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Title: Caryatids! Author: Madeleine Vernet Date: 1905 Language: en Topics: feminism, love, women Source: Retrieved on 10th September 2021 from https://forgottenanarchism.wordpress.com/2015/05/02/caryatids-by-madeleine-vernet/ Notes: Translated by Jesse Cohn.
— Madeleine Vernet (1905)
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Translator’s comments: What strikes me as interesting about this piece
is the way that a didactic poem – which, trained to read by modernists,
we tend to see as heavy-handed, overdone, clumsy, crude, simplistic –
actually incorporates a good deal of complexity. The overall idea
absolutely can’t be missed: it’s meant to condemn sexism. Beyond that,
though, it’s also putting its finger on some of the terrible ironies of
life for women under patriarchy: you can be both overvalued and devalued
at the same time, treated as a kind of living prop “supporting” the
social edifice that weighs down on you (by dutifully reproducing it),
and at the same time aestheticized to the point of absurdity, so that
your life is made into a kind of work of art, a decorative “luxury,” to
be regarded as superfluous and ornamental, socially prized (by men) but
also fundamentally worthless (without them). It does most of this work
of thinking through the contradictions of patriarchy using a single
image, which is really pretty economical (not in the spirit of modernist
terseness, but in an effort not to waste any of the effect). There are
also ideas in play here about sexuality as a field for political
struggle – the suggestion not only of a grève des ventres, a “birth
strike,” as was not uncommon in the anarchist and syndicalist press, but
also of a kind of emotional strike, a refusal to accept the false coin
of male romantic sentiment, that presages things like Adrienne Rich’s
notion of waging resistance against “compulsory heterosexuality” by
ceasing to draw most of one’s emotional sustenance from relationships
with men. Much as Proudhon, as a real patriarch, would have hated to
admit it, this is a Proudhonian strategy, too.