what are called rights and duties over them, AS LONG AS THEY HAVE NEED OF HER PROTECTION.
Liberated from the family, let man live his own life of audacity and conquest as soon as he possesses physical strength, whether a son or a father. The man who sows does not stop at the first furrow that he fructifies.
In my Poems of Pride, as in Thirst and Mirages,6 I have dismissed sentimentalism as a despicable weakness, because it hamstrings forces and energies and immobilizes them.
LUST IS A FORCE, for it destroys the weak, excites the strong to disperse energy, and hence contributes to their renewal. Every heroic people is sensual: for them woman is the most exalting trophy. Woman must be either mother or lover. True mothers will always be mediocre lovers, and lovers will be insufficient mothers by virtue of excess. Equal in their rapport with life, these two women complete each another. With the son of the past, the mother who receives a boy makes the son of the future. The lover dispenses desire that transports us into the future.
WE CONCLUDE:
The woman who keeps a man at her feet with tears and sentimentalism is inferior to the prostitute who impels a man, by prompting him to boast, to preserve his domination over the depths of the city with a revolver in his hand. This woman, at least, cultivates energy that could eventually serve better causes.
WOMEN, TOO LONG CORRUPTED BY MORALS AND CONVENTIONS, RETURN TO YOUR SUBLIME INSTINCT; TO VIOLENCE AND CRUELTY.
For the fatal enhancement of the race, while men are warring and struggling, you must make children; it is among them, in an act of sacrifice to the cause of Heroism, that you must play the part of Destiny.
Don’t raise them for yourself, which is tantamount to diminishing them, but let them grow in ample freedom, through complete development.
Instead of crushing man into bondage to EXECRABLE SENTIMENTAL NEEDS, impel your children and your men to surpass themselves. It is you who make them. You have complete power over them.
YOU OWE HUMANITY SOME HEROES. NOW MAKE THEM!
See also Futurist Manifesto Of Lust by Valentine de Saint-Point (1913)
