We visited China in November 1971. When I say we, I refer to twelve women from Paris and the French provinces. We were students and office workers, one peasant and a working-class grandmother. We included single women and mothers with anything from one to six children. But one thing we all had in common was that we were activists in the struggle for women's liberation.
However, this book should not be considered to be the unified view of our group; nor is it the product of a collective effort. 1 alone bear the responsibility for the opinions expressed herein, which may differ from those of my comrades.
I should like to thank Françoise Chomienne for her help in writing
the book. CLAUDIE BROYELLE
I wrote this book following a journey made in November 1971. Today I should like to draw the attention of readers to two very important points.
Firstly, the book is not by any means a final account, still less an estimate of the average degree of women's emancipation in China. I have tried to outline orientations and trends. It is, if you like, a book about the 'Chinese road' toward the emancipation of women. The road itself is a winding one and often seems uncertain of its direction - but the route can be clearly seen and the overall direction discovered.
Secondly, the book is also, and perhaps just as much, about the problems we women in the West face in today's struggle for our own emancipation. I have always thought, and still do, that a study of the Chinese experience in this area is an absolutely vital prerequisite for any clarification of the arguments about 'women's liberation and social liberation'. Just as vital, in fact, as learning from the failure of the Russian Revolution, which I consider to be the greatest tragedy of the workers' (and therefore of the women's) movement. 1 am more than ever convinced that despite the undeniable and timely gains of the new women's movement, the most important thing is still to 'dismantle', as a watchmaker would a watch, the complex and precise mechanism of women's oppression - both the machinery supporting the specific situation of women and the organic network of its connections with the exploitative society. We can no longer be content with platitudes about women's condition or with received ideas (even if they do happen to be fashionable) about 'phallocracy'. The directions we must take on the journey towards our liberation are written in their entirety in the material base of our oppression - and I think that everything, or almost everything, is yet to be done.
I should like to add one more point. I often read (and hear) that socialism, 'even in China', doesn't liberate women. Where is the evidence for this observation? There are still fewer women than men in administrative positions, women still do more work than men in the home and more looking after children, and so on. But what these arguments ignore is that there is a sense in which socialism doesn't liberate the proletariat either, 'even in China'. The wage system still exists; there are still important divisions between manual workers and intellectuals and between urban and rural areas; there is still the State. There is still class and the class struggle. There is a constant danger of capitalism being restored. You have to be blind not to see this possibility. To me the real issues are altogether different. We must look at the existence of workers' power in a socialist society - that is, a society whose twin characteristics are the destruction of social relations of production based on exploitation (in China, both capitalist and feudal relations) and the embryonic emergence of new communist social relations - and we must ask if that is the sole condition to be fulfilled before the long march of women's liberation can get fully under way. And we must also ask whether or not workers' power is viable without the developing struggle of millions of women to break their age-old chains.
I should like the English edition to make some contribution towards the discussion of these issues.
As for the rest, the book contains some debatable arguments and a number
of major or minor errors. I am aware of a few of these but not of others,
and in any case I think it would be dishonest to correct them now. I originally
wanted to submit raw material, warts and all, to be refined in discussion
and debate about our cause. I still do. It is clear to me that this discussion
and debate emphatically result in a demand that we should return to Marxism.
CLAUDIE BROYELLE
Peking, July 1974
The very existence of the new women's movement poses a number of questions The first one is: why is there a women's movement at all today? After all, women have the right to vote in all countries where the movement exists; so that wasn't the reason why they formed women's groups. We have the right to divorce, to a limited degree. A limited right to contraception has recently been achieved in France. Nowadays almost all women have experience, at some time in their lives, of social labour. The principle of 'equal pay for equal work' has even been written into the bourgeois code of work.
Recent reforms in the marriage laws have attenuated some of the more glaring instances of sexual discrimination. Today, universities are open to women. And, last of all, a large number of household appliances are widely available these days to lighten the burden of housework.
Then why have a women's movement? Historically, women have accomplished a great deal, and yet they find themselves virtually back at square one, still oppressed. We know that the right to work, to vote, to get divorced, to study, to use contraceptives and an electric coffee grinder haven't really freed us from domestic slavery, from compulsory motherhood or from economic dependence on our husbands, any more than our political rights have enabled us to change society in any way. This means that our oppression isn't rooted in the absence of these rights. In fact not only have these reforms not liberated us; they have made us feel our oppression even more cruelly.
'What do women went?' cries the panic-struck bourgeois legislator 'after all, we've given them everything!' Quite right! They have given us everything (or almost everything) - everything allowed under capitalism, that is.
And it's not much!
We can expect nothing from this society. The cycle had to be completed, and all the illusory hopes for legal solutions to our problems, which characterized the earlier women's movements, had to be thoroughly shattered before a new women's movement could appear. Even though the new movement isn't always aware of it, its existence and nature are determined by the experience and limitations of the earlier movement. Yet with this starting-point, everything remains to be done.
But if our lack of legal rights had nothing to do with our real oppression, what does it stem from? It is clearly important for anyone concerned for the future of women to discover the causes and to investigate the forms and consequences of women's oppression in order to develop a theory which can be used in attacking. But this doesn't interest the French women's liberation movement very much. For them women's oppression is 'lived experience', to be 'felt' rather than explained. They believe that we live under the tyranny of non-communication. That no man can rise above himself sufficiently to understand the female condition. And that women who live their oppression have no need to analyse it, and even less need to build a theory about their liberation. In any case, they say, theories are made for men by men - that's male territory.
But many of us think we must go beyond this 'feminism'. It doesn't take much time to survey the true stories of women's oppression - the women's liberation movement has heaps of them. They contribute about as much to our cause as stories of factory life enlighten the proletariat about their tasks. We want to go further. In its infancy, the oppressed working class turned its anger against machines; later it built the Paris Commune. The distance between these two stages is the distance still to be covered between the revolt against 'the male' and the liberation of women.
Everything we saw in China confirms this, and what we learned helped us to clear up a misunderstanding: the emancipation of women cannot be a separate task, an 'extra bit of soul' that gives socialism a human face. Take sexuality for example: any attempt to free women from the myths of passivity and of woman as sex object is no more than wishful thinking if we don't apply ourselves equally to the task of destroying that economic dependence which is precisely what forces women to be passive and to play the role of object; that is, unless we also attack the economic and political functions of the bourgeois nuclear family in which women are trapped. The patriarchal family has its raison d'être in the capitalist system. Schools aren't the diabolical inventions of teachers any more than the family is the fruit of men's wickedness. Those who act in a play don't set the scenes. These institutions are machines, indispensable devices, enabling workers to go to work each day, and their children to learn day after day the role that society assigns to them.
This is the reason why capitalism, although always eager for novelty and transformation, preserves one of the most ancient cottage industries: the domestic workshop where 'honest workers' and their docile wives are trained and become conscious of their duties and respectful of other people's property. Capitalism must ensure that women, the skilled workers who provide this noble service, are not diverted from such profitable work, even when it has to use them as a pool of reserve labour. In either case, it is vital that they should continue to fulfil their domestic role.
You can't break a machine unless you know how it works. To be sure, domestic slavery and the mother's role are strengthened and morally sanctified by myths and illusions, but they are the very chains which bind a woman to the restricted network of her daily activities; it is precisely because women prepare vegetables and do the washing up that they see these chores as a talent, a vocation, a destiny. It is the material base that gives birth to the illusions and myths of feminity, and not vice versa.
Beyond all the talk about the 'essence' of womanhood the reality is that to be a woman under capitalism means to be involved in five main kinds of social relations, to have a particular relationship to:
social labour
housework
children
the family
sexuality.
But these five aspects of oppression are not all equivalent and interchangeable. Thus it is no accident that the first chapter of this book deals with social production and is immediately followed by a chapter on housework: women are oppressed because of the division of labour in our society, which excludes them from social production and limits them to doing housework. That is why the first step towards the emancipation of women is to ensure that they are fully able to participate in social labour. Without that all the discussion about women's liberation is just empty words. And it is no accident either that sexuality comes last in this book: we must describe the framework within which it exists before trying to analyse how the question of sexuality is objectively raised in China today. Again, it's no accident that the chapter on children's liberation occupies the centre of the book, after the chapter on housework and its socialization and before that on the family. Motherhood can operate in capitalist society only if women are excluded from social labour, for that's where its original function lies. To understand the changes that have come about in China, from the point of view of women's liberation and the revolution in childrearing and education, we first had to outline the new role that women are playing in different social activities. Conversely, any approach to the family in China would have been useless without a previous study not only of the new ties that bind women who belong to these families to society as a whole, but also of the new role that children are playing in society, and the way in which society takes upon itself the task of looking after them.
Because we are revolutionary women people see us as torn between our different aims: we are expected to say that as women we wish to struggle against men, while as revolutionaries we are struggling against capitalism.
But we're not 'torn' and we don't want to reconcile women and revolution like two hostile sisters. Our project is altogether different: we want to see and understand exactly how a revolutionary society, socialism, liberates women. We ask both what socialism will do for women, which is of obvious interest, and also, most emphatically, how the very existence and development of that socialist society necessitate the liberation of women. In other words, we want to know what the internal, dialectical connections are between women and revolution, the part and the whole.
'Women are one half of heaven,' says Mao, and if that part of heaven remains unmoved, the revolutionary storms which should sweep away the old world will turn out to be only passing showers.
With all this in mind we organized a trip to China to study the condition of women in Chinese society. More precisely, we wanted to chart the course of the Chinese revolution from the point of view of women's liberation in order to try to identify the effects of one on the other.
However, I must warn readers against too hasty an interpretation of this book. They will not find a 'stock taking' of the Chinese situation. We ourselves are too far away from such a comprehensive view even to think of sketching it. Each of the revolutionary positions we have tried to bring out, study and comment on is counterbalanced by a reactionary bourgeois position which tries to smother it. The revolution doesn't advance in a straight line. It can't be programmed, but follows an uneven course. So you mustn't take all the progressive experiments as indicative of the norm for the whole of China. We came across particularly exciting ones in some places, but found that they were almost unknown in others.
In Shaoshan, Mao Tse-tung's birthplace, the political commissar of the People's
Liberation Army (PLA) in that region gave us an interview in which he told
us: 'It is absolutely necessary to realize that China is not all red. For
instance there are a handful of reactionaries supporters of American imperialism,
in China today. If we lose sight of that reality, we will fail in all our
plans. You, too, must absolutely not believe that all is well in China. You
can't say that all is well in China, since there are still reactionaries,
reactionary ideas and reactionary practices. Two things are fighting it out:
on the one hand, the revolution; on the other, the counterrevolution. Of
course it is through this struggle that socialism develops; but if we fail
in this struggle, socialism will die. In other words, the question as to
who - bourgeoisie or proletariat - will prevail in China still remains unanswered
today.'