Daily Inspiration Quote by Mao Tse-Tung

Equality is framed here not as a moral aspiration but as a political project with a gatekeeper. Mao’s “can only” does the heavy lifting: it turns women’s liberation into a dependency of revolution, not a parallel cause that can pressure the state from the outside. The rhetoric is consequential because it doesn’t merely predict that socialism will help; it asserts a monopoly on the route to gender justice, making alternative feminist demands look naive, bourgeois, or counterrevolutionary.

The intent is twofold. First, it recruits women’s emancipation as evidence for socialism’s total competence: a system so comprehensive it can redesign the most intimate hierarchies. Second, it disciplines the timeline of liberation. If equality arrives “in the process” of transforming “society as a whole,” then incremental reforms, independent women’s movements, and pluralist politics become distractions at best, threats at worst. The subtext is a bargain: align with the party’s program and history will deliver equality; contest the party and you are contesting equality itself.

Context matters. Maoist China did pursue sweeping legal and social changes - the 1950 Marriage Law, attacks on arranged marriage, mobilization of women into labor, slogans like “women hold up half the sky.” Those were real ruptures with patriarchal tradition, and this line leverages that promise. Yet it also foreshadows the recurring contradiction of revolutionary states: emancipation offered from above, contingent on political loyalty, and often subordinated to production targets and party control. In other words, the sentence is both a manifesto and a warning label: liberation, yes, but on the revolution’s terms.