Memoirs of a Woman Doctor

Everybody does wrong. Life is made up of right and wrong. We only come to know what’s right through our mistakes. It’s not weak and stupid to do wrong, but to continue doing wrong.

The woman stands before the man, deprived by the world of her freedom, her honour, her name, her self-respect, her true nature and her will. All control over her spiritual and material life has been taken from her, even her control over the little fruit which she creates inside her with her own blood and cells and the atoms of her mind and heart.

Everybody does wrong. Life is made up of right and wrong. We only come to know what’s right through our mistakes. It’s not weak and stupid to do wrong, but to continue doing wrong.

Then I’ll tell you: because from early childhood a girl is brought up to believe that she’s a body and nothing more, so her body becomes her main concern for the rest of her life, and she doesn’t realize that she’s got a mind as well which must be looked after and encouraged to develop.’

‘What’s harder to accept than death?’

‘An incurable illness or severe physical deformity or mental deficiency.’

I was going to show my mother that I was more intelligent than my brother, than the man she’d wanted me to wear the cream dress for, than any man, and that I could do everything my father did and more.

My brother played, jumped around and turned somersaults, whereas if I ever sat down and allowed my skirt to ride as much as a centimetre up my thighs, my mother would pierce me with a glance like an animal immobilizing its prey and I would cover up those shameful parts of my body.
Shameful! Everything in me was shameful and I was a child of just nine years old.