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

Background [ edit ]

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 Theatre des Bouffes Parisiens , ^[2] where she appeared in Andre 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 Desexues: 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 Lecons d'amour (1929).

Notes [ edit ]