Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact. I'm Alice. I'm Heinish. I'm Eli.

We're a twice-monthly queer history podcast coming out on the first and 15th of each month.

Every episode, one of us will talk about a person, a place or a topic from queer history.

This week we're talking about 19th century artist Rosa Bonner. We don't have many content warnings for this episode.

We do talk a bit about the Franco-Prussian war, including some of the deaths involved in that.

But otherwise, that's pretty much all.

So if that's something you don't want to hear, you can check out any of our other episodes. We have content warnings at the start of all of them. Rosa was born Rosalie Marie

Bonner in Bordeaux in France in 1822. Her father, Raymond, was a poor artist who made his living

teaching art, and her mother was the illegitimate child of an aristocratic merchant.

The family was quite poor, and in 1829 they moved to Paris for Raymond to find work.

So in 1832, Raymond joined a religious and social reform movement, which was called the Saint Simonians.

They focused on improving the world through education, industry, and fine arts, and one of their

main focuses was equality between men and women. So Raymond's beliefs as part of this

movement influenced Rosa throughout her life, and she said later, to his doctrines, I own my great

and glorious ambition for the sex to which I proudly belong, whose independence I'll defend

till my dying day. Well, that's very progressive. That's really good.

Yeah, she comes from a very progressive family.

I love it when women have, like, permissive fathers in history, because then they can do stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, her father's not, like, ideal, but...

Okay, well, yeah.

His role in the group led him to leave his family to go and live in a sort of, it's sort of like a monastery.

It was a kind of St. Simonian retreat, which was in the northeast of Paris.

...