Immediately after its liberation in 1949, China was faced with the problem
of how to involve in social production the many millions of women confined
until then in narrow domesticity. China was in a good position to bring about
this upheaval. In particular, the victory of the revolution, crowning twenty
years of national and civil wars, had profoundly transformed the old society
and had destroyed many of the old ideas about women's inferiority. Millions
of women had played an active part in the war against the Japanese; they
had exercised power directly, often playing a leading part in the liberated
areas. In many districts they had frequently taken charge of agricultural
production. This wealth of experience was the context in which the question
of achieving emancipation was seen. It was a very important established fact
which the women's movement could look to for support when tackling the next
stage.
While China is almost the only country in the world today where the vast majority of women participate in social production, this didn't come about smoothly. Some figures are worth thinking about. For example in Shanghai in 1966, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, more than half the women had given up their jobs and had returned to their domestic lives. This can be explained partly by the policy of the Chinese Communist Party, under the influence of Liu Shao-chi, ex-president of the People's Republic of China, which involved waging an intensive propaganda campaign for a return to the home. This took many and varied forms. Here a mother's 'unique' ability to raise children was praised; there it was stated outright that women were good for nothing, too limited intellectually to learn a trade. The scarcity of day-care centres and canteens was often used as an argument against women working. As for those who already had a job, their work was interpreted in a particular way: a second wage for that little bit extra ('work to feed and clothe your family better')! [1] This reactionary chorus was no doubt loud enough to discourage many whose intentions were good. But by itself it cannot explain the fairly widespread return to the home. We must look for the underlying reasons in the work itself, in its organization. Otherwise it's hard to understand how women holding down a job as part of their effort to liberate themselves could have allowed themselves to be convinced by such backward-looking theories. It's really because not all the working women were actually gaining any freedom. Wherever there were genuinely liberating jobs women didn't leave the factories in such great numbers. In the Chao Yan factory, which we visited, only about ten women 'went back behind their front doors', as the Chinese say.
Nobody can still think that the Soviet way of explaining things is satisfactory: 'Here is a state-owned factory, and since the State is the Party and the Party is the masses, the factory belongs to the workers, QED'. That's no longer acceptable. If I'm told, 'This factory belongs to you and the people' while I blindly obey bosses' orders, understanding nothing about my machine and even less about the rest of the factory; if I don't know what happens to my product when it's finished, or why it was produced in the first place; if I have to work faster to get a bonus; if I'm bored to death in the factory waiting all week for Sunday, all day for clocking-off time; if I'm even more ignorant after years of working than when I began - then it's because the factory is neither mine nor the people's! When production is still organized on capitalistic lines, that is maintaining and deepening the separation between intellectual and manual work and sticking to the rule of profitability; when production relies on a bourgeois rule-book, blind discipline and material incentives and maintains a division between those who think on one side and those who do on the other then the least educated, especially the women, are also the most oppressed.
A significant number of women were convinced of the advantages of returning to domesticity, because in the first place the class struggle had not yet defeated the bourgeoisie in the factories. Because of this, work remained subject to bourgeois criteria. And capitalist production can no more 'liberate' women than it has ever actually liberated men. We, who had all worked in factories, remembered the endless conversations with other women on the subject: 'If my husband earned enough, I'd stay at home', 'When I get married, I won't work any more.' Such talk came up again and again, even though, the very next day, these same women would swear: 'I wouldn't stay at home for anything in the world, I'd get too bored.' Such wavering opinions only reveal the particularly ambiguous position of women workers in a capitalist country: they have enough experience of social labour to appreciate the triviality of housework, but this social labour itself is so devoid of meaning as to make the prospect of staying at home seem like a temporarily inaccessible luxury. A solderer in a television factory once told me: 'On Monday morning, the prospect of the whole week ahead of me makes me envy those who can stay at home; on Sunday evening, after a day of cleaning-up, I pity them.'
Yet while the participation of women in social labour has not liberated them,
it has nevertheless been a decisive factor in arousing an awareness of their
oppression and in the socialization of their rebellion. It has led to an
enormous increase in their consciousness of oppression: 'woman's condition'
or the misfortune of being a woman.
The Chao Yan Medical Apparatus Factory in Peking isn't much to look at - a few brick buildings opening out on to a yard reminiscent of a school playground. Yet things are happening there, with little fuss being made, which are critical for the future of women. We were received there two or three days after our arrival, seated round a long table, in a little white room, our cold fingers hugging scalding cups. A woman worker in her fifties, Ma Yu-yin, told us the history of the factory:
'Until 1958 most women in this neighbourhood used to stay at home and work for their family, doing housework, looking after children ... It was then that the whole country rose up to make the "great leap forward", and everyone's energies were mobilized for the next step in the transformation of society. In the countryside, the peasants were reorganizing the more advanced co-operatives into people's communes; industry was being widely decentralized; and even in the most remote areas small industries were springing up. Were we, the women, to stay at home, out of the storm? Chairman Mao appealed to us 'to rely on our own strength, to break away from our housework and participate in productive and social activities'. We wanted to answer this call, to make the great leap forward too. But how could we go about it? It was then that about twenty women in this neighbourhood decided to 'cross the threshold of the home' and set up a local factory. The street committee let us have two empty warehouses for this. From one point of view everything seemed to be working against us: there weren't many of us, we had no equipment, no crèche, no canteen, no experience of production (we were all housewives). We didn't even know what to make. But on the other hand we held important trump cards. We hadn't decided to work just to make life a bit more comfortable for our families: we wanted to change society, to transform the condition of women. If only women would throw open the doors of their houses, which block their view! We no longer wanted to serve our families, we wanted to serve the people.
'Finally, after asking round the district, we decided to make essential goods such as kettles, stove-pipes, saucepans, that sort of thing. We brought our own tools from home: hammers, pliers, a few screwdrivers, nails and so on. We had nothing else. We went to factories to salvage sheets of scrap metal and iron tubes, and we set to work. Sometimes some workers would come in after work to show us what to do. A serious problem of another kind was looking after the children.
'For example this comrade here had five children. We managed as best we could.
The older children looked after younger ones. Some women could leave their
children in the care of their mothers or mothers-in-law. There were neighbours,
too, who approved of what we were doing and gave us a hand. You could say
that the problem was solved during that period by mutual aid. During the
whole time we didn't get any wages. We would often stay at the factory even
until late into the night to finish some task we had set ourselves.'
'Finally, by a process of trial and error, we succeeded in making kettles and stove-pipes by hand. These products were accepted by the State. That was our first victory. A few ordinary, unskilled housewives helping one another had actually managed, by dint of sheer energy and obstinacy, to manufacture household appliances of a high enough quality for the State to buy. We redoubled our efforts. We next decided to diversify according to the needs of the people. We asked round to find out what the new local needs were, and then we began to manufacture medical apparatus: protective sheets for use with X-ray machines, isolating cabinets. We used old discarded machines; we took them apart, repaired them and converted them ourselves because it was more productive and easier that way. This work was more complicated and required more knowledge than kettle-making.
'We had posted up in the workshop Chairman Mao's saying: 'Times have changed, and today whatever men comrades can accomplish, women comrades can too.' l here was no fundamental reason why women couldn't build this apparatus. Sometimes some of us would become discouraged in the face of the difficulties. They used to say: 'What's the use of all these efforts, we'll never succeed. We're not educated, medical apparatus is too difficult to make, we'd better stick to kettles'. We would discuss it among ourselves. 'We aren't here to make money for ourselves and even less are we here to enrich some boss. The people need this apparatus. Should we women hang our heads when faced with the risk of failure? For centuries and centuries Chinese women have been treated like animals. We are part of the working class. How can it lead the country if half of it is kept ignorant and unable to learn new techniques? We don't know anything! Okay then, let's learn! The most beautiful stories are written on blank pages!' And we would return to the task, our confidence restored. With the help of other factories who sent skilled people to advise us we managed to produce not only protective sheets and isolating cabinets, but also large high-temperature sterilizers and infra-red lamps. After an inspection, the State gave us the job of producing those things and our factory took the name it has now: the Chao Yan Medical Apparatus Factory. By then our ranks had swelled and there were just over three hundred of us, including about twenty men. In 1960 we built four more workshops in the yard without asking the State for a single penny, simply by salvaging bricks from old buildings. That same year we built a restaurant and a creche in the factory enclosure. All this with our own hands; we can built socialism with our hands.'
'Inside the factory there was a feeling of solidarity, dynamism and dedication. It was quite common to see women workers staying on after their day's work to finish a job, or to practice a difficult technique. Of course we weren't forced to do that, and we weren't paid for the overtime. Must we get bonuses for making the revolution? And that was what it was about. Besides, our experiment didn't by any means please everybody. In 1961 some of the factory's managers, completely blinded by orders from the Peking town council,[1] decided to "rationalize" production. They decreed that there were too many of us working there and that we would have to stop making kettles since we were now a medical-apparatus factory. How contemptuous they were about our kettles! The 'reorganisation' would have meant a good number of us returning home. They thought they'd convince us by saying that the men would get a wage rise so that we could stay at home and look after our families. Wouldn't everything be simpler that way? But these plans encountered spirited resistance from the women, and they declared: "We won't go back to our cooking, we won't give up our jobs!" Life in the factory became very tense. There was a desperate struggle between that faction of the management who wanted the factory to be run for immediate profit and who, above all, didn't want the women workers to liberate themselves, and the large majority of women workers who wanted to continue on their chosen path.
'This struggle was fought in full awareness of what it was all about. We understood what was at stake. In most cases our husbands and the other men supported us. That can easily be explained. What happened in Chao Yan wasn't an isolated incident. In all the factories a reactionary offensive arranged by Liu Shao-chi aimed either to re-establish capitalist norms of production, or to prevent their overthrow by the masses. This explains why the men, who were also having to confront the bourgeois offensive, understood and generally backed up the women's resistance. Since many of us were out of work, we got no pay. But it didn't matter. If we didn't have any work, we would make some for ourselves! If we got no wages, we would hang on by helping one another! We asked other factories to give us work that we would then do in "our factory". Some women workers would bring scrap to the factory (bricks, sheet metal and so on) and we salvaged and cleaned it for recycling. The women's work was useful, even if it wasn't "profitable", and we proved it. A few women, only about fifteen of us, were unable to go through with it. They either went to work in large factories or returned home. During the Cultural Revolution we came to understand even more clearly the real nature of this reactionary policy. We led campaigns to denounce the method of so-called "rationalization". Most of those who had supported Liu Shao-chi's line discovered the interests they had really been serving. They are now working side by side with us. Almost all the women who had left the factory have come back to work here. Recently the women workers at this factory have perfected a process for the manufacture of silicon. Previously the workers here were all former housewives and generally quite old, between forty and fifty. Now we also have some young school-leavers, who share their knowledge with the older workers, at the same time learning from them the qualities of revolutionary persistence and proletarian resilience. In this neighbourhood virtually none of the women stays home, only the women who are too old or who are in bad health - but even for them life has changed. They help one another and take on a few domestic chores to relieve the ones who have jobs away from home; they organize the political and cultural life of the district; they aren't as isolated as before. This transformation is the result of the move by thousands of women into productive and social activities. As for us, we are wage-earners, and it's important that we have won our economic independence. But it must be understood that it is still more important for us to stand four-square in the world, to be concerned about communal affairs rather than to care only about family problems. We have used production as a weapon to liberate ourselves, to serve the Chinese people and world revolution better.'
There are thousands of small district factories like Chao Yan in China. The first wave of factory building came at the time of the 'great leap forward'. These factories came under relentless fire from Liu Shao-chi and many were shut down. During the Cultural Revolution new ones mushroomed everywhere. They now form a dense, widespread network of' industrial production, across the whole of China, by which China works, breathes and lives. As the small Chao Yan Factory proves beyond doubt, little or no investment is needed to start them because they depend entirely on living labour and on the workers' political determination and creativity. They also have the advantage of close ties with the local community, understanding its specific difficulties as well as the immediate needs of the people. The women of the Chao Yan district in Peking both wanted to work collectively at useful jobs and had the will to transform the living reality of the neighbourhood. If the housewives, in their determination to 'get out of the family', had simply gone to work in big factories outside the district, the main result would have been to turn their neighbourhood into a dormitory suburb. What actually happened, as Ma Yu-yin pointed out to us, was that when small factories were built in the heart of the district new relationships and new activities developed in the neighbourhood. The factories gave the neighbourhoods new life and their influence really spread throughout the whole district.
We saw these small factories in the countryside and in the cities. A factory stands with all its doors wide open just off the main road among the houses, helping to set the rhythm of the days and the nights for the people who live there, whether or not they work in it. Those who have retired help to run the small factories by organizing collective child-minding after school.
The struggle to built and develop these small factories has led women to face the problem of housework and often to open communal restaurants and crèches. Men become more committed to sharing household duties when the factories are at stake. Sanitation systems are built round the factories, benefitting the factory workers and the whole communities. Adults, and especially women, who go back to school most often go to learn about the problems they have encountered in factory production.
In destroying the artisan class, capitalism also destroyed the symbiotic relationship it had with consumers. Traditionally, craft production was necessarily closely bound up with local needs. While the Chinese neighbourhood factories have put an end to small-scale individual production, they have on the other hand retained and possibly strengthened their links with the consumers. This holds good not only for factories producing household appliances such as saucepans and chairs, but also for the manufacture of machinery and farm tools. This kind of industrial development is particularly conducive to the participation of women in social production. It doesn't demand any prior technical qualifications which the women happen not to have, but only their initiative and their knowledge of the actual needs of the people. Who are better suited to transform the daily life of a neighbourhood than those women who have assured it for so long? And who is better able to bring to the fore the use-value of an object instead of treating it simply as a commodity, those who worked for centuries to maintain, clean, prepare and make something that would be useful for their families rather than something that would pay? Despite the intolerable oppressiveness of this work from which their revolt stemmed, women have developed an acute sense of useful work which cannot be measured in profits, surplus value and labour time. When women come together to re-examine the meaning of work designed to serve privatized units, when society as a whole engages in a relentless struggle against private interest, then the time is ripe for those 'feminine qualities' so long repressed to shine out brilliantly.
Forging the dialectical links between the immediate needs of the people and the growth of a modern industry is no mean task. We are all aware how the Soviet Union wages great ideological campaigns: the sacrifice of a generation would guarantee a happy future. But for the mass of the Soviet people the music of the future turned out to be pure lamentation. The crushing priority accorded to heavy industry left without a solution the problem of what the masses were to consume. It was women who suffered most in the interminable queuing for scarce consumer goods and from the need to fall back on their own resources in order to maintain, somehow or other, a minimum standard of living. Had China followed that road to industrialization we can bet that Chinese women, and most of the men as well, would be no better off than unskilled workers in a reserve pool of labour. They wouldn't have become what they are today - informed workers who are changing the world in the process of changing themselves.
Technological developments should never be underestimated, even when they're not directed at the immediate creation of productive capacity. The great merit of Chinese industrialization has been that it has allowed all workers to be active in the growth of the productive forces. Chao Yan is a good example of the way in which the acquisition of the most advanced technology has been solidly founded on the progress of the workers. Former housewives with hardly any education progressed within eight years from making kettles to making sterilizers and, finally, to producing electronic equipment.
Ma Yu-yin told us: 'We have managed to master complex manufacturing processes with the help of large factories.' This is how it happens: to train its own technicians, the small neighbourhood factory sends a few women workers to the larger factories, where they work on recently developed machines with technicians and experienced workers. There they acquire useful new knowledge. When they return to the factory they set up "technological innovation teams" with other women workers, who work together to surmount the obstacles resulting from their lack of facilities and training.
Compared to the very recent past, productive forces in China are bounding ahead, and yet they can be, and are, more and more closely controlled by the people. How could the working class exercise power if it had only a narrow, fragmented knowledge of production and was 'under the domination of technology'? Through the revolution in social production, women in China have gained a thoroughgoing knowledge of society that was denied them as long as they stayed by their own firesides. Their participation in power is effective and not merely formal - and it is precisely on that that their liberation is based.
Although there are women in all sectors of the economy in China, many can still be found doing 'women's work', in the health, education and textile sectors, for example. This is generally considered to be a temporary state of affairs, bound to be progressively phased out. I say 'generally' because this is by no means a unanimous opinion. We met several people who didn't seem to have considered the question very much, and were quite happy with the current situation. A male official in one factory told us with some pride that there were women doing all different kinds of jobs in the factory, and he concluded by quoting Mao Tse-tung's famous dictum: 'Whatever men comrades can accomplish, women comrades can too.' ( Chantal replied: 'That's all very well, but we've just come from the factory's crèche, and we didn't see any men looking after the children. Why not?' A fairly heated argument started among the Chinese comrades. He then replied; 'You see, it's because women have wonderful qualities when it comes to child-rearing'.
'Then you believe in the idea of innate and unchangeable human nature?' Chantal asked ironically.
'No, of course not!' he said abruptly, visibly offended. 'That's not what I meant.' He hesitated a moment, while laughter broke out all round him, then he replied: 'Comrade Chantal's remarks are quite correct, and I thank her for criticizing my inadequacies. The class struggle doesn't stop with socialism; if you come back to see us in a few years, you'll certainly find that great changes have taken place, and in particular there'll be men in the crèche.' He added: 'We shouldn't just say "Whatever a man comrade can accomplish a woman comrade can too", but also "What a woman comrade can accomplish, a man comrade can and must accomplish too."'
The 'feminine' virtues, not those supposedly given us by nature but those which stem from women's oppression, our heritage from the past, can in some cases be transformed and provide the impetus for a change in the condition of women. We were to witness a particularly clear example of this at the embroidery factory in Suchow.
A long time ago Suchow was renowned for its embroidery. But the embroideress used to work at home, and she was invariably very poor. After the liberation, in Suchow, as all over China, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recommended that women should participate in social production. A few factories could have been built in the town and women encouraged to work in them, but the local revolutionary leadership decided on a different policy. There were hundreds of embroideresses in Suchow who had become very good at their work. For generations they had been ruining their eyesight embroidering flowers and butterflies on the clothes of wealthy landlords. Should an art that the propertied class had appropriated be destroyed, or should it be transformed and restored to the people? The decision was probably not reached without a struggle. The idea of 'socializing' embroidery was certainly not an article of faith for the workers' movement in the 1950s. A mechanistic interpretation of Marx might imply that a production process could not be socialized unless it had previously been mechanized. But this 'heresy' didn't worry the communist women of Suchow. As plants need water, so the Chinese people needed an art for themselves. The embroideresses were useful to the people. Let no one tell them that this country - with some hundreds of millions of inhabitants and with an economy still underdeveloped, which had scarcely begun the task of overcoming the ancient and man-made curses of famine and war - needed machines more than art. Without art, there can be no revolution!
In Suchow, just as in Chao Yen, it was the determination of a small group of women (eight in all) that eventually brought about the co-operation of the majority. They had to resist a great deal of hostility from the home embroideresses.
In the first place, techniques had been handed down from generation to generation, and each embroideress jealously guarded some family secret. Co-operation meant sharing the tricks of the trade and therefore devaluing her individuality. In the same way, designs had in the past to be original to be of value; what would happen if anyone could reproduce a design? And then working at home has its advantages. You could, for example, embroider and mind the children at the same time. The eight 'feminists' weren't seduced by these arguments. They picked up their silk, scissors, needles and children and began to embroider together. They pooled everything, their experience, their initiative and their enthusiasm.
Far from becoming boring and unoriginal, their designs achieved a new variety through their work, and this change could be seen after only a few months. They would sketch together, discuss, criticize and improve their designs. The eight women embroidered more varied and more beautiful designs than a hundred embroideresses each locked up in her own home. They made similarly spectacular technical progress. Until then people had embroidered only one side of the silk; these women perfected a way of embroidering both sides, giving a lot of depth to the design and increasing the possibilities for relief work. Within a year the co-operative had grown from eight to a hundred members.
At that time there were still some capitalists in China (small capitalist enterprises continued to exist under strict state control until 1956) and the silk merchants in Suchow didn't look kindly on this battalion of angry women. They tried to smash the movement by increasing the price they offered for the embroideries. For example, the silk merchants would pay 24 fens for an embroidered pillow that the State bought from the co-operative for 20 fens, but on condition that the pillows should be made at home. This method was not as successful as expected. In fact it opened the eyes of many women. 'Had anyone ever seen a capitalist increase workers' wages without their asking for it? Clearly something peculiar was afoot.' The co-operative's ranks closed. While single, isolated embroideresses had always been at the mercy of the demands of the silk merchants and of their own mutual competition, the co-operative was soon able to guarantee its members a regular income from the sale of embroidery, with some state aid. They earned the right of all Chinese workers to free medical care and they organized a creche and kindergarten in the gardens surrounding the workshops. Funds they had built up enabled them to expand production. They bought large silk stretchers (wooden frames, hinged on their supports, on which the silk is stretched for embroidering) and were able to embroider large designs on which several women could work together.
The fact that women aspired to become involved with art was politically significant. After all, it had been a long-established fact that women didn't understand the first thing about art, since art is creation and in matters of creation the weaker sex cannot raise itself above the level of procreation! What a check to assert that workers, and what's more women workers, could begin to understand these matters! Who were to be served, the people or their enemies? Should ancient tradition be upheld or should they introduce innovations? Should they depict kings and emperors or workers on the march? The controversy raged. On the pretext of preserving rich traditions, some women, still in the grip of bourgeois ideology, said that you couldn't portray the rough hands of peasants with fine thread. Their view was that trying to improve technique was more important than revolutionizing content. That's why until the Cultural Revolution most embroider still depicted the heroes of the past, so dear to the Parisian antique dealers.
But it soon became clear that the position these women were defending was wrong even in relation to matters of technique. For example they would allow most of the embroideresses to work only on backgrounds, leaving the faces for the select few who knew how to embroider them and who would do it secretly, to maintain their prerogative. The other embroideresses, who had no hope of doing anything but backgrounds and headless bodies, were disgusted. The women had lost control of the factory and managerial decisions were actually being made by a team of 'experts' without any regard for the women's wishes and aspirations. A young embroideress tells the story:
'Since childhood I had had a burning desire to embroider on silk the faces of the revolutionary heroes who liberated China. But people made fun of me: "You're too young, you don't even know how to embroider the sky and the landscape properly, let alone eyes and noses! You're too ambitious!" I tried anyhow, on my own, and failed. Full of bitterness, I went back to doing skies and landscapes. During the Cultural Revolution we decided that doing faces would no longer be a special prerogative, a privilege. We would all be able to do them. So all the embroideresses had to be taught how. We made a lot of attempts, not always very successfully. Once I had embroidered a sentry squatting in the dark and watching out for the enemy. I wanted to convey the atmosphere of heavy silence and stillness that you feel when you hear descriptions of these scenes. But my friends burst out laughing when they saw my embroidery: "Your sentry must have been running hard. He's all out of breath, he's purple in the face, he must be puffing and blowing like an ox. The enemy must be deaf if they can't hear him!" That made me sad, but then my friends told me seriously, "It doesn't matter; if we don't try, we'll never win. Let's start again together, and this time make sure we don't use too much red. We'll get there in the end." In fact, although it's pretty difficult, we can all do faces well now, because we try to help one another and we no longer hide our work from one another.'
There are now 1600 embroideresses in this factory. We saw young men sitting at their frames embroidering with women advising them. Edith asked one of them: Don't you mind doing woman's work?'
'Not at all, I like it. And it isn't woman's work. That's the old society's way of seeing it: man's work, woman's work Times have changed.'
'But don't the other men make fun of you?'
'No, embroidery is useful for the revolution. Of course there are still some people who think it's woman's work', and he added, smiling, 'The class struggle isn't over yet, we must keep fighting'
It was while visiting a large textile factory in Changsha, where more than seven thousand workers (80 per cent of them women) are employed, that we suddenly understood what had until then seemed very confusing: just how changing the relationship between intellectuals and workers in the heart of the factories can contribute so enormously to women's liberation.
Our visit to the factory had to be short that day because we had a heavy schedule. We raced through the workshops filled with the noisy rattle of the shuttles. Afterwards, in the meeting-room, we weren't paying much attention. Then we heard: 'Before the Cultural Revolution there were more than 2500 rules and regulations aimed at oppressing the women workers in our factory.' Danielle asked the serious-looking young woman worker who had just spoken: 'Can you tell us how these rules acted against the women workers?' She answered without a moment's hesitation: 'Because of these absurd rules, women workers just couldn't make any technical innovations. If they wanted to improve production, their project had to pass through a complicated and intimidating hierarchy. When it finally reached a technician's desk, he usually wouldn't see any point in it and would throw it in the waste-paper basket. The system was discouraging and slowed down the development of production.'
I can still see the looks of disappointment and surprise we exchanged when we heard this. The first illustration of the repression of women workers that came to her - the fact that they weren't given enough opportunity to develop production - seemed to us to be stereotyped and unconvincing, to say the least.
Danielle changed the subject: 'Are women workers allowed to move to different jobs often enough to learn what the work is like everywhere?' 'We try to make it easy for women to work at different jobs with different people,' was the reply. 'But it's fairly difficult. Some jobs demand a lot of experience, so the older women can change round more easily than the younger ones. Even though we always try to make these changes possible, we don't consider them crucial. To get an overall knowledge of what goes on, it is essential to participate more and more in the work of development and design. In each workshop there is a technical innovation team made up of women workers, technicians and revolutionary cadres. As well as doing their shop-floor work, the team members plan projects and produce blueprints, scale models and drawings. The team takes up workers' daily suggestions, criticisms and advice. In this way knowledge and manual work, theory and practice, intellectuals and workers are gradually united. And the two sides of the old gap - which still exists, of course, but which is decreasing - are qualitatively transformed. The goal is to make a new man who will be unlike either the intellectuals or the workers of the past, who will neither be cut off from practice, the work and its concrete problems, nor lack theoretical understanding.
'Change is needed on both sides, but that is possible only if the workers themselves assume political and ideological leadership. They instruct one another, but it's really the workers who re-educate the intellectuals. It seems paradoxical, doesn't it? A long time ago we thought it was the duty of intellectuals to give 'knowledge' to the workers. That's a one-sided point of view. While it's true that a worker's knowledge is fragmented, at least it's knowledge tested by practice and based on a revolutionary class position.'
That's why the workers must lead in bringing about this change. If they arc to free themselves from the limitations of their own knowledge, they must also liberate the intellectuals. Once again a specific case has illustrated Marx's thesis: 'Only by emancipating all mankind can the proletariat achieve its own final emancipation.' Each different job is like a cog in a big machine, and by jumping from one to the other, workers can widen the range of their practical experience. But they can never cross the boundary between the conception of an overall project and its practical realization. This explanation by the woman at Changsha really clarified what she had told us earlier: women workers really had suffered because they couldn't make technical innovations and give their initiative free reign.
We understand all that, you might say, but what does it have to do with women specifically?
Actually it's very simple, and you will understand, as we did. When we distinguish between manual and intellectual labour, the vast majority of women are traditionally manual workers. Not only because, like male workers, they haven't got enough information, but also because they are shut in by the family and thus even further removed than anyone else from any overall view of the world. Their world is their kitchen, the children's room and the conjugal bed. They are the semi-skilled workers of the home.
When they leave their homes to work in conventional factories, they are therefore, even more than their male colleagues, reduced to the role of carrying out 'mysterious orders'. But for the same reasons, they are the first to benefit from the revolutionary change in the relations between intellectuals and workers.
When the oppression of women stems, as it does, from their being cut off from social activities and therefore deprived of a social vision, there can be no solution but to give them immediate access to the widest and most comprehensive range of scientific information. This should not be handed down from teacher to pupil, but instead free reign should be given to the co-operative effort of intellectuals and women workers.
The acquisition of new skills and the diversification of practical experience are other important ways in which workers can develop that broad knowledge of things that was previously forbidden them. It's well known that some Chinese workers become doctors by being given practical and theoretical training by qualified doctors in the field, and not by going to university, but there are many other similar cases. For example workers will often go into the country for a few months to help set up small local industries, or to train peasants to become the skilled workers a commune needs. There are also groups of workers selected by fellow-workers to go usually for a year to direct political and ideological work in all sorts of places besides factories: theatres, hospitals, schools, administrative offices, department stores.
They can also take up or continue studying and may, for instance, be chosen by other workers in their factory to go to university, to evening classes or to one of the part-time study centres set up in some factories, such as the one in a Shanghai machine-tool factory, where workers spend half the day on the shop floor and the other half studying.
The aim of technical-innovation teams, as with job diversification, is to close the gap between manual and intellectual work. Because the oppression of women is closely linked to this gap, their participation in the revolutionary social movement aimed at its abolition opens the way to their own liberation.
Comrade Pai, secretary of the revolutionary committee of the Sino-Albanian Friendship People's Commune, explained to us how ideas of 'absolute egalitarianism' ended up oppressing women yet again. Some men opposed the idea of women getting equal wages in the name of equality and the equal pay principle, saying: 'They don't do equal work, they don't carry loads as heavy as ours.' Pai told us that such ideas, held by only a minority but not uncommon, expressed the new society's struggle between the capitalist and the socialist roads. 'They must be criticized and vigorously opposed, because they are the tenets of a feudal approach towards women and work. In spite of countless real and historically important facts, the minority still, wrongly believe that women are inferior beings whose contribution to society is minimal. As for work, only slave-traders and exploiters judge human and animal labour by the same standards and with the same values - in terms of sheer physical force. Tibetan landowners, for instance, found that they could trade one healthy and physically strong slave for two less sturdy ones. In the new society, following the example of Tachai, [2] we must first of all look at a person's political attitudes to society and to his or her work, regardless of sex, before we can determine the contribution his or her work makes.'
The controversy concerning the value of the work that women do has been the subject of an ongoing debate all over the country, as is shown by a Red Flag [3] article of February 1972:
People have differing capacities for physical work. Farm labour which demands great physical strength should be left to men who have this strength. It is natural to take account of the physiological differences between men and women in allocating jobs. [As for differences among women themselves, we were often told that work demanding great physical strength is not given to weak men or women in poor health. Author's note]. . . . But in no case whatsoever must the degree of physical strength be used to justify wage differentials between men and women. Following the principle to each according to his or her abilities and to his or her work the norms which determine wages take into account the actual quantity and quality of each worker's labour, as well as his or her greater or lesser contribution to socialist production.[4]
A concern with the specific physiological characteristics of women is also revealed in rest-day and holiday arrangements. Everyone has at least one day off a week, but women, whether in the town or country, get four extra days a month when they have their period. Women also retire at fifty or fifty-five, depending on the type of work they've been doing, while men retire at about sixty. The distinction between absolute egalitarianism and equality between the sexes may seem a little too fine or dangerously fuzzy round the edges, threatening to introduce a notion of equality based on 'nature', propped up by physiology. Indeed how do we know which sex differences are purely physiological and which are acquired, and at least partly determined by the role women play in society? The dividing line isn't easy to draw, but it has to be drawn somewhere.
The same controversy about 'male and female work' crops up in connection with the question of whether women have the ability to master certain agricultural jobs. Some people (apparently opposing the 'egalitarians') go so far as to assert that men and women must share the work according to their sex. The same article in Red Flag comments:
The division of agricultural labour into male and female jobs is a left-over of the old society which still survives in some regions. For example jobs requiring more complex technological skills like the sowing of wheat and rice or soil fertilization have in the past been considered man's work. Some people still refuse to allow women to learn these jobs or to participate in them. Some simply mock the women who do take up these jobs, saying that it's 'topsy-turvy' or 'the world is back-to-front'. The article points out that men have become better equipped to do this work only because they've been practicing it for so long, while women in the old society were confined to domestic tasks, and were generally not allowed to do work in the fields and on the farm.
Red Flag comments further: 'Why couldn't women, with practice, also master the technique of transplanting seedlings? Where does technique come from if not from practical experience? Such attitudes are part of a feudal mentality. They are a manifestation of the contempt in which the exploiting classes hold women. It is this notion of women's nature, a pernicious and reactionary notion, to which Liu Shao-chi and others referred.' The effects these attitudes would have on wages for both men and women are then discussed:
There is another kind of mistaken idea which must be fought. Some comrades admit that in fact it is wrong for women to get eight points [5] for doing the same work as brings ten points for men. And yet they do nothing to eliminate this wrong, reasoning that, 'If you look at wages from the point of view of a household rather than from an individual point of view, you see that nobody actually suffers financially because each family is made up of men and women.' This sort of thinking leads its exponents to give the wrong emphasis to the application of the equal pay principle . . . It is incorrect reasoning because the problem cannot be seen from the standpoint of household profit or loss. The implementation of the principle of equal pay for equal work is first of all a very important political problem and a problem of ideology. Economic equality of the sexes is closely linked to political equality. The fact that the old ideology of male superiority and female inferiority still survives in some pockets of the country is nothing but the political image of the economic inequality between men and women. In fact the struggle of the mass of women against inequality is carried out on the political level. Some women put it very well when they say, 'We are not struggling for a few extra work points, we are struggling for dignity.' To consider that unequal pay for men and women is not a fundamental problem is tantamount to considering that the status of women is of only secondary importance - an attitude which is part of the feudal ideology of contempt for women!
In the meeting-room of the Shawan peoples' commune a peasant woman in her forties told us how the commune's land had become collectivized, a process which was marked at each stage by the role played by women.
'At the time of the liberation the agrarian reform politically emancipated the poor and middle peasants - and women, like men, were given land. But the family was still the unit of production, and had to manage on its own when there were difficulties. One year there was a big drought, and if we were going to harvest anything at all we had to carry our water to the fields. Those families who were short-handed were at a great disadvantage. A widow I know had received five mous [1 mou is 1/15 hectare] during the agrarian reform but as she had no help her income was very low. She thought about the nature and root of her difficulties and took an active part in setting up the first mutual-aid groups between families. But these groups didn't resolve everything. We helped one another, but as long as production was based on family property, it was the family who bore the final responsibility for their own successes or failures. One year a neighbouring family was seriously hit by illness; they couldn't work and eventually had to sell their land [the right to sell land lasted until 1952] to buy medicine. This was an important political lesson for all the poor peasants in the village. We thought: 'Class distinctions will just get more pronounced unless we work harder at collectivization.' So we set up the first co-operatives. Several families worked together and divided the profits according to the amount of land and livestock contributed. Women were doubly attracted to this co-operation. Firstly, as peasants they knew that it was the only way to keep the countryside from becoming a hell for the exploited poor once again. And secondly they knew that as long as production centred on the family unit, they would be stuck at home. Who else could take care of the children, do the housework and cook the meals? But with teams, everyone, men and women alike, worked on the land, and problems with children and housework had to be solved on a collective basis.
'"If we help one another on the land, we must also help one another in the home - this was the position of the women. I myself told my husband: "We must join this co-operative." But he only replied: "You're nothing but a mare [a term for a woman dating from the old society]. You don't understand anything about these things and you won't got out to work!" I used to get really angry: "Women have liberated themselves, you have absolutely no right to treat me like this. Everything have, we have won through struggle and I won't give it up!" And I joined the co-operative without him. He had been a poor peasant, he owned a small plot, sometimes he couldn't do all the work on it himself and he would grumble about his difficulties. I would explain to him, giving him the facts, the advantages of the co-operative. Gradually, he realized that his stubborness stemmed from the feudal ideas he still had about private property and the role of women, and when he accepted that, he felt able to join the co-operative. I know many families in the village where things happened just like that.
'Later on we took another step towards collectivization. More forces had to be brought together so that we could take on the large-scale projects that were necessary if we were to control the forces of nature, like building irrigation works for example. But instead of pushing for more collectivization, the Liuists [Liu Shao-chi's partisans] took advantage of every natural disaster to promote the nonsense of "the family as unit of production". They would launch into defeatist speeches or would say insolently that our commune was too small, with a workforce of two thousand, to carry out big projects like these. To arrive at a figure of two thousand, they counted two women as one man.
'The hills surrounding our brigade [1] were so arid and dry that they looked bald. The poorer peasants who wanted more collectivization would say: "Man must control nature and not the other way round. The bald hills will wear luxurious manes before long." And we began the struggle. Day after day we carried full baskets of earth to the hills on our backs. We dug terraces in the soil. One by one the four hills surrounding the commune came into our hands. Now we gather the largest tea harvest in the region from these hills. Could we ever have achieved results like that on separate little allotments? Our victories arm us with facts to fight the Liuists. And in this struggle the women are in the vanguard - and that's common knowledge.'
The secretary of the revolutionary committee, who was sitting next to her, spoke up. 'I should like to give you some other examples of how women often taught us revolutionary lessons in clear-sightedness and tenacity. Some time ago, before the irrigation works were built, there was a terrible drought. The entire harvest was at risk. We couldn't even contemplate transporting water because all the surrounding rivers had dried up. A few of the old people in the commune said they remembered that when they were kids there had been a spring in a large field near the village, but no one could remember exactly where it was. A team of girls decided to look for it. They set out at once for the field above the village. For five days and five nights they dug the earth to find it again. A lot of people thought their effort was useless, and made fun of it. Springs in Shawan! Never! But on the morning of the sixth day, the girls rushed into the village, shouting, "We've found the spring, we've found the spring!" Everyone ran to the spot and saw a little stream trickling over the ground. They had found it by feeling the earth with their hands until they came across lumps of earth that were slightly less dry. They went on digging on the spot, until they got to the spring. It wasn't easy. The whole village now started working; we spent all day digging a large reservoir, then we dug some canals. Within a week we had got enough water to irrigate the fields. Our crops ater with their bare hands because they were determined to prove that collectivism was better than private family ownership, when are saying, another man will always remind them, "What about the spring? Who was right, the women or us? We must never forget the lesson. of the spring!"'
After this meeting we were led up a narrow path to the spring. On the site they had dug a deep reservoir to hold 6000 litres and had lined the walls with stones. Edith imagined the six girls on all fours, going over every single centimetre of the field as if they were feeling someone's vast belly, so confident that they would succeed that they weren't even aware of the herculean dimensions of the task. Why didn't the men do this work? After all, women haven't got any special talent for water divination! And why were the poorest peasants the first to co-operate? Obviously their own economic situation meant that they were in the best position to appreciate the advantages of collectivism. The women spent five days looking for water with their bare hands because they were determined to prove that collectivism was better than private family ownership, which they also experienced as a concrete form of women's oppression.
Here is too great a tendency to think that the specific nature of women is important only in relation to the contradictions between men and women. Actually the long experience of oppression with which women are familiar is more extensive than that. Let's assume that feminine specificity takes two forms, or more exactly that it has a dual nature. On the one hand women are seen as social inferiors (in a society based on private property). On the other hand, women are traditionally inferior in their day-to-day relationships with men - and this subjugation is a product of their social inferiority. Then, because women's view of the family is informed by this dual oppression, they have a much clearer idea of the limitations of the family unit, and they are more likely than men to reject the illusion that 'the ideal is to be master in one's own home'. Women have been the vanguard at certain moments in history because some of them, more than any other groups of people, have nothing to lose but their chains. The challenge of the Shawan dowsers can and must be understood only in this way. For women, who have always been most dominated by nature, to be in the front line in the struggle to control nature, what a marvellous reversal of history, what a defeat for the sceptics!
In the course of the same conversation the people of Shawan confirmed that during the Cultural Revolution the old women's organization had been 'suspended'. This old revolutionary group, born in the flames of the war against Japan, had become a sort of welfare organization pushing the reactionary women-in-the-home ideology, interested only in the tiny world of domestic bliss and sorrow, in the idea of the little woman we're so familiar with in the pages of capitalist women's magazines. Comrade Ton An-ming, a peasant in her thirties, told us that several revolutionary committees had been organized in Shawan, that about 5500 of the women from the people's commune - more than 80 per cent - belonged, and that she herself was one of the women in charge. During our visit we were often told that women's organizations had reached the stage of 'struggle/criticism/reform'. These groups were still taking stock of past activities and, moreover, new directions had not been clearly mapped out yet. Clearly the people as a whole were still debating the topic - a nationwide organization would not be created by a decision from above, but on the basis of a host of observations and investigations by the masses themselves. We were particularly interested, therefore, in finding out what aims (even if, as seemed probable, they were short-term ones) the Shawan women's revolutionary committees had decided on. Ton An-ming answered our query: 'At the moment we have agreed on five main tasks. First, study of Marxism, of Leninism and of Mao Tse-tung's thought. I'd like to tell you how we've gone about this. To start with we had mixed study groups. So couples would bring their small children with them, and this interfered with our studying. The women then suggested that instead of helping one another to baby-sit on a neighbourly basis, it would be better if the men stayed at home to look after the kids while the women studied. That way we are free to study, and besides the men have a clearer idea of what looking after children is all about. It's arranged so that the women and the men study separately, each for six sessions every month. The women are very well satisfied with this system. "We've found this to be an efficient way of studying politics", they say...'
Just then an old peasant women interrupted Ton An-ming to say: 'One evening I had to go out to study and it started to pour with rain. It was pitch-black. My husband said I shouldn't go out in such weather and in total darkness. I answered him that in the old days, in spite of the daylight, I had been as good as blind because, like almost all women, I couldn't read or write. Now that I was more than sixty and going to school again to share revolutionary experiences with other women, to re-educate myself and to raise the level of my political consciousness, did he want me to stay at home? I told him, "You don't know what we women would pay in order to study." I tell you this story because it shows that women really are set on studying politics," the old peasant woman ended, without having paused for breath. Although she was visibly embarrassed by speaking in public and in front of foreigners, she had decided to do it to make sure we would realize how vitally important this point was to her: women have a burning desire to study.
Ton An-ming carried on talking about the second task, which she said was to do everything to facilitate the most far-reaching revolutionary critique. 'We women must wage an all-embracing struggle against every manifestation of revisionism. In particular, we must follow through to its conclusion the mass criticism of the old aims of the women's organization.' 'The third task,' she continued, 'is to do everything to enable women to participate fully in all the various political activities, so that they fulfil their role as "half of heaven". There are women in every area and at all levels of leadership, but there are still too many who daren't voice their opinions at a public meeting, and there are too many men who won't listen when such opinions are voiced. Our job is to investigate this problem, to mobilize the masses and to find a solution to it.'
I was reminded of some words spoken by the political instructor of a May 7 school [2] near Peking: 'Whenever a man and a woman are equally qualified to fill a responsible post, the policy of the party is to choose a woman comrade. This is a matter of revolutionary principle.'
'The fourth task is to overcome reactionary ideas in women and men alike, particularly those connected with the alleged superiority of men in certain technical areas. We see to it that women participate in all social activities without exception. We are ruthlessly struggling against superstitions which have been especially directed against women.'
This isn't just an empty phrase for comrade Ton, but a matter of hard reality. The miners of Shawan had told us that in the past women were supposed to bring bad luck, and if a woman was seen walking near a pit the workers would refuse to go down, believing that there was a curse on the pit. Another ancient precept forbade women to take wine offerings in religious temples. A woman who drank holy wine would die instantly, a victim of divine wrath. Rebellious women, struggling against obscurantism, drank some of this wine, watched by the frightened villagers, whose superstitious beliefs were deeply shaken when they were not promptly struck down.
Ton An-ming told us another story: 'A few years ago there was torrential rain; huge areas of crops were destroyed and cloudbursts washed away any sloping fields. A 500-kilogram rock was moved more than a kilometer in the storm. Hen, a class enemy, tried to dissuade the masses from acting. He went round saying, "When you see the torrent on the mountain slope, it always means that the god of the plague is descending on the earth. We must let him alone, otherwise everything will be laid waste." These feudal words confused some of the peasants. What's more, a few older ones almost believed that this was a punishment from heaven for the social changes they had made. So comrade Pin came forward and harangued the villagers: "The torrent is merely water. It's just the result of the heavy rain. What can it devastate? Houses and fields perhaps, but not, as Hen would have you believe, everything. It can't destroy our will to carry the revolution through to its conclusion. No force in the world can do that. Not only must we overcome this fear of punishment, we must also struggle with all our might to conquer natural disasters. If we redirect the torrent we can avoid further destruction of crops and houses. Let's set to work!." She organized the women to take on a good share of this work. After several days of strenuous activity we had moved more than 30,000 cubic meters of earth and had managed to control the torrent completely! And that year, in spite of the floods caused by the rains, we harvested 25,000 kilograms more than the previous year. The Shawan commune's poor and middle peasants have struggled against heaven, earth and class enemies, and have won through. Women have played a crucial part in every struggle, bearing out Mao Tsetung's point that women are a decisive force for the victory of the revolution.
'Our fifth task is to redouble our efforts to revolutionize ideas about the family. Women have an important contribution to make to society in this area too. We've already had quite a lot of experience of it here. Maybe comrade Li Ma-shien can tell you about her own case.'
Li Ma-shien, about forty years old, with a suntanned face, began to speak: 'Once the brigade needed a table for the collective. When I found out about it I told the comrades I'd got a suitable one at home, and that they could take it. When my husband realized I had lent the table, he got angry and said, "Some women go to work to bring more things home for the family, but my wife does the opposite and gives our things away." After he'd said all this, I organized a meeting to study Mao Tse-tung's thought in our family. I particularly criticized Liu Shao-chi's revisionist line, according to which there is no contradiction between collective and private interest. This is a hypocritical idea and one that encourages selfishness. We poor peasants must serve the people totally. In spite of our personal interest, we must struggle against selfishness and try to develop for ourselves a proletarian conception of the world. We must learn to act first and foremost in the interests of the people. During the meeting my mother-in-law talked about past suffering and present happiness. She said: "Must we take pleasure selfishly, and think only about our own family, forgetting the past, and forgetting the seven hundred million Chinese and the three thousand million human beings who people the earth? Must we look to our own welfare and forget that two-thirds of humanity still live under the yoke of oppression and exploitation?" The whole thing moved my husband deeply. Now he puts collective property first and foremost and thinks of his own possessions only afterwards. When the comrades brought back the table some time later, my husband applied a little self-criticism and said, "Whenever the brigade needs anything, our house is always open."'
The revolutionary transformation of the family is an enormous task. It involves changing the social function of the family and destroying private interest, as well as progressively creating new relations between men and women, and radically changing relations between parents and children. That's why it's interesting to note that Chinese revolutionaries do not consider the evolution of the family to be a simple consequence of social upheaval, but a necessary precondition of the revolution. They feel that women are naturally responsible for 'leading' the revolution in the family and that this is one of the fundamental tasks that women must undertake for humanity. Ton An-ming concluded; 'We can summarize the revolutionary committee's goals as follows: under the leadership of the party and of Chairman Mao, we must do everything possible to enable women to carry out fully their historical role.' Make no mistake! The Chinese don't need to win women over to the revolution, still less to neutralize them. They simply need to let women play out their historical role, for without them the revolution will be abortive.
What will the new Chinese women's movement be like? Judging by the example of Shawan's committees and Mao Tse-tung's attitudes towards the subject, it will be rooted in the recognition of the remarkable contribution that women have made to the revolution. We are as far away from Liu Shao-chi's paternalism as we are from that dominant tendency in the Third International to see women as a backward and manipulable mass, who have to be pushed into action.