status of women

Foot binding: what it was

• involved breaking the toes of young girls and folding them back under the foot, which was then tightly bound

• had to be carried out before the feet were fully grown, and it restricted foot growth to about three inches, which was regarded by men as a sign of beauty and distinction

• It was also a convenient way of restricting women's movement

Foot binding: wild swans

In her book Wild Swans, Jung Chang described how her grandmother had her feet bound at the age of two, having a cloth stuck into her mouth to gag her, while the arch of her foot was crushed by a large stone

Foot binding: the banning of foot binding

• Although the practice came under challenge in the 19th century and was outlawed in 1911, it still persisted in some rural areas when the Communists came to power

• Their decision to ban it brought it to a speedier end, but it was already on the way out.

The marriage law: experimentation of marriage law

The Communists had experimented with new marriage laws in the Jiangxi and Yanan areas under their control in the 1930s, and the Red Army was instructed to treat women with respect, in marked contrast to women's treatment at the hands of the Japanese invaders after 1937.

The importance the Communists attached to the law is shown by the speed with which they tackled the issue, drafting it while the civil war was still going on. In order to enforce it effectively, they deluged the public with a huge propaganda campaign in the press, on the radio and through posters and leaflets. The Party organised thousands of drama troupes to take plays that publicised the new laws around the villages, and Party cadres were urged to check that the law was actually being applied.

However, despite these efforts, the impact of the law was limited by traditional resistance, which was even more pronounced in the Muslim regions of the west. As a result, a second propaganda drive was launched in 1953, but this too was undermined by the outlook of the cadres, many of whom resented the changes. It would take time and a lot more education to shift traditional male attitudes to marriage and the status of women in general.

The marriage law: basis of the law

Once the Communists acquired power over the whole country, the 1950 Marriage Law was one of the first changes they introduced. The new Marriage Law dramatically changed the basis of marriage, from a contractual arrangement between families to something freely entered into by two individuals.

The marriage law: Maos arranged marriage

Mao had been personally involved in opposing arranged marriages since his teens. As a 14-year-old, he had rebelled against his father by refusing to go through with his own marriage (which had been arranged with a woman seven years his senior), even though the bride price had already been paid.

The marriage law: 1919 bride

In 1919, he had become embroiled in a bitter controversy in Changsha that had flared up when an unhappy young bride had cut her own throat and bled to death in front of the guests, rather than go through with her wedding.

• inspired him to write a series of articles condemning arranged marriages and the marriage system in general, which he claimed turned women into slaves

• It seems to have sparked a genuine urge to promote women's rights

• as his power within the CCP grew, he made it clear that he regarded advancing women's rights as an integral part of the Communist programme

• Practical reasonings: Women made up half of the population (he had referred to them as holding up half of the sky)- needed them for revolution

The marriage law: The main clauses

• The practice of arranged marriages and the payment of dowries to a husband or his family were outlawed.

• Men and women who had been forced to marry previously had the right to divorce their partners.

• All marriages and divorces had to be registered with local government.

• Divorce was to be available on equal terms, except that a man could not divorce his wife if she was pregnant or within a year of her giving birth.

• Children born out of wedlock had equal rights with other children.

• Women retained the right to keep the property they already owned when they married.

• Concubinage and polygamy were both outlawed.

Impact of collectivisation and the communes: the land redistribution campaign

• The land redistribution campaign of 1950 appeared to have advanced the cause of women's emancipation significantly, as it gave women the chance to own land in their own name for the first time

• Prior to this, all property dealings had been controlled by men

• However, this gain was short-lived, because neither men nor women were allowed to own land privately once the new collectivisation scheme became compulsory a few years later

Impact of collectivisation and the communes: negatives of communes: why there were negatives

• the communes should have been beneficial for women, because it was envisaged that they would provide canteens, laundries and kindergartens to free women from domestic chores, enabling them to concentrate on working on the land

• However, few communes could supply this range of support facilities

Impact of collectivisation and the communes: negatives of communes: sexual inequality

• While the introduction of the communes might appear to have been a step towards sexual equality, the actual working conditions in agriculture put women at a serious disadvantage

• they earned fewer work points than men because the nature of much agricultural work involved heavy physical labour, and women's productive capacity was frequently lower than men's

Impact of collectivisation and the communes: negatives of communes: cadres

Furthermore, the cadres responsible for enforcing discipline usually held traditional attitudes towards sexual equality, and were intolerant of requests for absence from women who were pregnant or during menstruation. This meant women were frequently treated more harshly than men.

Impact of collectivisation and the communes: negatives of communes: famines impact

• Women's vulnerability increased during the years of famine (1958 - 62), when food was even scarcer

• As the most productive workers, men could claim more of the food rations

• As mothers, women had the invidious task of deciding if they, or their children, were going to be fed first, if at all

• Lack of food is often cited as driving more women into prostitution during the famine

• it also caused a significant rise in the divorce rate in badly hit areas

• When food ran out, either the husband or wife went elsewhere to seek work and maybe a new partner

• In Gansu province, for example, the divorce rate rose by 60 percent in the famine years

• Wife-selling was another desperate remedy adopted by some to make their resources go further

Women and the family: Confucian values

• Mao and the Communists wanted to destroy traditional family life, since it symbolised the Confucian values that they were committed to overturning

• The Communes were part of the attempt to do this, reducing women's roles as mothers and family raisers (in theory, at least)

Women and the family: married couples in communes

The Party was so determined to destroy the traditional family that in many communes, men and women were made to live in separate quarters, only seeing each other occasionally for conjugal visits

Women and the family: old and young people

Although women suffered badly from the 1958-62 famine, the main victims were the very young and the very old. Children in families that were left without mothers were frequently sold or abandonea, so that there were fewer mouths to feed. Old people who could no longer work were left to fend for themselves.

Women and the family: aftermath of the famine

Some of the fallout from the disruption caused by the famine became apparent later in the 1960s, when conditions improved. There was a stream of court cases in which husbands tried to retrieve wives they had lost, who preferred to stay away, having found a better life elsewhere. The Great Leap Forward had certainly disrupted the family, but not in the way that had been planned by the Party.

Women and the family: family unit during the cultural revolution

The family as a unit came under renewed attack during the Cultural Revolution, when it fell into the category of the four olds: Children were told that Mao and the Party were their true parents, to whom they owed loyalty, and children were taught to inform on relatives who clung to old attitudes.

Women and the family: family disruption once the radical has of the cultural revolution ended

• the young Red Guards were sent up to the mountains and down to the countryside

• The damage they had been causing to family stability might have ended but at the expense of uprooting vast numbers of teenagers (12 million between 1968 and 1972) from their families

• Those who tried to come back after serving their time in the countryside often found it hard to reintegrate, and have been described by historians as China's lost generation'

Women and the family: Population policy

• Population policy also had an impact on women and the family

• For many years, Mao's approach to this was ambiguous

• In public, he celebrated the continued growth of the population (from 540 million in 1949 to 940 million by 1976), on the grounds that this demonstrated China's growing world power and justified the mass mobilisation campaigns being used to implement policy

• However, by the mid-1950s, worries over resourcing such a huge population were already prompting government officials to discuss ways of restricting population growth

• The 1958-62 famine added urgency to the situation, even if the failure of the Great Leap Forward could not be admitted in public

Women and the family: encouragement of less children

Contraceptives were made widely available in 1962, and female cadres in the Women's Federation were given an increased role in encouraging mothers to restrict the number of children they had.

Women and the family: reduction of the birth rate

• As things calmed down when the most turbulent phase of the Cultural Revolution was over, an administrative framework to support family planning initiatives was gradually put in place

• Mao finally clarified policy in 1971, by declaring that the birth rate should be reduced to two percent

• A concerted propaganda drive was launched at the same time, pressurising mothers into marrying later and restricting family size to two children

• This had some, but limited, effect and was the precursor to the much better-known one-child policy introduced in 1979, three years after Mao's death.

The nature and extent of change: Marriage law positives

Arranged marriages were much less common, to the extent that in the first year after the law was passed over a million women used the new divorce system to extricate themselves from arranged marriages that did not suit them

The nature and extent of change: Marriage law negatives

while this law, along with the continued decline in Confucian values, reduced the power of parents over their daughters, for many young women the state merely stepped in to take their place: according to historian Rana Mitter, the authority of parents was merely replaced by that of the state in the guise of the head of a woman's work unit.

The nature and extent of change: in comparison to men

Women did make rapid advances in terms of taking up opportunities for paid employment, and were ented to receive the same rates of pay as men, although if these were based on piece work then their output and pay might well be significantly less depending on the nature of the work involved

The nature and extent of change: growth in the number of women in the workforce

• Although the proportion of women in the overall workforce quadrupled between 1949 and 1976. from & to 32 percent, this still represents less than one-third of the workforce, and the opportunities for career progression up management structures were predictably limited by male domination further up the hierarchy

• The growth in numbers of working women owed much to the expansion of industry in the First Five-Year Plan (which saw more women taking up jobs in heavy industry and of the services sector (opening up opportunities in office and clerical work); and to the greater opportunities for women to follow courses of higher education, although here the proportion of women was even lower than in employment

The nature and extent of change: higher education

Higher education was neither free nor compulsory, and the pressure on many women of student age to fulfi domestic roles prevented them from taking advantage of the opportunities to train for careers

The nature and extent of change: propaganda

• While Communist propaganda frequently featured women's issues and laid great stress on the central importance of gender equality, it depicted women's needs as being the same as those of men: the images used in propaganda posters portrayed women as happy and fulfilled because they could fill roles traditionally occupied by men (soldiers, metal workers, violent Red Guards, etc.)

• Women who wanted to adopt these male styles of behaviour did feel better off, but there was no opportunity for women to gain more rights while still retaining their feminine roles.

The nature and extent of change: the cultural revolution

• The Cultural Revolution worsened the position of women all-round - the cause of emancipation went backwards because class, rather than gender, issues were considered more important in this period, and their role within the family was undermined by the attacks on the 'four olds'

• Meanwhile, women who took up roles as Red Guards found themselves accepted only as long as they exhibited similar levels of violence as their male counterparts, which involved losing their distinct identity as women

The problem of changing traditional views, especially in the countryside: ethnic resistance

• Resistance to female emancipation was strongest in the inland rural areas, where changes were always slower to arrive and to be accepted

• The greatest resistance came in the Muslim provinces of the far west, where arranged marriages formed an integral part of the religious culture

• The difficult task of changing these traditional views was left in the hands of the cadres, whose efforts were supported by an assortment of propaganda campaigns, usually in the form of posters

The problem of changing traditional views, especially in the countryside: resistance to the marriage law

• Aware that male resistance to the Marriage Law was delaying its implementation, the government stepped up its promotional propaganda campaigns in the early 1950s, using the All-China Women's Federation to train cadres in the workings of the new law and to persuade them that it would not lead to chaos

• This was only partly successful, however, and male opposition to the Marriage Law remained strong in many areas.-

The problem of changing traditional views, especially in the countryside: agriculture

• Attitudes to women's pay for agricultural work were also slow to change, especially in northern areas, where women had rarely worked in the fields before the Great Leap Forward

• Some of the prejudice against women doing farm work was weakened when they stepped in to fill the labour shortages caused by the mass mobilisation of men on construction projects, but despite this and the achievements of 'model workers' such as Deng Yulan in Jehol province, there is plenty of evidence that men and women were still not being rewarded equally for their efforts

• This became more obvious when the communes were dismantled and replaced by small collectives where the practice of rewarding rural workers with work points was often restored

• Given the heavy nature of much agricultural work, women's output could rarely match that of their male counterparts, but no allowances were made for this