Portrait of the novelist Colette

Feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings.

Angela Davis

The portrait of the novelist Colette represents a woman who has just got up, calm, and still half asleep. We can see here a woman in a more natural and realistic position that we could associate with the French context where, after the French Revolution, the questioning of the official powers (monarchy and church) led to a better scenario for the emancipation of the women of their historically assigned roles. Even so, Colette, a recognized writer at the time, also suffered from violent oblivion, which history, as an academic discipline, subjected women to. The art historian Griselda Pollock asked in her book Vision and difference. Feminism, femininity and art histories if the fact of including women in the history of art would be equivalent to creating a feminist history of art. The author claims that the simple fact of demanding that women be considered not only changed what is studied and what is relevant in research, but also questions the political plan of existing disciplines. Both the oblivion of women and the construction of certain stereotypes that normalize what they are, forms part of the structural sexism that makes up our society and actively contributes to the production and perpetuation of this reality.

Portrait of the novelist Colette, Jacques-Émile Blanche (1905)