Dear Friend, You Must Change Your Life' by Ada Bronowski

Author:Ada Bronowski [Bronowski, Edited by Ada]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350089204
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2019-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

Flora Tristan To Charles Fillieu

Paris, 30 July 184310

Monsieur Fillieu,

A superior woman must be superior with everyone, and in all circumstances – this is how I have lived from the moment I came to be aware of my superiority and that is how I shall continue to behave.

I am at a loss as to the reason for the more than inappropriate … letter which you wrote to me yesterday after you left my home, why? – You were obviously under a serious delusion.

Were I a prude, I would send you back your letter, and forbid you from seeing me ever again, and I would utter your name only to disparage and sneer at it. Were I a coquette, I would show your extravagant letter to your friends, and, together, we could make jokes about you for a whole week. But since I am a superior woman, well aware of my mission as a woman, I will answer you in a very different manner –

Monsieur Fillieu, had you read my Mephis, I am sure you never would have sent me such a declaration – For you would have known that when it comes to love, I have a system all of my own, and I’ll have you know, for your own improvement, that the systems which I enunciate in my works, I realise in my life. In preaching the independence of Woman, in desiring that she be perfectly free in all things, I want that, when it comes to love, it be she who takes the initiative – That she be the one to say to the one she loves: ‘I love you. Do you want to be mine?’ – This much shows you how I understand and consider what love would be between a woman and man.

But you see, my dear sir, as I write this to you, I feel enough strength in me to put into practice now, in the present, what humanity will come to acknowledge in the future. In all my life, I have belonged to no man – for always, it has been me who has taken the initiative.

Whenever I met a person whom I liked, or a man whom I loved, I said to the first: do you want to give yourself to me? And to the other: do you want to belong to me?

As for declarations of love, I have received hundreds of them and never have I accepted a single man who addressed one to me.

And now, sir, if you are truly great, truly intelligent and good, you will come to me as a brother, as a friend, but you must convince yourself that never will I be a woman for you. But if you do not have enough greatness in your soul to understand all that is elevated and sacred in my way of behaving, do not return and all will be over.

Your letter, however inappropriate, did not offend me in any way. It is since the age of 21 that I live

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