Manifesto of a Futurist Woman
The Futurist Manifesto has been a point of reference for many vanguard movements of the 20th century. The Italian born movement was the first to use an artistic form of expression to call upon a modern revolution that is not solely artistic. Futurism is based on the concept of a new moden man disconnected from the past and who is expression of the industrial revolution of the first decades of the century. Speed, light, danger, fiercess, rebellion: this new man wants to leave behind his passive submissive counterpart of the 19th century. Interestingly, the violent language of the Manifesto not only targets all "moralistic" and opportunistic" act but also feminism. The leader of the movement and author of the Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti professed women's inferiority in all aspects of life and work.
Among Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà e Giacomo Balla, to name a few, there was one woman who was considered part of the Futurist Movement. Valentine de Saint Point used the masculine violent language for her own battle. In 1912 she wrote the "The Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti)" in which she praises equality between men and women. Valentine's figure and position within the movement and in relation to other feminist personalities and movements is very interesting and still needs to be explored further. She moves away from a battle for social or political rights for women stating that fighting for materialistic needs was less important than investigating a reflexion on the personal and spiritual aspects of being a woman. Although we could argue that her wealthy upbringing shortsigthed her from seeing the necessity of fighting for "material" rights, it is very interesting how she undergoes a feminine research about being, feeling and living as a woman in a hyper masculine world.
Read the except below or the full version here ---> The Manifesto of Futurist Woman
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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.
The whole of humanity has never been anything but the terrain of culture, source of the geniuses and heroes of both sexes. But in humanity as in nature there are some moments more propitious for such a flowering. In the summers of humanity, when the terrain is burned by the sun, geniuses and heroes abound.
We are at the beginning of a springtime; we are lacking in solar profusion, that is, a great deal of spilled blood.
Women are no more responsible than men for the way the really young, rich in sap and blood, are getting mired down.
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.
Any exclusively virile individual is just a brute animal; any exclusively feminine individual is only a female.
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.
