Bonnes Mères

My four-year-old asked me where babies come from in a museum in Marseille, and I did not answer him.

Bonnes Mères was an exhibition on motherhood, and on how it has been used to justify a male domination presented as natural. One of the walls was projecting a short black and white film called La Fée aux Choux. A fairy walks along a row of cabbages and lifts babies out of them, one after another, and hands them to the camera. It runs about a minute. He was hooked. "Why are the babies in cabbages?"

The film was directed by Alice Guy-Blaché, a secretary at Gaumont who asked whether she could try making something with a story in it. She made hundreds of films and ran her own studio in New Jersey. Then she was left out of the histories for the better part of a century. She came back to France in 1922 with two children and never worked in film again.

The joke of La Fée aux Choux is that it is a story invented to avoid telling children where they come from, made by a woman whose own origins in the medium were subsequently invented away.

He is four. I told him about the cabbages and said nothing about the woman who made them, which is how it usually goes.