Céline Renooz
Céline Renooz | |
---|---|
Born | |
Died | 22 February 1928 | (aged 88)
Nationality | Belgian |
Occupation | Writer |
Notable work |
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Céline Renooz (7 January 1840 – 22 February 1928) was a Belgian
.After a troubled marriage and the birth of four children, Renooz left her husband to launch a writing career in Paris. In a prolific series of books, lectures, articles, and correspondence, she advocated for the demolition of
Renooz's theories were too radical for most feminists of her time, and her attempts to redesign the scientific method were not supported by women scientists with more formal training. Her ideas were largely dismissed and ignored by the male-dominated scientific establishment she criticized; her last works were written in poverty. However, Renooz was recognized as one of very few women who had become notable in French scientific circles, and regarded by feminist colleagues as a supporter in their campaigns against oppression.
Early life
Renooz was born in Liège.[1] Her mother was from Paris;[2] her father was Emmanuel-Nicolas Renoz (he preferred this simplified spelling), a government-appointed notary who had played a significant role in the Belgian Revolution of 1830.[2] His outspokenly liberal views were reportedly a strong influence on his daughter.[3] Because of his politics, the Catholic Church did not give him a religious burial, a rejection which led to a public conflict between local Catholics and liberals.[2] After his death, his library was inherited not by Céline Renooz but by her brother, who claimed it by arguing that "it was the man's responsibility to provide books for his family."[4]
Renooz's formal training was limited to the basic lessons typical of female education in the nineteenth century.[5] In 1859, she married an engineering student,[6] Ángel Muro Goiri,[7] the son of a well-known and politically active Spanish banker.[3] After their marriage, they moved to Madrid and had four children together.[6] However, their marriage became conflicted, and in 1875 Renooz left her husband to live with her children in Paris.[3] Muro went on to become a journalist for French and Spanish newspapers, but was best known as the author of a popular Spanish cookbook, El Practicón.[7]
Career
After separating from Muro, Renooz began a prolific career in writing and feminist activism, publishing
Evolutionary theory
Her first book, L'Origine des animaux (1883), was written in response to
The male-dominated scientific establishment criticized and poked fun at Renooz's evolutionary theory.[5] The publishers, at the well-known firm of Baillière, publicly dismissed it by claiming that they had not read the work before publishing it.[8] In a face-to-face 1887 encounter, the scientist Mathias-Marie Duval informed Renooz that she was demented. Renooz remained deeply troubled by Duval and the confrontation for years afterward, writing in her memoirs: "By his colossal struggle against Woman, he embodied the terrifying and satanic figure of the antichrist … Duval was the vandal of science."[6] Other criticisms provoked similarly bitter responses from Renooz;[5] as time went on, she began to see enemies everywhere[6] in an obsession amounting almost to paranoia.[5] Another influence on Renooz's worldview were her memories of her troubled marriage, which she called a "sad apprenticeship" that led her to discover the "roots of evil."[6]
In 1887, Edmond Hébert, the dean of the University of France Faculty of Sciences, invited her to give a lecture at the Sorbonne explaining her theory, but the lecture, like the treatise, was received poorly.[2]
Neosophism
In 1888, Renooz founded a journal, La Revue scientifique des femmes,[6] dedicated to reshaping the scientific method by combining it with a feminist understanding. Renooz hoped this combination would bring about an intuition-based "true science" free from patriarchal bias.[3] According to Renooz's editorial in the first issue:
It is on woman that this task is incumbent. It is she, with the aid of that faculty, intuition, for which men, even the most unjust, recognise her, who should give back to the world the light that will regenerate intellectual life which has gone away, morality which has disappeared, faith in supreme truth, enthusiasm for great and holy causes.[9]
The Revue included reports of achievements by women physicians and scientists, as well as long preview excerpts of a new three-volume treatise she was writing, La Nouvelle Science.[3] Renooz also used the journal to expose situations in which women were mistreated by the scientific establishment,[8] such as Jean-Martin Charcot's antagonism and snobbery toward women entering medical fields.[10] Though the Revue gathered a small group of enthusiastic contributors, including the physician Caroline Schultze, it was not a financial success and folded after a year.[8]
The three volumes of La Nouvelle Science were published in book form in 1890.
In 1892, Renooz learned that the Société de Physiologie was to hold its second annual conference in her hometown of Liège. She contacted the director of the conference and arranged to give a lecture on her evolutionary theories, becoming the only woman present among some two hundred scholars gathered at the conference. Unlike her Sorbonne lecture, her Liège presentation was a marked success, and was even reported to be the most applauded lecture at the conference.[2] On the strength of her presentation, she was invited to contribute to the newspaper L'indépendance Belge. She returned to Belgium in 1893 to give two lectures in Brussels, one on evolution and one on comparative physiology of men and women; over the next twenty years, she lectured prolifically in Paris on topics related to neosophism.[2]
Renooz became the subject of fresh ridicule when, after
During the Dreyfus affair, Renooz was a Dreyfusard (supporter of Alfred Dreyfus's innocence), saying that both Dreyfus and herself had been shunned and unjustly treated by society.[13] Between 1890 and 1913, she worked sporadically on an autobiography, Prédestinée: l'autobiographie de la femme cachée; it was never finished or published.[6] In 1897, Renooz founded a society, the Société Néosophique, to help raise funds to publish her books.[6]
Historiography
Shortly after founding the Société Néosophique, Renooz designed a two-semester course in women's history, taught from her house in the
Renooz's interest in historiography developed into her
Personal life
Renooz was an acquaintance of Clémence Royer, periodically corresponding with her for more than twenty years.[3] Renooz also corresponded with the French feminist artist Hélène Bertaux[9] and with many other colleagues, including both supporters and skeptics of her theories.[6] In 1903, Renooz joined a mixed-gender Masonic lodge, La Raison Triomphale.[15] She was also a member of the Société d'Ethnographie de Paris and the Société botanique de France, the two Paris scientific societies that allowed women without formal training.[8]
Céline Renooz get 3 daughters and a son: Maria Louise Ernestine, born in Paris in 1860; Irène Antonia, also born in Paris, in 1861; Manuel Juan Fernando, born in Chelles in 1863; and eventually Alice Valentina Josefa, born in Bilbao in 1869. Maria and Irène did not get married and lived with their mother until their death, in 1886 in Paris for Irène, in 1910 in Paris for Maria. Manuel Muro, was hired for the Spanish government's finance committee when he was nineteen;[2] however, he too died of tuberculosis[15] in 1890 in Paris. Though Renooz's independent life in Paris began on a generous budget,[3] it soon grew financially precarious,[5] and much of it was spent in poverty.[15]
An American journalist who visited Renooz in 1919 described her as "a little, aristocratic, old woman of probably eighty with keen, starry eyes and a soft voice," living in a small top-floor apartment in a backstreet near the Trocadéro.[16] After a short period of illness,[6] Renooz died in Paris in 1928.[1] Her ashes are interred in the columbarium at Père Lachaise Cemetery.[17]
Reception and legacy
During her lifetime, Renooz's theory of neosophism had a small following of advocates, but it was largely rejected by feminists with more scientifically rigorous training, such as
Renooz's philosophy was far more radical than that of most nineteenth-century feminists, and her theories never achieved widespread acceptance.[3] After her death, her works lapsed into obscurity.[6] At the end of the twentieth century, however, some French feminists revived Renooz's writings, citing her as a predecessor.[8]
References
- ^ a b "Céline Renooz (1840-1928)", data.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque nationale de France, retrieved 12 May 2015
- ^ ISBN 9783487410586
- ^ ISBN 9780810849792
- ISBN 9781400862313
- ^ ISBN 9781403981431
- ^ ISBN 9781558491779
- ^ ISBN 9781855662469
- ^ ISBN 9781135963439
- ^ ISBN 0300059035
- ISBN 9780521395557
- OCLC 700897822, retrieved 13 May 2015
- JSTOR 1413363
- ISBN 9781429958028
- OCLC 457737508, retrieved 13 May 2015
- ^ ISBN 978-9004172395
- ^ Adler, Betty (1920), Within the Year After, Chicago: M. A. Donohue & Co, pp. 355–9
- ^ Landru, Philippe (28 March 2010), "Le columbarium du Père Lachaise: R à Z", Cimetières de France et d'ailleurs, retrieved 12 May 2015
- ^ Allen 2005, pp. 129–130