Your hour has struck, O woman citizen! Your hour is the hour of rescue and liberation! Your hour is the decisive awakening:
to be followed by eternal death,
or succeeded by everlasting life!
Your hour is the final explosion of the geniuses of this nation:
either the frame of our nation is cast among the ruins of extinct nations,
and it enters the history of the immortal dead,
or renewed life leaps up from among these moving bodies and resumes its march toward glory and survival!
They are trying to keep you outside the arena of life, because the luminous, rich virtues of your heart will expose the vices of their black, contemptible hearts! Know, then, that you are the one answerable before life, and before history, and before existence as it surges toward loftiness and perfection!
Your role is no longer a secondary one that can be dispensed with for a time —
it is the role that decides our destiny!
If you fall back before the assault of the reactionaries leagued against you, the loss will not be your loss alone, but the loss of the whole nation!
They commission women of your own sex to write, so as to turn your awareness and your renaissance back toward your traditional tasks, that your isolation within a narrow circle may continue, and that they may drag you down into the abyss toward which they themselves are sliding!
They call your right in life "politics," and your boldness in entering the field of reform a swerving from the path for which you were created!
They magnify your household duties in order to magnify the dangers of the venture of demanding your right in life!
Who told these fools that woman was created to be a captive in her house:
carrying her unborn child in her womb,
rocking her infant's cradle by night,
and cooking his food by day?!
Who taught them that woman exists to be a means of fulfilling man's ambitions in his pride and his despotism, his surrender and his servility?!
If these and their like are woman's duties, then man's corresponding duties are:
to toil the whole day long to support his children and his wife, and to come home in the evening and take his share in managing the affairs of his household!
But if life is a matter of impulses and gifts and aptitudes, which take hold of a human being and claim his energy, the powers of his mind, and the inclinations of his heart, then these impulses and gifts and aptitudes may appear in man and in woman alike.
A man may be created to become a cook and a nursery-tender, just as a woman may be created to become a reforming thinker and a fighter for the liberation of her country!
Woman's exercise of her social-political rights is not "politics"; and politics is not, as people among us understand it, a wallowing in base personal ambitions and appetites, nor is it a diversion from our family duties and our household tasks! It is, before all else:
a living social conscience that feels its responsibility toward itself and toward its society!
And is it permissible for any human being — whether a father working to support his children,
or a mother watching over the management of her house,
or a cook excelling in varieties of dishes,
or a philosopher immersed in the various philosophical schools,
or a maidservant working in her master's house —
is it permissible for any civilized human creature to be reared to the freezing of his social conscience, so that he neglects his rights and his duties?
The rights that woman is demanding are the completion of the cycle of social life in the field of rights and duties; and whoever resists woman in this bold renaissance of hers is like one who tears himself down with his own hands. For just as woman is the complementary part of man, so is she the complementary part of the national-political society; she is the necessary force that cannot be dispensed with if the cycle of social-political life is to be driven through its full motion — the motion that strives to free society from the diseases of its mind and its heart, and that guarantees its survival, its progress, and its continuance!
O woman citizen!
I have searched the corners of my country, corner by corner, and sounded the depths of my nation as it drifts toward extinction, and I found nothing pure and unsullied but the soil of my country, storing up bounties and blessings in its heart;
and I found nothing but your heart, bent over the virtues stored in its depths:
Woe to us, and to our generations to come, if our soil turns into volcanoes hurling lava, and if your heart turns to stone with fear and waiting!
On the first of May, 1950