"Iron Women and Foxy Ladies"

Promoting women's liberation began many years before the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. Three decades earlier (circa 1919), May Fourth intellectuals and writers had sought earnestly to reform the status of women and to disabuse the public mind with regards to their proper place in traditional society. Having suffered generations of emotional and sexual repression, female liberals took direct aim at relationships and passions as a root of their ills. Yang Zhihua, an author with multiple romantic partners, wrote the following in 1922 about disassembling the taboo of heterosexual relationships:

"First, when a man and a woman start to socialize by speaking and writing to each other, going to the parks together, or studying together, people jump to the conclusion that this young man and this young woman are in love, even though they are actually just friends. Consequently, some young men and women succumb to these outside pressures and speculations, go ahead and push themselves in to the 'business of love,' and then have sex. After that, they break up, agonize, and part ways. The whole process usually lasts a very short time because their relationship has the wrong foundation to begin with. This kind of love is caused by outside pressure, so it is not true love. It is not a personal choice, so it usually does not last long."

Another important voice in this movement, Ding Ling, raised quite a few eyebrows with her explicit depiction of female desire in her 1928, fictional memoires, Miss Sophie's Diary:

"I looked up and saw the corners of his soft, read, and deeply inset mouth. Could I tell anyone how I looked at those two delightful lips like a child longing for sweets? But I know that in this society I’ll never be allowed to take what I want to satisfy my impulses and my desires, even though it would do nobody else any harm."

These criticisms leveled at traditional Confucian propriety and the containment and control of female desire opened high society up to the possibility of alternatives to the traditional Chinese, female stereotype. Nonetheless, the majority of Chinese women (particularly the illiterate) would gain little from Yang and Ding's kind of liberation.

With the victory of the Communists over the Nationalists in 1949, Mao and his party sought a more pragmatic and far-reaching type of women's liberation that would produce more tangible results. A shift in focus from individual sexuality to passion for one's work and country became the avenue of emancipation for women seeking to break out of traditional modes. They were given the material means to be socially and financially independent.

A feminist and Chinese scholar, Tonglin Lu, has doubts that that kind of liberation has actually freed women from their ancient restraints:

Up to the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the situation of Chinese women after the May Fourth movement in 1919 and since the socialist revolution in 1949 can be summarized by two pictures: Nora leaving her husband’s house and the white-haired girl at the exit of her grotto. The former symbolized individual freedom in the bourgeois revolution; the latter, the liberation of the labor class in the socialist revolution. The two images raise the same question: "What can a woman do after abandoning, or being saved from, her previous slavery?" (4)

In Lu’s analysis, she can only be reabsorbed into ever newer incarnations of patriarchal notions of salvation that engender inequality (3). Communism is the new face of patriarchal repression, in her opinion.

A new generation of young Chinese women rushing to maturity in a contemporary age of economic prosperity might see things quite differently from Lu, however (see reactions to the White Haired Girl in the 21st century)


Readings:
Mao's Red Book (Ch. 31, Women)
Historic Liberation of Chinese Women (1994)

Questions:
(1) Why were women being liberated?
(2) From what were they being liberated?
(3) What do you perceive as ulterior motives for the liberation of women in modernity?

Links:
*Stefan Landsberger's Iron Women and Foxy Ladies
*White Haired Girl (1950, film version)
*Jing Haozhou's 2003 evaluation of the Communisty Party and Women's Liberation
* The Status of Women (Beijing White Papers, June 1994)

Secondary references:
*Tonglin Lu. “Introduction.” Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society. Ed. Tonglin Lu. Albany: State University of New York Press. 1-22.