Part III Transforming the Family

Abstract

Though May Fourth era feminists strongly supported the incorporation of women into the male-dominated public sphere, they were more ambivalent when it came to challenging the assumption that women would always be responsible for childrearing and domestic work. The essays in this section deal with the question of how women's domestic work and childrearing might be handled after women are emancipated. All three essays look to the socialization of domestic work for an answer, but they differ in the extent to which they are willing to let public institutions usurp the role of the family. Yun Daiying takes the most radical perspective, arguing that the institution of the family is not necessary to a healthy modern society, and proposing that public institutions take over all the work of childrearing except possibly the nursing of infants, even if it means doing away with the family entirely. In presenting his detailed proposal about how public dining halls and child care facilities might work, Tang Jicang also imagines a large role for public facilities, though he does not attack the family directly. Zhang Weici presents a more conservative vision of the "transformed" family, in which women remain responsible for and defined by domestic work, with the difference being that each woman would specialize in a specific kind of domestic work, get paid for doing it, and presumably benefit from the public interaction that would result from such an arrangement.