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Women and China's Socialist Construction, 1949–78
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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The chapter that follows is excerpted from my book Women and China's Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), which asks: If we place women at the center of our account of China's last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? Women and China's Revolutions takes a close look at the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens. Building on the research of gender studies scholars since the 1970s, it establishes that China's modern history is not comprehensible without close attention to women's labor and Woman as a flexible symbol of social problems, national humiliation, and political transformation.
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References
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1 Many aspects of life in the PRC, including the specifics of intra-Party contention, important political campaigns, and the consolidation of state control over borderland areas with large ethnic minority populations, are dealt with glancingly or not at all in this chapter. Fortunately, a large and easily accessible body of scholarship exists on these topics. For one useful overview, see Meisner 1999. For selections of interviews with women about their lives before and during the PRC, see Cusack 1958; Davin 1989; Verschuur-Basse 1996; Xinran 2002
2 On the conflicts that emerged between state-affiliated feminists and other Party leaders see, inter alia, Wang 2006; Wang 2010a; Wang 2017; Manning 2006b.
3 On the Marriage Law, marriage, and popular cultural portrayals of both in this period, see Ono 1989, 176–86; Davin 1976, 70–114; Johnson 1983, 115–53; Diamant 2000; Diamant 2014, 86–94; Glosser 2003, 167–95; Cong 2016, 244–83; Friedman 2006, 77–81, 89–96; Hershatter 2011, 96–128; Wang 2017, 14.
4 On the significance of labeling a practice feudal and thus attempting to consign it to the past, see Friedman 2006, 69–70; Hershatter 2011.
5 The fixing of class status in the early PRC had unforeseen effects. People were given class labels, inheritable through the patriline, which kept categories such as “landlord” in place long after the actual social phenomenon of landlordism had disappeared, influencing subsequent generations. Women could change their class labels if they married, for example, into a poor peasant family, though gossip about being a “landlord's daughter” might persist. More generally, the freezing of class labels meant that no language of class was available to express emergent relationships of inequality, for instance between city and countryside, cadre and worker, village leader and peasant. The dominance of class labels in public discourse also made the naming of other inequalities, such as those of gender, difficult to articulate. For a discussion of how class labels affected selection of marriage partners in rural areas, see Zhang 2013.
6 Tran 2015, 175–98.
7 Hinton 1997, 396–99
8 On speaking bitterness and women's mobilization, see Hershatter 2011, 34– 37, 62–64, 79; Ono 1989, 171–73, Hinton 1997, 157–60; for an urban use of the practice among factory women, see Ma 2014. On the difficulties of mobilizing women for more extended political activity, see Crook and Crook 1979, 195–203. On the persistence of speaking bitterness as a narrative practice among urban women into the post-Mao years, see also Anagnost 1997; Rofel 1999, 137–48; Huang 2014.
9 Of course, men petitioned for divorce too, including in cases where rising cadres wanted to end marriages to aging or poor wives and “trade up.” See inter alia, Wang 2010a, 839–40.
10 Johnson 1983, 132; Huang 2005, 179.
11 Johnson 1983, 115–53.
12 On mediation, see Huang 2005.
13 Hershatter 2011, 111–12.
14 Cong 2016, 249.
15 Yan 2003.
16 The foundational discussion in English of the difference between men's and women's lives within this marriage pattern is Wolf 1972. On patrilocality, see also Johnson 1983.
17 See, inter alia, Judd 1989; Hershatter 2011; F. Liu 2011.
18 Except where otherwise noted, this section is based on Hershatter 2011, 154–81; Fang 2017.
19 Hershatter 2011, 351n51.
20 Evans 1997, 41–47. On attempts to introduce a Soviet method of painless childbirth in urban China in the 1950s and its entanglement with Cold War politics, see Ahn 2013.
21 . Except where otherwise indicated, this account is based on Hershatter 1997, 304–24
22 On resettlement of other women to Qinghai during this period, and the importance of women's role in establishing families and bearing children there, see Rohlf 2016. On the reform of singing girls in Qingdao and their transformation into socialist cultural workers, see Zhao 2014.
23 Zhang 2015, 65.
24 Evans 1997, 145, 160, 174; Smith 2013a; Smith 2013b, 20–21, 63, 65–67, 74–82, 102–6.
25 Davin 1976, 154–90, provides an overview of policies toward urban women. On women in the press, see also Davin 1975b, 365; Honig 2000, 100. On women who became models for being the first to do particular kinds of work, see Chen 2003. On the reconfiguration of labor for urban women and how it was recalled nostalgically in the reform era, see Rofel 1999.
26 On the difficulties of political mobilization among women factory members in the early years of CCP control in Beijing, see Ma 2014.
27 Davin 1976, 163–64; Ma 2015, 326–28.
28 Large state-owned enterprises also employed temporary and contract workers, who helped fuel labor unrest in 1956–57 and during the Cultural Revolution; see Perry 1993, 254–56; Perry 2002, 206–74.
29 Evans 2012; Rogaski 2004, 296–97; Ma 2015, 329–30
30 Wang 2005, 197 and passim; Wang 2017, 29–53; Ma 2015, 329–34.
31 On women in industrial and agricultural production on the covers of Women of China, see Luo and Hao 2007, 287–88; Finnane 2008, 203; Wang 2010a; Wang 2017, 78–111. On women in mass-produced posters, see Sun 2011.
32 Davin 1975b, 365–72. On women's fashion and its political significance in the Mao years, see Chen 2001; Finnane 2008, 206–26. Harriet Evans (personal communication) points out that Women of China introduced the slogan “let's be pretty” (zamen haokanqilai ba!) during a mid-1950s production slowdown.
33 Evans 2002.
34 Personal communication. For similar situations recounted by Beijing women of that generation, see Zuo 2013, 108–11.
35 See, inter alia, Evans 2008, 44–53, 105–6.
36 Wang 1999, 285–86 and passim.
37 Barlow 2004, 194, 233–52; Spence 1981, 379–85, 394–98.
38 On women's work and family obligations during the 1950s, see, inter alia, Zuo 2013.
39 Evans 2008, 106–9; Liu 2007a, 1–86; Zuo 2016, 21–76.
40 Hershatter 2011, 70–72, 83; Eyferth 2015, 132–33.
41 Except where otherwise noted, this discussion of women's rural labor during the collective era draws upon Hershatter 2011; Davin 1975a; Davin 1976, 115–53; Johnson 1983, 157–77. Other sources that include discussion of women's role in rural life during this period are Parish and Whyte 1978; Croll 1981, 380–86; Friedman et al. 1991; Friedman et al. 2005.
42 For firsthand descriptions of women's daily lives in a rural collective, see Sheridan 1984; Chen 2015, 67–87.
43 On rural labor models and production contests, see Gao 2006; Hershatter 2011, 210–35; Chen 2003. For brief accounts of rural and urban labor models, see Sheridan 1976.
44 Huang 1990, 200–203; Hershatter 2011, 136–39
45 For this pattern in a papermaking village, see Eyferth 2009, 130.
46 For this pattern in a papermaking village, see Eyferth 2009, 130.
47 Wu 2008.
48 Han 2007; White 2006, 19–41. On rural women's distress about the large numbers of children, see Hershatter 2011, 206–9.
49 Eyferth 2012; Eyferth 2015.
50 Where not otherwise specified, this discussion of the Great Leap and its aftermath draws upon Hershatter 2011, 236–66. See also Chen 2015, 88–107; Guo 2007.
51 Meisner 1999, 216.
52 Pietz 2015, 207.
53 On women's work on infrastructure projects, see Friedman 2006, 43–45; Pietz 2015, 144–45, 207–9.
54 On rapidly rising rates of women's participation in production during the 1950s, reaching 80–95 percent in the Great Leap, see Thorborg 1978.
55 Manning 2006a, 359–60.
56 Gao 2006, 607–8; Manning 2006a; Manning 2006b. Yang Jisheng (2012, 220) points out that prolapse also was widespread during the ensuing famine.
57 Manning 2006a; Manning 2006b.
58 King et al. 2010; King 2013.
59 Thaxton 2008, 199–207.
60 Accounts of the Great Leap Famine not otherwise cited here, many of which include tales of starvation and cannibalism in some regions of China, include Yang 2012; Dikötter 2010; Manning and Wemheuer 2011; Wemheuer 2014.
61 For an Anhui County in which male cadres disbursed grain in return for sexual services from local women and more than a quarter of the population died during the famine, see Yang and Cao 2016.
62 Yang 2012 (67, 132, 135, 136, 217, 220, 228, 275, 348) cites interviews with former Women's Federation cadres, and Party and state committee reports, from Henan, Gansu, Sichuan, and Anhui. Yang (409) calculates the national shortfall in births from 1958 to 1961 at 31.5 million.
63 Hershatter 2011, 391n164.
64 On feminization of agriculture in the 1960s and 1970s, see Gao 2006; Hershatter 2011, 129–30, 145–49, 242–44, 264–66; Honig 2015, 194–95; Friedman 2006, 52–54. For a description of men flipping irrigation switches, a technical job, while women did the physical work of ditching and damming—at a lower work-point rate because this was ordinary day labor—see Wolf 1985, 83–84.
65 Johnson 1983, 181, 195. For the origins of this attack on the Women's Federation and Women of China in particular, see Wang 2017, 112–39.
66 Wang 2001; Wang 2005, 198.
67 Honig 2002; Hinton et al. 2005; Ye 2006. An ongoing controversy about responsibility for this death was rekindled when former Red Guards apologized in a 2014 ceremony for having failed to protect the principal. Yang 2016, 184–86.
68 Honig 2002
69 Yang 2016, 1, 54–55, 57–58. On factory violence during the Cultural Revolution, see also Perry 2002, 238–74.
70 Honig 2002, 257–58. On men's and women's dress across the Mao years, see Steele and Major 1999, 55–67; on the Cultural Revolution in particular, see Wilson 1999.
71 For surveys of women's dress and its significance across the Cultural Revolution period, see Chen 2001; Chen 2011; Finnane 2008, 227–55.
72 See, inter alia, Honig 2003; Yang 1997; Honig 2000, 102–9.
73 Honig 2015, 190–91; Zhong 2011.
74 Honig 2015.
75 On the Iron Girls, see Honig and Hershatter 1988, 23–26; Honig 2000; Jin 2006; Sun 2011, 133–37; Wang 2017, 221–41. On a less well-known precursor, the Mu Guiying Brigade of the Great Leap Forward period, see Manning 2006b; Manning 2010.
76 On the suppression of the enormously popular Yue opera performed by women during the Cultural Revolution, see Jiang 2009, 194–98.
77 On gender roles in the model operas and ballets, see Chen 2002; Roberts 2010; Bai 2010; Honig 2000, 100–101; Edwards 2016b, 198–206. On similar gender hierarchy in Cultural Revolution posters, see Evans 1999.
78 On Jiang Qing in her own words, see Witke 1975; Witke 1977. On her role in the film industry just before and during the Cultural Revolution, see Wang Zheng 2017, 205–20. On the campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius, see Johnson 1983, 194–207; Honig 2015, 195–96; Croll 1977.
79 Zhong 2011; see also the individual essays by women of this generation in Zhong et al. 2001; Ye and Ma 2005.