Quotes from The Revolution Cannot Triumph Without the Emancipation of Women (3)
"If society sees the birth of a boy as a "gift from God," the birth of a girl is greeted as an act of fate, or at best, an offering that can serve in the production of food and the perpetuation of the human race. The little male will be taught how to want and get, to demand and be served, to desire and take, to decide things without being questioned. The future woman, however, is dealt blow after blow by a society that unanimously, as one man-and "as one man" is the appropriate term- drums into her head norms that lead nowhere. A psychological straitjacket called virtue produces a spirit of personal alienation within her. A preoccupation with being protected is nurtured in the child's mind, inclining her to seek the supervision of a guardian or drawing her into marriage. What a monstrous mental fraud! This child knows no childhood. From the age of three, she must be true to her role in life: to serve and be useful."
"While her brother of four or five will play till he drops from exhaustion or boredom, she, with little ceremony, will enter into production. She already has a trade: assistant housewife. It is an occupation without pay since, as is generally said, a housewife "does nothing." Do we not write "housewife" on the identity cards of women who have no income, signifying that they have no job, that they are "not working"? With the help of tradition and obligatory submissiveness, our sisters grow up more and more dependent, more and more dominated, more and more exploited, and with less and less free time for leisure."
"While the young man's road is strewn with opportunities to develop himself and take charge of his life, at every new stage of the young girl's life the social straitjacket is pulled tighter around her. She will pay a heavy price for having been born female. And she will pay it throughout her whole life, until the weight of her toil and the effects of her physical and mental self-negation lead her to the day of eternal rest. She is an instrument of production at the side of her mother, who is already more of a matron than a mother. She never sits idle, is never left to her games and toys like her brother."
"How do women manage to live out this peculiar dual identity, which makes them, at one and the same time, the vital knot that ties together the whole family by their presence and attention, guarantees its fundamental unity, and yet also makes them marginalized and ignored? The woman leads a twofold existence indeed, the depth of her social ostracism being equaled only by her own stoic endurance. In order to be able to live in harmony with the society of man, in order to obey his command, she envelopes herself in demeaning and self-effacing detachment. She sacrifices herself to this."
"Woman, you are the source of life, yet an object; mother, yet domestic servant; nurturer, yet pseudowoman; you can do the bidding of both soil and hearth, yet you are invisible, faceless, and voiceless. You are the pivot, the unifier, yet a being in chains, shadow of the male shadow. The woman is the pillar of family well-being, the midwife, washerwoman, cleaner, and cook. She is errand-runner, matron, farmer, healer, gardener, grinder, saleswoman, worker. She is labor power working with obsolete tools, putting in hundreds of thousands of hours for a hopeless level of production."
"Broken on the wheel and bullied, women, our sisters and wives, pay for creating life, for sustaining life. Socially they are relegated to third place, after the man and the child--just like the Third World, arbitrarily held back, the better to be dominated and exploited."
- Thomas Sankara, Marxist president of Burkina Faso who implemented sweeping initiatives for the rights of women, including banning forced marriages and FGM and promoting female literacy and representation in government, until his murder in a French-backed coup in October 1987 that led to an utter reversal of his policies
