South Yemen (when Yemen was divided in two) in 1970: “To quote Tuful Saïd, a woman refugee from the eastern sector whom I met in the western sector in February 1970: 'Here we are fighting on two fronts. The first front, that of revolutionary violence and armed struggle, is the easiest. The second and most difficult one i s where we fight against illiteracy, ignorance and backwardness.' A number of measures resulted from the Second Congress. Slavery was abolished. Education classes in politics and literacy were set up throughout the liberated area. For the first time young children received primary education; and in 1970 a Lenin School was set up just inside the PDRY – People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen. In addition to learning history, mathematics, politics and languages, the children shared the tasks of the camp - cooking, cleaning and guard-duty - and had group discussions on the tasks they had to perform.
—Fred Halliday in Arabia Without Sultans.
“If we name a human being in whom, in all class societies, all forms of oppression and exploitation are centred, that being is woman. Woman is not the only example of someone who suffers from the economic structure in a class society. We can point to other victims of suffering and exploitation by capitalism : workers suffer, and farmers do too. But a woman-worker or a woman-farmer in addition to her sufferings under the relations of feudalist or capitalist production also suffers from her position inside marriage and in the family she was in before that. Moreover, she suffers from the oppression of society in general, since society imposes on her traditions and old customs which paralyse her activity and deprive her of the sensation of being a human being.”
—the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf, June 1970.
Halliday, 1979
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