Women and Communist China Under Mau Zedong

Abstract

The mid twentieth century was a tumultuous and transformative period in the history of China. Mao Zedong and the Communist Party seized control and established the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, which was the culmination of over two decades of civil and international war. Mao Zedong's famed political slogan: "Women Hold Up Half The Sky[1]," was powerful rhetoric, with the apparent emphasis on gender equality and inferred concepts of equality and sameness.Women did not achieve equality with men, nor did they attain egalitarian self-determination nor social autonomy. Nevertheless, when Chinese Communism under Chairman Mao is analyzed we discover women, both rural and urban, were able to challenge social, cultural, and economic gender stratification. Mao envisaged "women's equality" as a dynamic force with an indelible power to help build a Chinese Communist State. This essay illustrates the ways in which women inextricably worked within Mao's Communist nation building efforts to slowly erode gender inequalities. Yet despite the inability of full gender equality to be realized, this era allowed women to experience a broad range of experiences which contained the seeds of change toward breaking down gender inequality. Ultimately, Chinese women under Mao created a more fertile environment so the seeds of equality may continue to grow, perhaps bearing fruit of full "gender equality" in the future. [1] Xin Huang, The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era: Women's Life Stories in Contemporary China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2018): 14.