One problem must be solved if we are to achieve equality between the sexes: housework must be transformed. I have been concerned, first of all, to trace how the fact that women began to participate in production played a decisive role in their emancipation, because I believe that this was the route actually taken by Chinese women towards their liberation. Women who have been confined to household tasks which keep them outside the mainstream of society will liberate themselves only by plunging straight into social production, as Ma Yu-yin said. But as long as it is the women who do the housework, this participation is in reality impossible. It's the same old vicious circle we know so well in Europe. Almost a century ago, Engels analysed it in very clear terms:
Only modern large-scale industry again threw open to her - and only to the proletarian woman at that - the avenue to social production; but in such a way that, when she fulfils her duties in the private service of her family, she remains excluded from public production and cannot earn anything; and when she wishes to take part in public industry and earn her living independently, she is not in a position to fulfil her family duties . . . The first premise for the emancipation of women is the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry; and . . . this again in demands that the quality possessed by the individual family of being the economic unit of society be abolished. [1]
One aspect of the contradiction which affects the vast majority of women is necessarily of prime importance - the root of the whole contradiction, if you like - and this is the aspect of women's social role that must be attacked first.
The women workers of Chao Yan and Suchow didn't wait for the problem of child care to be solved for example, before becoming involved in social production. Yet if this problem hadn't been adequately solved in time, these women would have found themselves in the only too familiar position of European women - doing two jobs every day.
Comrade Su Yin, who accompanied us throughout our trip, was in her fifties and had been a member of the Chinese Communist Party for about thirty years. She had been one of the original members responsible for organizing women. She told us that she was with us to help us study and understand the role of women in the Chinese revolution. 'The socialization of housework is a key to women's liberation she told us. 'Unless we achieve this socialization, equality between the sexes will remain formal - existing in law but not in reality - the antagonism between men and women will not be resolved and, in the last analysis, socialism will fail. So it really is going to become a major issue for us.'
I've always found it very instructive to listen to the official statements handed out by a truly naive bourgeois Establishment announcing that nowadays, the urban housewife spends the same average number of hours doing housework as the housewife of a hundred years ago. It's easy to believe it when you realize that a working-class woman with three children and 'not working' (as they say with magnificent hypocrisy) still spends about fourteen hours a day on housework. Regrettably, a hundred years ago the days contained only twenty-tour hours, as they still do in our time, and our great-grandmothers would have been hard put to spend more than fourteen hours on their housework and come out alive at the end of each week. And yet industrialization of the vast majority of production on a massive scale has had an undeniable and truly remarkable impact on housework.
Let's take the obvious example of the almost exclusively family produced goods of four or five generations ago: clothes, preserved food, bread, and even woven material in some places. All these have simply vanished as the products of a housewife's domestic duties. And what you don't make, you buy these days, by courtesy of industrial capitalism. More recently, with mass production of household appliances, like automatic washing machines, we have been freed from many of the other routine aspects of housework. But if capitalism has really abolished all this drudgery, what do housewives find to do all day long? How many times have you heard some man ask that question? The truth is that we don't do less, we just do different things differently and, when all's said and done, in worse conditions. It may be true that we don't have to go to the wash-house any more to scrub and beat our washing by hand. But on the other hand our great-grandmothers weren't confronted by the impossible task of organizing their day round a husband's shift work, the children's schoolday and the opening hours of shops and post offices. They didn't have to spend several hours each day travelling to and from supermarkets which, although admittedly less expensive, also happen to be miles away. They didn't spend whole afternoons being tossed, like a ping-pony ball, from one office to the next, from one specialist to the next, from one desk to the next, to fill in forms enabling their eldest child to go to summer camp, to enrol their youngest child at a school to get an inadequate rent rebate, to renew an identity card or to sort out national insurance, to find a place to live, to be refused accommodation, to visit another address and be told, 'Sorry, too late, it's already taken', to take a young child to the welfare clinic, to queue all day just to be told, 'Come back tomorrow.' Our great-grandmothers may not have had creches, but then the ones we have are so few and so pathetic they aren't worthy of the name. In the old days our great-grandmothers had their grandmothers nearby, if not in the same house. They had old friends in the neighbourhood to help out - theirs was a completely different life-style. The sociologists describe our lives in terms of 'the incrcasing mobility of the work force' and we really do live in a state of perpetual motion - changing cities and friends like we change shoes. We stay in one particular neighbourhood barely long enough to know it, let alone the people in it. Our parents live far away, too far to look after our children.
Years ago there may have been no running water, but when women went to the village wash-house at least they met other women and had a chance to discuss all manner of things important to them and to the village as a whole. Running water may have disposed of the chore, but at the same time a social link between women has been severed. Ever since, the labour of washday, done behind closed walls, has become 'invisible' and, socially speaking, non-existent.
Vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and washing machines - so what! You have to get into debt to buy them, and you'd need to be a technician to maintain and service them. So we take them to the 'expert'. 'Unfortunately,' the expert tells us, 'they don't make this model any more and there aren't any spare parts available.' The machine can't be mended, anyway. It's useless. Paul is good with machines, but he hasn't got time to fix it. But it seems we're in luck. The salesman graciously agrees to take it back. A worthless machine is suddenly revalued. We will get 50 francs for this scrap-metal vacuum cleaner, on the sole condition that we buy a new one for 250 francs. Mechanization on these lines is a two-edged weapon: on the one hand some jobs are made easier; but on the other hand it creates new ones. To be truly efficient, all kinds of labour-saving devices should be used collectively; no single family, and therefore no single woman, should bear the full responsibility for the new jobs of maintenance, repair and so on.
One successful and respectable Frenchwoman [2] made a startling discovery some years ago. Housework, she revealed, is like factory work. To do it properly you must have effective organization, sound financial support, job rationalization - in other words, everything required in the management of a small business. With skill and care, you might even show a profit! And the women who run this 'small business' are no longer servants to their household, but chairwomen! They will, of course, have worries, the author admits. After all, it's a well-known fact that no chairman is without worries. But think of the enormous satisfaction of getting all the work done in six hours while the poor narrow-minded creatures who haven't yet grasped the historical scope of their role still toil for six and a half hours, or even seven. And what does she do, the housewife-manager of our friend's imagination, with all the time she's saved? She goes to the hairdresser to have her hair set so that she can please a husband who most probably won't even notice. What a thrill!
In the quite distant past women spent long, boring days doing their family's washing. They would set aside a day for the window-cleaning, and one for scrubbing the floors. They'd have a day for jam-making and another for ironing. These days a woman is more likely to spend her time making beds, shopping, preparing a meal, washing up, ironing, doing the washing, again, cooking another meal, washing up again - a rota of household tasks, repeated daily. The pace of our lives has quickened. There are pauses, of course, the occasional idle moment. But that's only because housework can't be stockpiled. Socks can't be darned before they've got holes in them, dishes can't be washed before they're dirty. But even if we do have an hour or two of actual free time between the midday round of shops-lunch-dishes, and the afternoon round of kids-tea-fights-supper-bedtime, what can we do with that time? It's not long enough or definite enough for us to think of taking a job. It's too short a time even to go out, since home is probably miles from anywhere. As a result this hard-earned respite becomes a time of dreadful boredom, solitude and despair. It's then that you stand back and look at yourself--like a puppet, gesticulating in all directions but not actually moving in any of them. Do you live to work yourself to death, to bleed yourself white day after day, just to give support and sustenance to your husband so that he can sell his labour to pay for the food, clothes and home that you prepare, repair and maintain? You are given moments of rest and holidays with the family for no other reason than to keep you working next day, next month and next year. Your children are with you, in reality, so that they can become a new generation of workers. There are times when women would willingly turn their hands, in myth so tender and loving, into clenched fists.
No, Electrolux doesn't liberate women! Nor does the soap powder which washes whiter. And we, daughters of the Kenwood Chefette and Madame Solei of the agony column, know what we're talking about. Women won't be liberated until the function of the family in our society is itself destroyed. Among the oppressed classes the family exists to produce the workers of the future and to care for today's workers and keep them in good shape. Our children and our husbands are supposed to turn out as the bourgeoisie want them to. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie in a sense 'consume' our children and husbands - at least they consume their labour-power. So they require our husbands and children to be physically, intellectually, morally and politically oppressed.
If capitalism could, without jeopardizing its own existence, concentrate workers in large barracks, giving them the bare minimum for survival, and put all their children into orphanages, then maybe the condition of women would be modified. It might begin to look a bit more like the condition of men - but would that be liberation? Of course this is an absurd hypothesis, because the fluidity of with and the competition the work force imply that they must reproduce themselves privately, everyone having his own independent responsibility to meet the requirements of capitalist society as fully as possible and on all levels. Otherwise they face the threat of being rejected by the production process, and perishing.
No wonder the princes who govern us aren't very keen on discarding this family - from their point of view, it's a necessary machine that has more than proved itself over the years.
The socialization of housework necessarily implies the denial of the economic role of the family, and therefore of its traditional political role. This in turn makes the creation of new institutions to take over family functions like feeding, clothing, educating and relaxation an absolute priority. Destroying the family as an economic and political unit is a challenge to all revolutionaries, but ensuring that the useful functions of the family are still carried out is another matter altogether. Kollontai, a leading Bolshevik in the twenties, advocated (among other measures) the creation of a corps of workers who would take over the household chores that enslaved women. But who would then free these liberators from the drudgery? Kollontai has nothing to say about that. To abolish oppressive division of labour by the introduction of a new division of labour solves nothing. 'The individual household has passed its zenith. It is being replaced more and more by collective housekeeping. The working woman will sooner or later need to take care of her own dwelling no longer; in the communist society of tomorrow this work will be carried on by a special category of working women who will do nothing else.' [1] Do women protest at their household confinement? Don't they want to be the semi-skilled workers of the home any more? No matter! We'll create a specialized corps of workers (Kollontai says women workers!) who will do not only their own housework, but everyone else's as well. What a victory!
Socialism doesn't consist of higher pay for boring jobs, or of handing over the boring jobs to a small section of the workforce. Socialism is about the complete elimination of the repetitive and absurd aspect of work. And if it hasn't yet been eliminated in a certain kind of work, the answer isn't to hand over that work to a single battalion. The work should instead be distributed as widely as possible, so that, with everyone doing his or her bit, no one is enslaved.
It was a cool Thursday in December when we filmed the big weekly cleanup at the Shanghai workers' housing estate. Children of all ages, kitted out with brooms and dustpans, are sweeping paths, picking up leaves and litter (though there is very little litter because the Chinese are now a 'socially responsible' people). Two teams of retired workers are washing down staircases, other people are cleaning windows, while little groups potter about here and there, mending a damaged door or a leaking fountain. The whole scene is extraordinarily lively and busy. Some people arc taking advantage of the situation to continue a discussion with their neighbours or to teach one another new songs. This is unpaid work; it's voluntary and collective. No one is taken to court for refusing to participate. And yet if someone systematically avoids doing the work, or does it 'just to get it over with', he or she will always be confronted by a group of youngsters who will argue and criticize until they convince him or her of the importance of collective, voluntary work.
The Chinese way gives priority to the struggle against the traditional division of labour, without waiting for any preliminary technological progress. The narrow village lanes in the Xiao Wang people's commune zigzag towards a square where new buildings have been constructed - small, low buildings with whitewashed brick walls and slightly upturned roofs, vaguely reminiscent of pagodas. Each door leads to a flat. Each net has a mud floor and a wooden staircase leading from the kitchen to the bedrooms on the next level. The communal rooms open directly on to the square. On the day we were there people were eating their meals on their doorsteps and chatting to one another. A wide-brimmed straw hat was hanging on one white wall, a dark wooden flour sifter on another. The atmosphere was simple and warm.
There was hardly any evidence that work here was mechanized. As in most villages, there was electricity in all the houses, but no running water and no mains drainage. A smiling young woman offered us tea in her house. Neighbours dropped in, greeted us with a nod and joined the conversation. Our questions were all concerned with the central difficulty of solving the problem of housework in conditions of such rudimentary comfort. The girl told us: 'We must try to develop mechanization in the area of domestic work. The peasants in this district are working on it, but we mustn't wait until this mechanization has been achieved to release women from their traditional duties. Up to fifteen years ago, there was no electricity, no mechanical aids to housework and no crèches. In order to create farming co-operatives, the peasants found ways of compensating for their lack of means. Small children were taken to the fields, where the older children looked after them while copying characters to help them to learn to write. The old people would take charge of collective services for the village, running the clothing repair workshops and the laundry, for example. At harvest time they would prepare the communal meals. This custom has survived and to this day, when there is a big job to be done, communal meals are still prepared.
Housework is shared equally among all members of the family, so that everyone - husband, wife, grandparents and children - participates in running the house. When a man not only does the washing-up but prepares meals, scrubs the floor, sews on buttons, dresses the youngest child's cuts and bruises, and does all that regularly throughout the week, not just on Sundays, he is no longer a husband in the accepted sense of the word.
The dramatic change in the status of the village women has its roots in the struggle for the socialization of the land. It was during this struggle, as we have seen, that the women gained recognition as a political force. It's an easy matter to demand servility from a submissive, silent wife who has no experience of the world beyond her limited family horizons. Try refusing to scrub the floor if your wife has spoken up before the entire village, if she has had the courage to stand up to wealthy peasants, if she has struggled to close the ranks of the peasants, if she has organized teams of women who tomorrow will join the men in irrigating the fields! Refusing to scrub the floors if your wife has enjoyed the support and applause of a whole village is another matter altogether!
The emergence of women as a political force brought with it a change in their household status. And the Xiao Wang women have ways of convincing a recalcitrant man that this change has come. As a first step, his wife will try to persuade him by discussing the issues. If that fails she will readily call on the whole family for support. If that has no effect, the women's committee of the village will visit him en masse and insist, politely but firmly, that he must remember the difference between socialism and feudalism. In the unlikely event of the man still clinging stubbornly to his attitudes after all this, the whole village may support the woman with a campaign of mass criticism - and, as a last resort, she can always divorce him.
The young woman concluded: 'It was mainly taking part in the class struggle that made us understand the origins of our enslavement, and enabled us to change our situation as women.'
We had met many women veterans of the revolution before this visit, and had listened to their stories. These women all seemed to suggest the truth that this peasant woman had now spelled out. Because Chinese women rose against feudalism and against the class enemy, they became more aware of their specific oppression. Those peasant women who had taken part in the struggle against the Japanese invasion saw the necessity of destroying the old family structure before victory could be achieved. Feudal traditions had barred women from working in the fields and denied them any possibility of economic independence in the social system as it then was. During the war against Japan many of the able-bodied men left the fields to enrol in the People's Army. If women had not taken over agricultural production in the liberated areas, the people in those areas could not have survived and become self-sufficient. But that takeover was itself a massive blow against feudalism, and without it the revolution would have failed. It's often in the struggle for the recognition of their right to make the revolution that women will gauge the extent of their specific oppression. In the same way, the mass of peasant women who fought for the socialization of agriculture gained essential social experience in this struggle, and therefore widened their horizons. They are bound to see traditional housework even more clearly as a tight and restricting yoke standing in total opposition to the revolutionary role that they want to play and actually are playing. We were often told of working-class or peasant women who would be criticized by husband or family for wanting to go out to work. 'It's ludicrous, there's plenty of money coming in, why on earth do you want to go out to work?' 'To make the revolution!'
The first necessary step towards the development of a clear idea of our particular oppression is not always obvious. Why was it that in capitalist countries a large minority of women had to go into industry, or other areas of social involvement, before women's movements could begin? It was doubtless because the experience of social labour suddenly enlarged the female perspective, which had until then been confined to the insoluble problem of the family. For the first time ever, a women's situation did not appear to be the inescapable will of God, but the inevitable consequence of an inhuman social structure, transforming men into production-machines, and women into a maintenance crew for these machines. As a result of their entry into social production, women learnt who was responsible and whose interests were really served by their domestic slavery. It was a lesson they could never forget.
We found again and again that socialization - in the sense of a transformation of relations between people - is not conceived by the Chinese as a stage which follows the development of mechanization.
The two are undertaken together and progress together. We saw how this is happening with the women workers in small neighbourhood factories like Chao Yan. The same approach applies equally to housework. 'We mustn't wait until mechanization has developed before starting on socialization,' a young woman explained to us. This brought to mind what Trotsky had said while he was still one of the leaders of the Soviet Union: 'We need socialist accumulation; only under this condition will we be able to liberate the family [and therefore women] from all the functions and cares which now oppress and destroy it.' [2] This idea came to be used as the standard justification for not finding the necessary solution to the problem of housework. Meanwhile women continued to do their two jobs a day and to suffer more or less overt contempt from society, precisely because they were still 'housewives'. In fact this amounted to making the emancipation of women dependent on the technical progress of an industry in which they played particularly minor roles, and not at all on their own labour. Basically it fell to technicians to liberate or not to liberate women from domestic oppression.
Trotsky's position on this was hardly unique. At that time such sanctification of economic development through technology was common all over the Soviet Union and in all spheres. Stalin viewed the problem of agriculture, for example, in much the same way. The argument goes like this: the socialization of agriculture depends on mechanization, which depends on the building of tractors, which depends on the development of heavy industry. Meanwhile the peasantry, the mass of small landowners who aspire only to become kulaks, must be regarded with the greatest suspicion. Peasant crops can be requisitioned, and peasant labour diverted to keep industry going. And when the day of the long-awaited leap forward in productive forces finally arrives, tractors are simply brought to the fields chosen by decree to become state property or Kolkhoz (collective farm) property, without further ado. Peasants become farm labourers overnight and collectivization is achieved.
China's first step towards collectivization was to set up simple I agricultural co-operatives. This preceded mechanization. A cart, often hand-drawn, was a highly valued production tool. Before all else, the human workforce, its energy and enthusiasm, was socialized. Mechanization has developed from this basis and its progress is evident. We saw a little remote-controlled cultivator ploughing the side of a very steep hill, narrowly terraced like a staircase. When the cultivator reached the end of one terrace it would rear up almost vertically, go down one step and plough the lower level in the opposite direction. A few dozen meters above it, a peasant leaning against a tree operated the machine from a simple control box.
When the ideological aspect of the revolution, the transformation of work relationships and political consciousness are given their proper priority, technological progress is sure to correspond to the needs of the masses, and to help to put socialism into practice.
Chen Yung Kuei, the peasant leader of the Tachai commune and a well-known figure in China, writes about the experience of his brigade:
Only by following Chairman Mao's teaching of using the ideological revolutionisation to lead agricultural mechanisation forward can we guarantee that mechanisation will advance along the socialist road . . . Some people think it [mechanisation] is aimed only at reducing labour intensity and providing more leisure, and they do not understand that mechanisation is the Party's fundamental line in the rural areas for adhering to socialism and defeating capitalism. Others regard agricultural mechanisation as an ordinary measure to save labour and increase production. They fail to see it from a higher level and regard it as a measure which consolidates the worker peasant alliance, promotes socialist industrialisation and reduces the differences between workers and peasants. They also do not understand that unless we implement Chairman Mao's revolutionary line mechanisation will not necessarily bring about socialism and it may even lead to capitalism . . . Therefore to carry out farm mechanisation it is necessary to firmly grasp ideological revolutionisation and always carry out as a matter of primary importance the raising of the masses' ideological level and their understanding between the two lines. Otherwise, farm mechanisation will go astray... Mechanisation is by no means merely a technical problem. [3]
The marked similarity in attitudes towards agricultural work and housework (both in China and in the Soviet Union, though in very different ways) can be readily explained. Both agriculture and housework require the transformation into a social industry of a work process based onthe family unit and strongly tied to small holdings of private property -- the peasant's plot or the housewife's house. It's clear that, as Mao has said, this transformation can't be achieved without those concerned freely expressing their desire for it. But even given that desire, the transformation is bound to fail where archaic means of production are destroyed only to be replaced by structures in which the masses are denied all power.
Many of the poor peasants who had willingly accepted the collectivizalion of the land and the creation of the kolkhoz in the Soviet Union joined the opposition to the Soviet regime when they realized that they would have no say in the running of their collective farm. Technicians and apparatchiks, denying the peasants any of their specialized knowledge, made all the important decisions about what was to be produced, how, when and in what quantity - with catastrophic results for agricultural production.
The close similarity between the problems presented by small agrarian property and those presented by domestic work enabled Chinese women to make the breakthrough which allowed them to criticize vigorously the Liuist policy of restoring capitalism in rural areas. In my opinion this is one of the fundamental reason why women could be in the vanguard in the sort of struggles we had been told of in Xiao Wang - where the connection between the struggles and the specific oppression of women might not have been immediately discernible.
Liu Shao-chi's policy made explicit the following aims: setting up a free market where prices would be fixed according to capitalist laws of supply and demand; extending individual plots (which could of course be inherited); creating individual enterprises fully responsible for their own profits and losses; and using the family to establish production norms. This policy was called Zhen-Zui-Yi-Bao, an abbreviation for the various measures. (Along with this policy went a call for the 'four freedoms -- freedom to practice usury, freedom to hire farmers, freedom to buy and sell land and free enterprise.) Each of the measures can be seen at once in terms of the oppression of women, especially the one that was the sine qua non of all the others: the recognition of the family as a unit of production, a family with an urge to become wealthy, since it would reap the benefit of its own profits, but threatened by ruin since it would equally bear the responsibility for its own losses.
Liu Shao-chi proposed exactly this sort of family life, with its burden of feminine 'curses': the duty of motherhood - to produce heirs who will increase the workforce; the slavery of housework - so that the husband can devote all his energy to farming; the prison of the home; the degradation of being an eternally submissive 'minor'; the race to catch a husband; the right to keep her opinions to herself. This was the 'paradise' promised by the 'four freedoms'. This is no doubt one of the root causes of women's opposition to Liu. But in this case, too, opposition couldn't crystallize and strengthen until the women had another solution or were able to envisage the possibility of another solution. Such knowledge or vision allowed them to relegate the 'blessings' of private property to the status of museum pieces.
During the years following the revolution in the Soviet Union an intense debate took place among architects: 1 October was the foundation-stone of a new world in which everything still needed to be done. Soviet Russia was a town-planner's dream. The problem, of course, was not how to build cosy semis for the new world, but how to collectivize housing. There were bitter clashes between differing schools of thought. One of them, following Sabsovich, typified the search for new approaches. Their theory was simple: material structures, acting as 'social condensers' would help to build up new relationships between people. It was, therefore, necessary to build to fit this function. The most extreme project of these town-planners was to construct communal buildings designed for several thousand inhabitants, consisting of units divided into three parts. One part was to be reserved for children, another for men and the third for women. Heated corridors would connect the different sections. Kuzmin had calculated to the nearest second how long each of the necessary actions of daily life should take - all of them at breakneck speed! Daily life was organized as if the people were living in the archetypal capitalist factory: rationalized, standardized, Taylorized and stupefying. In reality, this sort of thinking revealed a thorough understanding of the family's traditional role in maintaining and reproducing the workforce, and the only advance it represented was that the State should take over this formerly individual function. [4]
The main reason for abolishing women's domestic work was the need for profit. Sabsovich stated in one of his pamphlets that thirty-six million work-hours were spent daily on preparing family meals. He commented: 'It would take only six million hours to do the same work in kitchens-cum-factories, which would then deliver the hot meal in thermos-flasks to the various canteens.' [5] We have nothing against collective kitchens or canteens. Welcome as they are, it is none the less particularly distressing when the pressure to abolish women's domestic burdens arises only from a concern with profitability. At least Soviet women could be thankful that technological means were available to do domestic work faster than they could. Otherwise plenty of feminists would doubtless have advised them to stay at home.
The 'concentration camp' dreams of the town-planners were to have a strange fate. Kopp reports: 'Supercollectivization was a utopia, even a dangerous utopia. It went against the instincts of the population, and, in fact, every communal house built during that period was rapidly converted (by means sometimes rough and ready) into something that more closely resembled a home, in the usual sense of the word.' [6] This wasn't because the Soviet people opposed collective services in principle - indeed the local and national press of the time was full of demands from all over the place for more crèches, restaurants and youth centres - but because of the rationale behind the homes they had been forced to live in. The buildings were an artificial and authoritarian attempt to revolutionize social relations outside any mass initiative, rather than frameworks for the expression of new social relations arising from the revolution in production and the struggle of the people. The social relations imagined by bureaucratic planners had nothing to do with the reality of revolutionary change and revealed great contempt for the masses, who were seen as malleable dough which had merely to be poured into a mould to take on the desired shape.
And what was the outcome of the great debate on housing which lasted several years? Vast dormitory-towns, Stalin-allee style, exactly like the huge Municipal workers' estates familiar to us in the West. And those who were able to live there were the lucky ones, because the housing crisis has never been solved and millions of people have continued to survive as best they can in wooden shacks, deserted warehouses or, as Yvon mentions,[7] in the Moscow underground while it was still under construction. The bureaucratic housing projects had other shortcomings: they couldn't be built without modern materials like concrete, glass and steel, and modern techniques, such as the systematic use of cranes. Many of the planned buildings simply couldn't be built in prewar Russia. Some could be realized only as avant-garde experiments, reserved for a minority. The housing projects could in no way present a realistic solution to the problems of the millions of homeless and badly housed people.
Anyone who expects to find a new architecture in China, a new world translated into stone, will probably be very disappointed at first. On the day we arrived we saw many recently built blocks of flats from the bus taking us the 30 kilometers from the airport to Peking. These blocks were four or five storeys high and made out of rough, uncovered bricks, which made them look strangely unfinished to us. It hadn't rained in Peking for a long time and in the midday sun the bare earth pavements and the walls of the houses looked as though they'd been painted a matching burnt-sand colour. Against this background the numerous trees appeared as large green patches and their cool shade shimmered in the light. There was no sign of new architectural forms.
The first priority after the liberation was to give everyone a roof over his head. And that was no easy matter in a country where millions of peasants owned nothing but the rags on their own backs (sometimes not even that since two peasants would often take turns wearing a single sackcloth coat as an elderly worker, whose face bore the marks of past hardships, was telling the pupils in a Nanking primary school we visited) and it must be remembered, too, that China had just emerged from thirty years of war which had left behind a trail of ruin and destruction.
At the time of the agrarian reforms all existing houses were divided into sections and distributed as a matter of course to the homeless. William Hinton gives a very precise and detailed account of this.[8] We saw some of the rural manor houses which had formerly belonged to wealthy landowners and were now lived in by several households (quite often related). Such redistribution of property also took place in the cities. Houses which had belonged to class enemies were naturally requisitioned, and the remnants of the national bourgeoisie were also forced to give up rooms to workers. Of course these were extreme measures designed to cope with an emergency. The real need was for more buildings. However this period did have some lasting and positive effects. Families who lived together had to share kitchens, lavatories and water supplies, and this helped to collectivize household tasks, or at least to undermine the mystification of them as private tasks.
The next problem was whether it was wiser to postpone the building of large blocks of flats until modern materials were available (which could mean a long wait, given the low level of industrial development at the time of the liberation), or to start immediately on building a large number of small units by mobilizing the people. Considerable aid from the Soviet Union made it possible to rebuild quite a few large blocks, especially public buildings like assembly halls, hospitals, universities and department stores. But the problem was really solved by adopting the second alternative. To build brick houses with trowels requires no great technological development, only a sufficient quantity of bricks and mortar. The brick kilns were working to full capacity, but even that wasn't enough, so everyone took to firing bricks in their spare time.
In the Ling district we saw children packing a kind of damp earth into iron moulds which looked just like gadgets for making toasted sandwiches, and placing the moulds in rows by the roadside to dry in the sun. A little further on a peasant was putting them into an oven like buns. Countless blocks of houses have been built in this way, with next to no investment, and relying on the skill and ingenuity of the masses. These housing blocks usually have one shared kitchen to every two or three flats. There are mains supplies of electricity and water and town gas in the kitchens.
As construction costs are low, so are rents: a flat costs, on average, 5 yuans a month (the average worker's wage is 70 yuans a month). Water, gas, electricity, basic furniture, maintenance and repairs (such as painting and replacement of window-panes) are all included in the rent.
The Taching oilfield, the largest in China, was pasture only ten years ago. Today it is peopled by over forty thousand labourers, technicians and their families. First of all I must point out that we weren't able to visit Taching; I believe that, with the exception of Anna Louise Strong, [1] no foreigner has ever visited it. But it's important to mention it here because Taching is the Tachai of industry, i.e., an avant-garde production unit which serves as a model for the whole of China. If you really want to understand the Chinese revolution you must know about not only the average level of development, but also the advanced experiments which suggest the ways in which the society might progress. And although it is relatively well documented, many people interested in China still know too little about the Taching experiment.
Construction policy in China is not only to mobilize the masses to compensate for the lack of technological development but also, and more fundamentally, to forge a close link between the problems of urban life and the problems of society as a whole. But this link could be forged only if workers and peasants were admitted to the field of architecture, which was formerly the province of specialists. Only the mass of workers and peasants could be trusted to orient the building industry towards the needs of the people and of the revolution.
Taching is a typical example. When the first workers and technicians arrived there in 1959 they found only shepherds' mud huts to live in. Since there were no towns and very few villages almost everything had to be started from scratch. With the shepherds' help, the Taching pioneers used the traditional materials and techniques of the region to build new cobwork houses (their insulating properties are such that they are cool in summer and warm in winter). Some people thought that these houses should be only temporary dwellings, and that some grandiose scheme, on a par with the oilfields themselves, should eventually be put into effect.. They argued that no one could seriously expect the cream of China's labourers and technicians - some of the most advanced in the world - to live in mud huts like shepherds. Such a situation was so ridiculous as to be inconceivable. A group of specialists suggested that a vast oil city should be built, concentrating all the accommodation and services necessary for the workers and their families' daily needs.
The great majority of the Taching population strongly opposed the project on several grounds. The oil wells were scattered over a radius of about 20 kilometers. One giant oil city would have introduced the problem of time wasted in travelling to and from work, when the point was to keep travelling time to a minimum. The project would have necessitated a vast investment while there were cheap materials on the spot which had already proved their value. Finally, and above all, such a city would widen the gap between town and country instead of closing it. If the oil people lived in their own special city they would be cut off from the peasants and shepherds in the area. That would be tantamount to ignoring the revolutionary alliance between workers and peasants. And then, what would the Taching workers eat? Surely not oil? Settling the Taching workers in a city would merely confirm their total dependence on food imports from the agricultural regions, and actually create the economic imbalance typical of capitalism.
For all those reasons, the grandiose scheme' was rejected. The workers elected an 'architecture committee', made up of architects, labourers, technicians, shepherds, housewives and party cadres, who put forward other proposals. This committee embarked on a searching inquiry. All the people of Taching were asked what they wanted and all the criticisms levelled against the cobwork houses were collected. The committee worked in close association with the peasants, trying to understand better the advantages and disadvantages of traditional houses. Eventually they suggested a new model house in improved cobwork. This new project was then fully discussed by the people, altered again and finally put into practice. Between 1962 and 1966 a million square meters of living area were built by this method, which was also used to build crèches, schools, welfare clinics, offices, workshops, shops, cinemas and public buildings. Only the refinery, the central hospital and the Oil Research institute were built in conventional materials (concrete and steel) because they were too large and too tall to be made from mud.
At the request of the women the houses were planned to accommodate several families (between three and five each). Each house was designed to have communal areas (one large kitchen and a common living room) and private areas, so that each family would still have their own flat. The people insisted that the outside of the houses should look bright and attractive. The lower part of the walls' was to be kept dark brown, the colour of rough cobwork, and the upper area was to be painted ochre. Doors and windows, as well as the wooden cornice supporting the thatched roof, would be painted in a bright contrasting colour, usually bright blue.
The houses were sited to facilitate decentralization. The Taching community was divided into several districts, often quite far apart, but in such a way that homes would be near work places. Because the building techniques were simple, the necessary materials were available free. The workers built their own houses with the help of neighbours, and consequently the accommodation was rent-free. The fuller exploitation of oil resources has made available the natural gas contained in the oil. The gas is sent all over China in tankers and is carried to all Taching's houses in special pipes, giving them free heating.
No matter how well they've been planned, houses are only houses, and can't create life where there hasn't been any. The reason why today the districts make up living communities, and Taching as a whole is a model for all China, is that there is, probably for the first time in history, a balance between industry, agriculture, cultural activities and nature. Only mankind could have achieved this: in Taching, however, mankind has been predominantly womankind.
Taching's various oil wells, pipelines and refineries take up only a very small proportion of the whole vast area. In 1962 the rest of Taching consisted mostly of extensive pasture land and a considerable amount of fallow land. In the spring of that year, a series of unprecedented natural disasters had resulted in a bad harvest all over China. Grain had to be rationed. Many wives of workers newly settled in Taching decided to take up spades and pick-axes to help to improve their diet. They started tilling the earth to plant vegetable gardens near their homes.
But Mother Shui, a fifty-year-old whose husband and three children worked in the oil wells, wasn't satisfied with that. She thought that oil workers' wives shouldn't be content simply to look after a few vegetable gardens, even if these gardens did belong to everybody; that was only a makeshift solution in view of the temporary difficulties China was going through. Her plan was altogether different. 'The women should transform Taching, an industrial area, into a vast industrial and agricultural complex, and to achieve this, we should set out to conquer the fallow lands.' She convinced four of her women neighbours that she was right.
After consulting the local peasants they chose a few fallow fields about 30 kilometers away from their homes. They had to overcome one immediate problem. At that time there were no crèches or child-minding facilities available and they had young children. 'Never mind. We'll take the children along with us, and decide later how to organize the necessary services.' And so one morning they set out with their five spades, some tinned food, a tent, saucepans, the children and a few kilograms of seed. They pitched their tent in a field half an hour's walk from a village. The first evening a terrible wind got up and they spent the whole night hanging on to the tent. In spite of that, the following morning they started digging in the field. In three days they had dug five mous of land. On the fourth day, at daybreak, they saw about twenty women and thirteen children coming towards them. The newcomers said to Mother Shui, 'We were worried about you the other night during that high wind. We thought, "Those women and children are defying the wind and the cold, all for the good of the community, while we're tucked up in bed in the warm. They're transforming the world, and what they're doing we can do as well." So here we are!' Mother Shui was so happy she was speechless. Very soon the community was organized. One woman looked after the kids while the others dug the earth. They cleared and sowed 16 more mous, which yielded a crop of 1925 kilograms of soya beans. And so Taching's first 'farming brigade' was born.
The following year a village with two hundred houses was built on the brigade's work site. Mother Shui set out to clear more new land, taking with her about a hundred women. This time the women took time to organize themselves. They built collective cobwork houses (like those described above) for themselves and the families who had followed. Their first job was to organize a crèche and a school. The problem of the crèche was easily solved. They collected playpens and cots in one of the cobwork houses, fixed up a lovely garden area and placed the children in the care of volunteer grandfathers and grandmothers. A primary-school teacher set up the school with the help of other women. Some classes, such as those on the history of the revolution, were taught by men and women who had taken part in the great struggles of the past but were not qualified teachers. The women also insisted that boys as well as girls should get some basic training in collective housework. They set up sewing and shoe-repair classes. A larger workforce was available for farm labour and that year the first crop was harvested from an area of over 150 hectares.
The inventiveness of the Taching women didn't stop there. They organized a people's canteen, collective workshops for household tasks, and, with the newly arrived doctors, a decentralized health-care network. (In Taching every village, no matter how small, has a clinic where minor surgery can be performed.) Later on small factories were built to make various useful objects, ranging from radios, shoes, saucepans, furniture and spare parts to machines like grain threshers. Youngsters, old people and students at the Oil Institute were all drawn in by the extraordinary tide of activities the women had set in motion. Even though less than a third of them would have been considered capable of playing an active part at first, all of them, except the sick, wanted to join in the collective work. This may be one of the most obvious indications of the women's achievement - they managed to expand the scope of their activities from their start in food production to the point when men and women were integrated equally into all areas of the collective effort.
Another feature of Taching life deserves attention. Most collective services are free, such as haircutting, meal preparation, cinemas and transport. The clothes shops and shoemenders' charge for the materials used (like cloth, thread and buttons), but the labour is free. The women themselves are responsible for these things being free. As I pointed out when discussing the development of neighbourhood factories, women didn't go to work to increase their own incomes, but to play a powerful collective economic and political role which, in transforming their specific condition, would transform the lives of everyone else as well. Their aim was to take one more step towards the communist ideal of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'. When Mother Shui created the very first farm brigade, the women who participated in it adopted the system of wage determination by work points. This system took into account each person's capabilities. The women who earned the most points decided to give part of their own earnings to women who had material difficulties, such as children with delicate health, judging their need to be greater.
Was it pure chance that women were the first to put such egalitarianisn into practice? Or could it be that women down the ages have evaluated their work not by the profit they derived from it, since they were never paid, but by the usefulness of their work to their families? Or could it be that women have always had a communistic tendency to give priority to the social utility of their work? Whatever the reason, Anna Louise Strong reached this same conclusion in her discussion of the women of Taching, including Mother Shui, when she wrote:
This unpaid work in Taching is not very different from what women's work has always been. Women have always worked to supplement the family income in occupations that couldn't be cost-evaluated. Nor is it very different from the commune of the future, where tasks will be carried out according to each person's abilities and each person will be remunerated according to his or her needs.[2]
We seem to be touching here on what is nowadays called 'multi-faceted feminine specificity'. Mao Tse-tung issued the directive 'Learn in the school of Taching', in which he specifies: '. . . conditions permitting, the workers must take part in farm labour as is done Taching's oilfields.' This shows that, having studied the Taching women's experiment, the Chinese Communist Party fully understood the importance it had for the future of the economy and for the progress of communism. Taching is a model because the new form of social organization there integrates town and country by combining the advantages of both. This can be achieved only if all areas of production are collectivized, especially domestic production that is to say the condition of women must be transformed.
In urban neighbourhoods as well as in the villages, the 'people's restaurant' is often the most important communal building, and usually the oldest one, because the provision of meals is generally the first domestic task to be collectivized. Taking away from women sole responsibility for meals is an obvious and important step towards liberating them from housework.
Equally significant factors in the setting-up of communal restaurants are the clearly recognizable public usefulness of such establishments, and the fact that all you need is a few large halls.
After visiting a textile factory in Peking we were taken to the restaurant on a housing-estate near the factory. (The factory also had its own canteen, which was open to the workers, their families and friends.) This restaurant was a large high-ceilinged room. When meals were over it became the district's entertainment centre, where people would give performances after their day's work. It was midday and the chopsticks clinked on the crockery. The diners in the restaurant were commenting noisily on a radio news broadcast while they ate. Outside, the squeaky voice of a little girl mingled with the sounds of metalworking in a neighbouring workshop, but once through the door, we were cut off from these street noises. A couple who worked nearby were having a meal with their two daughters. A little old lady was chatting with the young people at her table. A dozen children, between six and eight years old, were eating quietly by themselves. In one corner long serving hatches separated the dining area from the kitchen. People queued there to buy their meals, then went to eat them at one of the long tables in the hall. Some people would buy food to take home in metal containers and eat it with their families. Next to us two tiny children, whose chins barely reached the edge of the serving-hatch, asked for something to eat. The waitress spoke kindly to them and handed them plates, which they took to a table where a man had been eating alone. He smiled at them, and pushed a bowl aside to make room for them. The children started talking to him. He listened attentively, nodding his head, and helped the youngest remove the skin from his fish. Their meal over, the children picked up the man's dishes along with their own bowls and chopsticks and took them to another serving-hatch. The man thanked them and they ran out to the yard, back to their games and the light. They weren't his children, nor were they related to him. They hadn't been deserted, they were simply eating by themselves. And naturally, anyone older than them would have felt a responsibility to keep an eye on them as if they were his or her own children.
Restaurants, we were told, are open every day and for every meal. The restaurant also provides full 'mess-tins' to take away, for anyone who has to travel, for his or her work, or for any other reason. The running of restaurants is generally co-ordinated under the triple direction of the cooks, the consumers and the administrators of the city's other collective services. Restaurants have often been organized by the former housewives of the district and they still look after the day-to-day running of them. Because as there are collective kitchens all over the country the importance of private kitchens has been considerably diminished. In any case, since household kitchens are usually shared by two or three families, they can no longer be described as private. In the houses on this estate there was one kitchen to each floor - one for every two flats. The cooking utensils were used communally and frequently the families had arranged to take turns cooking for everybody. On the day of our visit a grandfather and his granddaughter were preparing a meal for two families.
Other collective services like those set up in Taching were open to us for lengthy visits, especially in Shanghai. Their main feature is that women have set them up themselves: This means that both their organization and their development are closely bound up with the women's will to destroy the privatized, familial aspect of household tasks.
In the midst of groups of multi-storey houses stood small newly built single-storey buildings round which the daily life of the district revolved. Their doors were open on to the streets, and you could hear the noise of machines and conversation. People were going in and out, carrying packages. In front of one such building a bicycle with a sidecar stopped for the driver to deliver quite a few rolls of fabric. Clothes were being cleaned and mended in this workshop. The workers would go round the flats in the morning and collect anything that needed mending - torn shirts, socks with holes, trousers that had come unstitched, anything with buttons missing or frayed collars, slippers to mend, clothes to take in or up. Back in the workshop they set to work. One man was sewing on a patch, then a button; a woman was stitching a hem; two sewing-machines placed face to face were working on something with a large floral pattern of - probably an eiderdown. It often takes a day or less to mend and return all the clothes that come in in the morning. And it costs their owners hardly more than the price of the thread and material.
There are services of this kind for shoe-mending, laundry, ironing, respringing mattresses and making clothes to measure. They have two very important qualities: they are meant to be extensively used by the masses, and are therefore in the heart of the housing-estates (for maximum effectiveness), they are also very cheap. There are also workshops which undertake small repairs on utensils and furniture - mending holes in pans and saucepans, sharpening scissors and knives, fixing a damaged door on a wardrobe or a window that's sticking. There are also cleaning services, which clean flats out regularly and at very low cost, even given a worker's budget.
The teams of workers who run these service workshops have, more often than not, been set up by women, but they don't involve only former housewives. Most importantly, retired workers in good health can continue to perform socially useful activities in these shops. This is one of the ways in which old people are integrated into society. Others, people who are still working, often spend some time in these shops as well. They can put in six hours a day, or sometimes as little as three or four hours. This enables people, in poor health and also youngsters outside school hours, to participate, and gives all workers enough time for extra-mural activities. Sometimes these are 'artistic' activities - such as setting up amateur theatrical groups or choirs. Sometimes people may continue their education or learn a new trade - for example a housewife might train to become a 'barefoot doctor' on her housing-estate.
The introduction of more and better machines into the collective workshops already established is a constant preoccupation of workers and political cadres. The workshops, like any other factory, have small innovation teams, made up of workers and technicians, who try to develop new mechanical processes and to find ways of simplifying the work. In one place they were working to perfect a rapid and economical system for drying clothes. In another they were working on a new machine to comb out the stuffing for mattresses. Somewhere else the team is trying to make a small darning-machine. All these teams are linked to consumer-goods factories to study jointly different ways of meeting the needs of the people. While mechanization is not a necessary precondition for the socialization of' productive work, it is a vital means of maintaining it.
The prices for the collective services are very low, so the workers are paid out of the municipal funds for their area. The State will subsidize these wages if necessary, but where the municipality is rich enough it alone pays the wages. These are relatively low in the service workshops (about 30 yuans a month), but the working day is often much shorter than in other kinds of factories, and these workers are entitled to free medical treatment, like all other groups.
While collective workshops are changing the character of the districts, they are also and more profoundly altering the relationships among the people of the districts - first and foremost the relationships that women are involved in. Increasing collectization of housework has made it more and more obvious that the idea of housework as a family-based activity is only a product of a particular (and temporary) social organization that requires individual families to bear the brunt of the responsibility for household work, which has always been just another kind of production. When you've shared the task of darning a whole community's socks with a group of other men and women, you begin to understand why such work was previously servile and inglorious. It was universally scorned and we women were enslaved by it because its useful and necessary character was not socially recognized. The attitudes of the old Chinese society to many jobs persist in the West. All manual work is held in contempt, and so, by associations, are all those who do it. But such contemptuousness reaches its most extreme and purest form when the work that is done is to maintain house and family.
In the West housework isn't just scorned - it's actually negated. Women, we are told, don't work, they only 'keep themselves occupied'. One of the essential qualities of the Chinese housework collectives is the instructive role they play vis-à-vis young people and men. Their very existence has made tangible and inescapable what women in the West have rightly called 'invisible work'. The fact that Chinese men and young people can no longer ignore housework and, indeed, recognize its importance is evidenced by the level of their voluntary spare-time participation in workshop activities and in the collective building of new workshops.
Collectivization has reestablished housework as socially useful labour and, by the same token, those responsible for it have become full citizens as well. Socialization transforms and enriches the lives of former housewives. The district teams, organized and functioning just like any other production unit, participate fully in every area of political life. They carry on debates on the international situation and discussions on government policy, the major issues concerned with the building of socialism and the role of women in the revolution. There is no aspect of Chinese society from which former housewives can be excluded.
Recently the study of Marxism-Leninism has engendered a widespread and powerful movement. Housewives in their fifties, who had had hardly any education, told us, not without pride, that they were currently studying Materialism and Empirio-criticism - hardly Lenin's most accessible work.
The teams are also the prime movers in neighbourhood cultural life. China is full of amateur theatre groups, many of them started by former housewives. They put on shows for local people, perform in factories for other workers or act as hosts in their own neighbourhoods to visiting amateur troupes, who may come many miles to perform in a play or in one of the acrobatic displays that the Chinese love so much.
The transformation of retail trade has been a very important factor in freeing women from the burdens of domesticity. Small-scale trade was not abolished after the liberation. Small shopkeepers and traders were asked to regroup into distribution co-operatives, which gradually came under the ownership and control of the collectives - just as had happened with peasants and artisans. Former shopkeepers continued working in their shops, the only obvious difference being that the State now fixed the retail price of goods. Nowadays, of course, there are state department stores with different counters handling a number of different commercial items. But small local shops and travelling markets - all forms of decentralized trading, in fact - have also been developed. These help to maintain close links with consumers. Prices are kept the same in local shops as in the large department stores, and local shops sell all the daily necessities. The Cultural Revolution brought new changes in its wake. The accent is now on the link between production and distribution, and it's up to the sales assistants to match up consumer needs and factory production. They visit their customers regularly to ask their views. Are they satisfied with the quality of such and such a product? Does it work well? Is it easy to use? Is it cheap enough? What are its faults? Have they got any suggestions? The sales assistants take this information to the various production units concerned and together they investigate ways of better satisfying the people's needs. Once a year every sales assistant spends about a month training at the factories where the goods he or she sells are manufactured. This facilitates close political links through China between factory workers, peasants and 'trade workers' (as the Chinese call them). It also helps sales assistants to understand the amount and nature of the labour involved in producing the goods they handle everyday. A young salesman told us that after working in an agricultural commune he realized exactly how valuable the vegetables he sold were. From then on he took special care to keep them fresh handling them with extra care and even devising a system of ventilated trays to protect them from the damp. He explained that since he had seen how the peasants had to struggle against drought and floods, working hard and selflessly to provide good-quality food for the people, he felt it his duty to ensure that nothing was wasted and that the food stayed fresh. He said that quality, economy and dedication were the lessons he had learnt from his peasant co-workers.
A good knowledge of the goods you are selling also helps in repairing them.
Selling and repair work are therefore increasingly becoming two aspects of a single job. The attitude of one young woman who sold alarm clocks in a department store is typical of the new sales assistants. She felt that she was failing in her work if she knew nothing about the clocks except their prices, so she made a tremendous effort to find out about how they worked, having spent some time working in the factory that made them. Now she never sells an alarm clock without insisting that if it stops as a result of an accident or a manufacturing fault, she will personally repair it. If customers offer to pay her for her repair work, she simply replies that, as a 'saleswoman of the new society', repairs are part of the work for which she is already paid. She comments: 'Before, I didn't know anything about mechanics and this prevented me from serving the people as I wanted to. Now I use my knowledge to serve them better; it's perfectly natural.'
A change in trading which aims to bring consumers and traders closer will obviously play a part in changing the condition of women. The Chinese have avoided the western supermarket model. 'Corner-shop' trading is closer to the Chinese ideal - and such local shops have become genuine public services, unlike the pseudo-service of the supermarket, where minor price reductions are more than offset by the travel and storage costs introduced as a necessary consequence of the supermarket/hypermarket system.
Decentralization of the health service throughout China has the added advantage of releasing women from time-consuming nursing duties, which they are still expected to perform in the West. A Chinese mother no longer has sole responsibility for looking alter the health of all her family; nor is she landed with the burden of nursing sick children at home. For one thing, all work places have doctors or worker-doctors (workers trained by doctors while they practice) who take charge of first-aid, and, more importantly, of preventive care. The principles of medicine and nursing are taught in school. Groups of children will wage war on insects in summer. They will also go down a street advising old people to stop their habit of spitting on the ground, or asking people with colds not to go out without protective masks. They know how to treat one another and take great care to follow medical prescriptions. They can also make simple diagnoses, of colds, tonsillitis and stomach upsets, for instance, and can often give first aid in emergencies. They have some knowledge of acupuncture and use it to cure minor ailments.
In every building complex on the Shanghai housing-estates there is a medical unit. Two or three of the residents, usually former housewives, have been trained by doctors in all the standard diagnoses and treatments. They keep in constant touch with the medical staff of the welfare centres responsible for health care on the housing-estate, and they are in charge of convalescents and people whose illnesses do not require hospitalization These health workers also make sure that the sick rest as much as possible, bringing them meals, helping them to wash as well as taking the initiative in informing the various district committees that Comrade So-and-so has a broken leg, that they must visit her, bring her reading matter, help her in this or that job - and all without any fuss. No one in China can imagine a situation, so common in the West and so shocking -- where a person is left alone to cope with illness. To get to this stage, all sectors of society had to take an interest in the problems of medical care, so that the practice of medicine could gradually involve the whole population.
It seems to me that there are two aspects to the transformation of' housework in China. The first, of which I have given many examples, consists of socializing, regrouping and organizing the work in various ways outside the family structure. It's mainly because of this process of socialization that housework is being progressively eliminated. On the other hand, to make certain tasks the responsibility of some extra-familial administration would actually be harmful to the liberation of housewives. I raise this second point precisely because bureaucracy sees women's liberation as an aspect of the drive to increase productivity through the centralization of production. This stems from a comparison between family labour and social labour. In reality, family work is not familial. It is not done by the family, but for them - and solely by women. No husband would think of asking his wife to brush his teeth for him, or to dress him, but he finds it natural that she should make his bed, polish his shoes or tidy up after him. This may seem a forced analogy at first sight, but it isn't when you remember that not so long ago the wealthy had chambermaids and valets, whose work was precisely to wash, comb, powder and dress their master or mistress. The Chinese can see no difference between bed-making, clothes-brushing, stitching, sewing, tidying-up and teeth-cleaning. Everyone does these things for himself and considers it the most natural thing in the world. And the reason why it has taken only twenty years for the culture to adapt so completely is that men have been re-educated. They have learnt to value housework and no longer contemptuously dismiss it as mere woman's work.
The new women's movement in France also militates in favour of sharing work: 'Of course, first and foremost we insist on the collectivization of' housework, but we also want everything which isn't "collectivizable" to be shared out equally among us.' In formulating this demand - common sense tells us that it's a legitimate one - the women's movement surely never dreamed that it would provoke an 'armed uprising' among the promoters of 'collective programmes'.
It seems that, without realizing it, they had touched a sensitive spot. Just listen to this. After mentioning statistics which show that a worker's wife, doing two jobs a day, one in the factory and the other at home, works eighty to a hundred hours a week, a French Communist Party (PCF) pamphlet continues:
Some clear-sighted people . . . see the remedy to this extra work in equal sharing of household tasks between husband and wife.Indeed many working women already get considerable help in household tasks from their companion, and we see this as evidence of a new development in a couple's relationship. But expecting to solve the problem of the overburdended working mother merely by an equal distribution of problems and tiredness within the household represents a limited conception of equality; for us, this equality must represent a raising of the human condition, making each partner more available to the other and to the children.
'We will make two points:
'1 This 'solution' can only be a palliative at a time when the thorough-going and rapid development of science and technology ought to mean that every household can afford (without having to make sacrifices) the household appliances, which can today mechanize housework. As the statistics show, this is not yet happening . . . 72.5 per cent of French households have a refrigerator, but only 50 per cent have a vacuum cleaner or a washing machine.
2 This 'solution' is a red herring which would free the authorities and the bosses from the obligation to make motherhood easier for the working woman. [1]
There is no need to worry that the PCF may have a 'limited conception of equality' they simply have no conception of equality at all.
It's obvious that sharing housework won't of itself solve the problem, but it does prepare the way among ordinary people, for the political and ideological conditions which would allow household tasks to be appropriated by grass-roots collectives in a truly egalitarian spirit. Unless such political and ideological foundations are laid, a genuine seizure of power by all workers and not just by women, even at the head of a battalion of electrical appliances will be impossible, and we can only fall back on the 'palliatives' suggested by the PCF: the development of individual household appliances with the blessing of the bosses and the State. Of course egalitarian sharing is not enough, but neither more nor less so than any other partial measure. Only the destruction of capitalist relations of production will do the trick. The outright rejection of any struggle for the egalitarian division of domestic labour, by declaring it to be a 'diversionary manoeuvre', as the PCF has done, is nothing but a superficial and easy presence of leftism that masks the retrograde point of view criticized by Lenin in certain communists:
Unfortunately it is still true to say of many of our comrades, 'scratch a Communist and find a Philistine!' Of course, you must scratch a sensitive spot, their mentality as regards woman. Could there be a more damning proof of this than the calm acquiescence of men who see how women grow worn out in the petty, monotonous household work, their strength and time dissipated and wasted, their minds growing narrow and stale, their hearts beating slowly, their will weakened? . . . So few men - even among the proletariat - realise how much effort and trouble they could save women, even quite do away with, if they were to lend a hand in 'woman's work'. But no, that is contrary to the 'right and dignity of a man'. They want their peace and comfort. The home life of the woman is a daily sacrifice to a thousand unimportant trivialities. [2]
That daily sacrifice of women to a thousand unimportant trivialities is the reality behind the bourgeoisie's mawkish and deceptive homage to 'marvellous motherhood' and the 'irreplaceability' of the mother. Let's hear some more: 'Whether we like it or not, the mother's role is fundamental to the continuation of the species, not only at the time of gestation, but also through all the years it takes to make the child an adult.' Isn't that a very clear statement of the notion of woman as child-rearer and sole bearer of the domestic burden entailed in bringing up children? This hypocritical eulogy of feminine virtues is not an extract from a speech by some Victorian moralist, it is an example of what the PCF thinks is not a limited conception of equality'.[3] They call themselves socialists and, as if to prove it, they label their exaltation of motherhood a 'social function'. 'Motherhood should be considered to be a social function and as such taken into account by society' [4] as if tagging the word 'social' or 'rationalized' or 'real' on to any commodity or product were enough to transform it at a stroke into an authentic socialist product!
Let's take the advice of the ancient Chinese poet and 'sample together this strange literature, and together analyse its obscurities'. 'Motherhood should be considered to be a social function and as such taken into account by society.' Doesn't bourgeois society consider motherhood to be a social function even now? The dominant ideology in our society holds that it is natural for women to devote themselves exclusively to home, husband and children, which is just another way of saying that they do fulfil an essential function and that this function is recognized. This 'social function' is so deeply rooted in social custom that it 'goes without saying' that women should perform it. What a strange way of thinking about 'social functions' - and what an empty gesture to women to insist that it should be 'taken into account'. Women's own struggle, on the other hand, will bring real progress, by making this function everyone's, not just the housewives' and mothers'.
The bourgeoisie's attempts to avoid a clash between the working mother's domestic duties and her paid work (by rearranging factory hours, for example) show how vital women and the housework they do are. And that's the whole point. Our society aims to reconcile the irreconcilable, to make paid slavery compatible with domestic slavery, to magnify the exploitation of women to the limit by making them work seventy hours a week, half of it at home and half of it 'at work'. And, by a strange coincidence, the PCF also suggests 'special measures' to 'allow the millions of women who perform a dual social role, by both pursuing a career and bringing up children, to reconcile [5] these two activities in better conditions'. Meanwhile the ruling class sprinkles a few crèches here and there, a dash of family allowances, half a measure of part-time work and so on, and in the background, the PCF whispers in its ear: 'Put a bit more in, put a bit more in...!'