This work is concerned with the civil authorities' and missionaries' project of the emancipation of Madarε women in the west of Burkina Faso between 1900 and 1960. The work deals successively with the place of women in the pre-colonial village community, the beginning of contacts with European civilisation, the project's initiators' assessment of the women's living conditions and their willingness to change them, the means and methods used to this end and the limitations of the project at the time of independence in 1960. The fruit of several years of research by a historian, who is a...