Abstract
AbstractThis article investigates Chinese women labour models (or labour heroines) of the early 1950s as actors and symbols of socialist transformation. It centres on the example of Shen Jilan (1929–2020), who was one of the most prominent women labour models of the time. Shen rose to fame through her struggle for equal pay for equal work in her native village, became a delegate to China's National People's Congress, and even participated in the Third World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in 1953. The article critically engages with the concept of “state feminism” and proposes a shift in focus from state–society relations to work as a means to understanding the transformation of women's lives under socialism. Socialist society was a society of producers and work shaped people's daily lives; it was central to identity formation and constituted the regulating mechanism of social relations. Indeed, women labour models, together with related categories of working women, came to typify the new Chinese woman, who was integral to and symbolic of socialist modernity. They epitomized communist theory about women's participation in production being the mechanism of their liberation. The article has three main parts, each of which addresses a different level (local, national, international), different constellations of actors and agency, and different aspects of the relationship between working women and socialist transformation. By tracing Shen Jilan's activities in various contexts, the article reveals the complexity, contradictions, multilayered nature, and also incompleteness of socialist transformation.
Highlights
The “theoretical front” was represented by Kang Keqing and Cao Mengjun, two prominent women’s leaders, studying Stalin’s “Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR” and a document issued by the Nineteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Their equivalents at grassroots level appeared in two photos: vice cooperative leader and labour model Shen Jilan instructing her co-villagers on the upcoming autumn harvest; and vicecooperative leader and labour model Guo Donglian discussing the production plan for with co-cadres of her cooperative
As for working women under Mao, these new socialist feminists point to the voices of women who have experienced socialism and claim to have profited from socialist gender policies, were proud of their work, and were positively affected by the propaganda of labour heroines and other progressive female role models
Summary
On March , Shanxi ribao (Shanxi Daily), the newspaper of China’s northern Shanxi province, published a one-page article titled “Zai zuguo gege zhanxian shang de funümen” (The women at the various fronts of the motherland). It focuses on Xigou village and work as Shen Jilan’s true spaces of activity and identification, and on her fight for equal pay for equal work, the episode that brought her fame It reveals the upsetting effect of women’s participation in production on the traditional gender order, and shows how the particular ideals and interests of various actors – state, local cadres, village women – converged in the demand for equal pay. The second part moves to the national level and the political order, where male and female labour models were appointed delegates to the National People’s Congress (NPC; China’s “parliament”) and figured in the CCP’s efforts to legitimize communist rule It highlights women’s new sense of honour, dignity, and acts of recognition as important aspects of their “liberation” – gains that are overlooked in a rights-centred discussion. It was the educated and experienced heads of the Chinese delegation who represented New China on the congress stage, and they pointed to the young and uneducated Shen Jilan as mere evidence of successful liberation
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