Shaping the Women Question to Enter the Revolution: Women’s Production of Knowledge in the Ethiopian Student Movement (1972–1976)

In the 1960s and 1970s, a strong student movement developed in Ethiopia, grounded in the Marxist and anti-imperialist culture of the global sixties. This chapter proposes to understand how, while excluded from politics by sexist representations, women activists translated into Amharic the Marxist theory on the “women question” to legitimise their participation and put women’s issues on the general political agenda. Then, they envisaged using knowledge to unite all Ethiopian women across the social classes. The intersectional approach reveals the contradictions that arose when Ethiopian women activists reflected about their class position in relation to poor Ethiopian women and conceptualised knowledge as a bridge to transcend class distinction.