Pak Chol, Faculty of History, Kim Il Sung University
2024.5.28.
Chairman Kim Jong Il said:
"Busy as he was with the building of a party, state and army after liberation, the great leader Comrade Kim Il Sung paid close attention to the issue of women, having the Democratic Women's Union of Korea involving the broad sections of women founded and the law on gender equality, the first of its kind in history, proclaimed. In this way, he granted our women valuable political integrity and opened a wide avenue for them to participate in the socio-political life in a dignified way on equal terms with men. Throughout his life he put heart and soul to providing our women with the most wonderful conditions for their social activities and living."
President Kim Il Sung, in his whole life, put heart and soul to providing the Korean women with the most wonderful conditions for their social activities and living. He made his indefatigable efforts to make sure that the Korean women, who took up the half of the population just after the liberation from the Japanese imperialist colonial rule, turned out into the construction of a country. There was a moving story saying that he always cared for their active participation into the construction, making sure that a nursery was built for them.
On Oct, 20th, Juche 34(1945), he met a woman cadre of the Women's Liberation Union, the then women's organization, who came over to get his instructions for solving intricate problems arising in the work of women's movement.
President Kim Il Sung, with a broad smile on his face, kindly offered her to be seated and asked about the details of what kind of work the union did, whether or not they found it difficult and how the conditions of women's life and work were.
To his free-and-easy and tender words, she said that things were very difficult, talking frankly about the dilemmas in her mind, like she was doing in front of her own father.
She said that she could not understand some people's behaviours – some husbands' parents claimed their daughters-in-laws that it was up to women to bring up their own children but imprudent of them to be too vigorous in social life; some husbands did not allow their wives to go outside, insisting that women could not do a great thing, or even treated them unkindly.
President Kim Il Sung, who had a pent-up feeling by what she had said and looked out of the window, said warmly that even though women talked about equality, or even though they were given the equal rights in law, they could not truly as equal as men and that all women should be freed from their heavy burdens of household chores and turn out into the construction of a new country, as men did. He emphasized that nurseries should be necessary for women to go out into society.
She was so moved and grateful that she said, ‘Thank you very much, General! Our women will like it!'
Indeed, what he said to her that day showed the fatherly love of President Kim Il Sung, who was willing to set up the Korean women as masters of the country, for the Korean women, who had been forsaken under all sorts of maltreatment and deprivation of rights.
The grand plan and careful guidance of President Kim Il Sung and energetic efforts of the anti-Japanese heroine Comrade Kim Jong Suk led to the establishment of 3.8 Nursery (‘Kim Jong Suk Nursery of today), the first to have been built in our country, on Feb, the 15th, Juche 37(1948).
Indeed, President Kim Il Sung was the benevolent fatherly leader of our people, who, with deep concern for problems of the Korean women's activities even in his busy days of carrying out the cause of building the Party, the country and the army, opened a wide avenue for them to participate in the socio-political life in a dignified way on equal terms with men and, throughout his life, put heart and soul to providing the Korean women with the most wonderful conditions for their social activities and living.
