Feminist, Socialist, Militant, African: Jeanne Martin Cissé as a “Founding Mother”

In 1962, three women’s activists from West Africa founded the Pan African Women’s Organization, which predated the multilateral Organization for African Unity (now the African Union) by a year. One of these activists, Jeanne Martin Cissé from Guinea, became the organization’s Secretary-General for twelve years. Later, she served as the first woman to chair the UN Security Council when Guinea was a non-permanent member, a fact she rarely failed to mention. Internationally and at home in Guinea, Martin Cissé was a close ally of the country’s first president-turned-dictator, Ahmed Sékou Touré, and echoed his anti-imperial, pan-African, militant socialist politics. By examining Jeanne Martin Cissé’s feminist activism alongside her other political positions, this paper explores a particularly African form of feminism in the post-independence era, one that is based in local and regional traditions while also connecting to a growing global movement, a feminism that seizes upon multiple African liberation movements, often embedded in Marxist thought. Now, 40 years after Martin Cissé’s political peak, her leadership both exemplifies the tensions inherent in feminist movements and also reveals patterns of feminist political leadership in the country that can still be seen today.