"Let me speak and do not interrupt me. I don't have time to listen to you, they will come to take me at six in the evening. Tomorrow morning I won't exist. I won't be in any familiar place. This journey, to a place that no one on this earth knows - a journey that neither kings, nor princes, nor governors, nor police officers have made - fills me with pride. I always sought something to make me proud, something to make me feel superior, superior mainly to kings, princes, governors. I would take a newspaper in my hands, look at their pictures, and spit on their faces. I knew that I was only spitting on the newspaper, which I needed to line the kitchen cabinets. But I did it, and then I left the spit where it was, to dry."

This woman is real, flesh and bones, an indomitable female spirit trapped in a man's world. Seeking freedom and respect, Firdaus tries to escape from the life imposed on her. Slave as a child, slave as a wife, slave as an employee, slave as a prostitute, free only as a murderer.

On the night before her execution, Firdaus narrates her story, in one of the most classic and widely translated texts of feminist literature. It is not Firdaus' sufferings that make her story a timeless female issue. It is the simplicity of her message: that in the world of patriarchy, no woman is free.