A manifesto that particularly resonated with me was Valentine De Saint-Point’s Manifesto of Futurist Woman.  While I found sections of the poem somewhat confusing and contradictory at times, it made some pretty bold statements that made me want to read more.  One of the sections I found pretty relevant to our society was, “It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women.  It is composed only of femininity and masculinity.  Every superman…a complete being.”  Often, we tend to think of gender rigidly in nicely packed boxes – which often results in the ridiculing of individuals who deviate from “the norm.”  As the manifesto goes on to put it, women are often thought in terms of “arms with twining flowers resting on their laps on the morning of departure”, “nurses perpetuating weakness and age”, “…create children just for themselves, keeping them from any danger or adventure…”.  In other words, to be a woman is to be delicate, soft, weak, selfish.  This is absurd of course since men also can exhibit these qualities.

At times I found the manifesto overly dramatic such as when Saint-Point argues for increasing the virility of women.  “To restore some virility to our races so benumbed in femininity, we have to train them even to the point of brute animality…in order to arrive at a period of superior humanity.”  While I get the effect Saint-Point is trying to achieve by pushing for the “masculinization” of women to strengthen and reshape the way they’re perceived in society, she suggests the ultimate extreme of training them “to the point of brute animality.”  This signals the enormous gap or misconception of gender that exists for women.