Odette Dulac

Poster for Odette Dulac, by Leonetto Cappiello, 1901^[1]

Odette Dulac was a French singing actress, born 14 July 1865 in Aire-sur-Adour a diseuse in the manner of Yvette Guilbert, who became a militant feminist and novelist. Her 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 diatribe of triumphing French nationalism.^[2] 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,^[3] where she appeared in André Messager's operetta, Les p'tites Michu (1897). In London, at the Empire Theatre, she scored a hit with "The Honeysuckle and the Bee".^[4]

Turning her hand to modelling witty caricatures, she showed a Don Juan of Boulevard X at the Salon Humouriste, Paris 1908.^[5]

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;^[6] and Leçons d'amour (1929).

Notes

1. ^ "Capiello's biography"; the illustrated example was purchased in 1903 for the Library of Congress.
2. ^ 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.
3. ^ The New York Times Illustrated Magazine Supplement, "The drama", 21 May 1899.
4. ^ Ernest Henry Short and Arthur Compton-Rickett, Ring Up the Curtain: Being a Pageant of English Entertainment..., (London) 1938:121.
5. ^ It was illustrated in The Bookman 27 March–August 1908 p 588.
6. ^ Alexandre Destais

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Name	Dulac, Odette
Alternative names	Latrilhe
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