Odette Dulac

Who is Odette Dulac?

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 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. She became a member of the Ligue des droits de femme.

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, where she appeared in André Messager's operetta, Les p'tites Michu. In London, at the Empire Theatre, she scored a hit with "The Honeysuckle and the Bee".

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

Aside from La houille rouge, she published Le droit de plaisir, her first novel; a feminist erotic text, Faut-il?, a case of love for a mutilated soldier; Les Désexués: roman de moeurs co-authored with Charles-Etienne about the downfall of a gay man in 1920s Paris; Tel quel, denouncing social and religious hypocrisy and encouraging women to speak up for themselves; and Leçons d'amour.