Suggested accompaniments: …perhaps a Dubonnet cocktail (Zaza), or for non-alcoholic red grape and raspberry juice, and both with roasted lightly salted almonds, or tiny slices celery and soft goat’s cheese. And glasses of water.

“In December 1856, Héricourt had published an article in La Revue philosophique entitled “Proudhon and the Woman Question,” which informed readers of that magazine that she and Proudhon had already communicated on their differing opinions of women. A later exchange of letters between them was reprinted in the February 1857 issue. In these letters to Proudhon, Héricourt set forth two arguments that are particularly significant. First, she rebutted Proudhon’s statement that she was an exception to the generalization that men are more capable than women:

I felt myself linked with my sex by too close a solidarity ever to be content to see myself abstracted from it by an illogical process. I am a woman – I glory in it; I rejoice if any value is set upon me, not for myself, indeed, but because this contributes to modify the opinion of men with respect to my sex. A woman who is happy upon hearing it said: “You are a man”  (sic), is, in my eyes, a simpleton, an unworthy creature, avowing the superiority of the masculine sex; and the men who think that they compliment her in this manner are vainglorious and impertinent boasters. If I acquire any honor, I thus pay honor to women. I reveal their aptitudes. I do not pass into the other sex any more than Proudhon abandons his own, because he is elevated by his intellect above the level of foolish and ignorant men; and if the ignorance of the mass of men prejudges nothing against their right, no more does the ignorance of the mass of women prejudge anything against theirs.

And, second, she affirmed the justice of an autonomous feminist movement.”

(Italics and spelling as in the original).
Jenny d’Héricourt quoted by Claire Goldberg Moses
From French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century,
Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1984, p. 167-168.

Suggested accompaniments: Perhaps herbal teas such as peppermint, love mix, tasty and soothing herbal teas, or for alcohol a Caipiroska cocktail for quick refreshing jolt, and goat’s cheese and oatcakes, or tiny slices of apple and celery. And glasses of water.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another, a signer of contracts and Air Travel cards, a citizen: I wrote a couple of times a month for one magazine or another, published two books, worked on several motion pictures; participated in the paranoia of the time, in the raising of a small child, and in the entertainment of large numbers of people passing through my house; made gingham curtains for spare bedrooms, remembered to ask agents if any reduction of points would be pari passu with the financing studio, put lentils to soak on Saturday night for lentil soup on Sunday, made quarterly F.I.C.A. payments and renewed my driver’s license on time, missing on the written examination only the question about the financial responsibility of California drivers. It was a time of my life when I was frequently “named”. I was named godmother to children. I was named lecturer and panelist, colloquist and conferee. I was even named, in 1968, a Los Angeles Times “Woman of the Year,” along with Mrs Ronald Reagan, the Olympic swimmer Debbie Meyer, and ten other California women who seemed to keep in touch and do good works. I did no good works but I tried to keep in touch. I was responsible. I recognized my name when I saw it. Once in a while I even answered letters addressed to me, not exactly upon receipt but eventually, particularly if the letters had come from strangers. “During my absence from the country these past eighteen months,” such replies would begin.
This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no “meaning” beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.
During this period I spent what were for me the usual proportions of time in Los Angeles and New York and Sacramento. I spent what seemed to many people I knew an eccentric amount of time in Honolulu, the particular aspect of which lent me the illusion that I could any minute order from room service a revisionist theory of my own history, garnished with a vanda orchid. I watched Robert Kennedy’s funeral on a verandah at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu, and also the first reports from My Lai. I reread all of George Orwell on the Royal Hawaiian beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of Interstate 5 some miles south of the last Bakersfield exit. The child, whose fingers had to be prised loose from the Cyclone fence when she was rescued twelve hours later by the California Highway Patrol, reported that she had run after the car carrying her mother and stepfather and brother and sister for “a long time.” Certain of these images did not fit into any narrative I knew.”

(Italics and spelling from the original)
Joan Didion
From The White Album
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 11-13.

Suggested accompaniments: …perhaps a cup of coffee or tea, maybe the spicy chai tea, and swedish pastries or vanilla biscuits. And glasses of water.
Per Kagrell
Astrid Lindgren som Pomperipossa 1976
© Per Kagrell,
Scanpix