Women, Resistance and Revolution (29 page)

Female resistance emerged in a more popular and radical manner in the context of the general movement against imperialism and the response to capitalism. As women became involved in groups and organizations wanting to overthrow the existing system many aspects of their own oppression came to the surface. For the first time feminism was connected to a social alternative. Before the 1911 revolution secret societies in China served a political function. The ramifications of their influence are difficult to disentangle but sometimes they operated like a mafia through fear and violence, or like social bandits establishing relations with the poor. They played some part in the emerging labour movement in the towns. Within the secret societies women achieved a particular kind of honour. They were not admitted to the very high offices and did not take part in decision-making but they were able to fulfil roles of trust and responsibility not possible in the society outside. The secret society gave its members a rough and ready equality; they were bound together by a common identity which distinguished them from the rest of the world. In the south, women were particularly important as spies and lookouts and known as ‘female polished sticks’.
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Wives and mothers who were not in the societies formed an outer screen protecting the members and attached by loyalty to their men. Possibly to avoid political conflict with the men, women often split off and formed their own autonomous all-female associations with names like ‘The Green and Blue Lanterns’. In some cases these were female mutual aid societies, providing security for widows, for example. During the 1911 revolution the secret societies came out in open support. Women fought in the military brigades. From the women’s point of view the abolition of foot-binding was the only substantial achievement from the revolution. But after 1911 both male and female societies tended to lose their political content and become a mafia, or they merged with left political organizations.

The growth of capitalism made new forms of organizing possible. It is tempting to reflect on militant secret sisterhoods acting as organizers of women textile workers but this is only speculation. From 1910–12 women silk filature workers in Shanghai came out twenty times. The women were extremely low paid, fresh from the country and without union traditions, though some had formerly
been handicraft silk reelers with some form of guild organization. Most likely they were strikes of desperation, which threw up their own anonymous leaders in the moment of need, although they were not strong enough to build a continuing labour movement. The conditions of Chinese workers make resistance no surprise, even if survival was. An unlimited supply of labour, no factory legislation, the possibility of running machinery twenty-four hours a day, made it ideal for foreign capital. Foreign capitalists remained persistently bewildered at the ‘xenophobia’ of the people they kindly ‘helped’ by a particularly open exploitation.

Twelve of these strikes were over arrears of pay, or attempts to reduce wages and lengthen hours. The others were over bad treatment from foremen, including beating, and docking of wages. Some involved ta ch’ang [smashing up of plant] and almost all are described as riotous or very disturbing. Those over arrears of pay were generally successful, but only when the women had succeeded in causing so much trouble that magistrates or the police intervened for the sake of public peace, and told the factory owners to pay up.
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Short rowdy strikes served the women’s interests; because the employers operated in a world of petty cheating and brutality, even if they tried to negotiate they were beaten. In 1911 three years of this kind of action culminated in a strike in which they held out for ten days and apparently were beginning to recognize the advantages of long-term industrial organization. The fact that prices were rising probably strengthened their resolve to stick it out, because they faced the difficulty of making ends meet in the house as well. The weakness of this early labour action in China was really the fact that urban workers were still a small minority. It was very difficult for them to improve their conditions because the peasantry constituted a large reserve army of labour who could serve as strike-breakers. Unless the peasantry were somehow swept into revolution the workers’ activity in isolation was relatively ineffective. The anarchists, the only revolutionary group existing before 1911, recognized this but the lesson was forgotten by the Communist Party in the twenties. Probably because of its weakness the Chinese working class was very open to ideas of a complete uprising; they had more hope in revolution than in building up a strong defensive trade union structure and women workers were no exception here.

Amongst the young intelligentsia very different forms of female resistance were appearing. In 1912 a group of young women stormed Parliament, broke its windows and injured its guards in protest against inequality. Ideas about the reform of the marriage laws and changes in the position of women in the family were being discussed a great deal in radical circles during the First World War. Yang Ch’ang-chi, who was later to become Mao’s father-in-law, published an article in 1915 called ‘Notes on Reforming the Family Institution’. He contrasted the fact that widows couldn’t marry and that concubinage still persisted with English marriage customs, which he felt were ideal. More radical was the New People’s Study Society founded by Mao and Ts’ai Ho-sheng in autumn 1917. Together with Ts’ai Ho-sheng’s sister they swore never to marry because of their hatred of the traditional marriage system. In fact they all did – Mao in 1921. Most of the members were students and teachers from leading schools in Changsa. They were extremely moralistic and intent on reforming the world. The society was concerned to bring to women a consciousness of their revolutionary potential. Ts’ai Ho-sheng’s sister, Ts’ai Chang, set up a similar group in Changsha and some girls went to France to study.

The movement against Japanese imperialism (4 May Movement) provided an immediate outlet for the radical energies of these student-teacher groups. In Hunan in 1919 a network of student alliances throughout the province was created with a coordinating body called the United Students’ Alliance. Mao participated in this. At first the girls went along with the boys, then they started to take the initiative themselves. Not surprisingly the most liberal schools took the lead. At the end of May in T’ao Yüan Girls’ School several hundred students including the principal formed ‘Committees of Ten to Save the Nation’. These groups went off to talk in various parts of the city. Sometimes they even involved primary-school children who carried white ‘save the nation’ flags. They urged their listeners:

Dear compatriots, everyone must awaken to the fact that China is about to be lost and we shall become enslaved just as happened to the Koreans, and our women will suffer extreme humiliation. Taiwan is another example [of Japanese colonization]. Let us all be aware of China’s predicament and support native products!
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Girls from Chou-Nan Middle School also took an important part
in this movement against the Japanese along with their headmistress, Chu Chien-fan, who was active in reform circles in Hunan. Early in June the girls formed discussion, investigation and communications groups. Discussion groups of four or five girls went to public places to lecture to women and girls about Japanese imperialism and explain that they should boycott foreign goods. Investigation groups went out into shops and markets to observe what the women were buying and urge them to buy Chinese. The communications group distributed posters and leaflets as propaganda.

The various schools established contact with each other. By mid-June there were eleven schools, mainly girls’ middle schools, grouped into an ‘alliance’. They extended their demands from the struggle against Japan to the position of poor women in China. They wanted a Half-Day School for Women of the Common People. Politically they were far from revolutionary. They tried to put pressure on businessmen to ‘save the nation’. But their activity was very important in contrast to the fatalism of traditional Chinese womanhood, and many women who were later involved in the revolutionary movement took part in politics for the first time as schoolgirls.

In the radical journals which appeared in 1919 Mao wrote frequently on the oppression of women. He opposed fatalism and respect for existing authority, and urged peasants, workers, women teachers and students to join together and oppose aristocrats and capitalists. He said women should have the vote and be allowed to mix with men equally and freely. He was scornful of the double standard of sexual morality. ‘What sort of chastity is this, completely confined to women with shrines for female martyrs everywhere? Where are the shrines for chaste boys?’
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Many of these journals were explicitly committed to women’s liberation. There was the
New Hunan
, committed to undermining the theory of the ‘three bonds’, to ruler, father and husband, and
Women’s Bell
, founded by the student union of Chou-Nan Middle School, and with the aim ‘liberty and equality; means: struggle, creativeness, and solution of the woman problem by women’. Articles in this paper covered not only general questions of emancipation but also the conditions of female labour. There were other feminist strains.
New Youth
in June 1918 was completely devoted to translations of Ibsen and studies of his work. The
Journal of Physical Education
argued the importance of physical education for women.
This was extremely radical in the context of traditional Chinese society, when foot-binding had only just been officially ended.

Mao himself wrote about Miss Chao’s suicide because it typified not only the hopeless fatalism of women but that of the whole Chinese people. He saw the new culture being created by activity rather than self-abnegation. ‘Rather than die by suicide, one should die only after relentless struggle. The goal of struggle does not lie in “wanting someone else to murder me”, but rather it lies in “realizing one’s own life potential”.’
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He was aware of the implications of the liberation of women:

If we launch a campaign for the reform of the marriage system, we must first destroy all superstitions regarding marriage, of which the most important is destruction of belief in ‘predestined marriage’. Once this belief has been abolished all support for the policy of parental arrangement will be undermined and the notion of the ‘incompatibility between husband and wife’ will immediately appear in society. Once a man and wife demonstrate incompatibility, the army of the family revolution will arise en masse and a great wave of freedom of marriage and freedom of love will break over China.
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A few months after Mao’s articles appeared, the case of Miss Li Chi-ts’un received much publicity. Miss Li resisted the marriage her father arranged and ran away from her home in Changsa to Peking where she became involved in the Work-Study Programme. At one side her father maintained traditional notions about women, ‘stupidity is the only virtue’, and was furious that he had ever allowed her to study; at the other the student press argued that Miss Li was an example of the spirit of struggle which was such an essential element in the new culture the young revolutionaries upheld. The emancipation of women was regarded as inseparable from general social emancipation. Indeed, one writer in 1920, Tai Chi-t’ao, thought a revolution for sexual equality between men and women would precede the workers’ revolution for economic equality.

Chinese feminism was thus an integral part of the radical nationalist movement and developed along with it. Politically though the same differences between the communists and the nationalists emerged in the approach to the women problem. A journal called
Women’s Voice
, started in 1921 in connection with the newly formed Chinese Communist Party, emphasized the conditions of working women. Organizations like the Hunan Women’s Association established
some coordination for demands for free marriage, the vote and personal liberation. Nora from
The Doll’s House
was the popular symbol of liberal feminism, because she struggled individually and morally against the restrictions of her role as a bourgeois wife. Girls bobbed their hair as a sign of defiance. Enthusiasm for liberation was strongest among the young educated girls in the towns but it spread also to some peasant and working women.

In 1927 the communists and the Nationalist Party broke apart. Communists and their sympathizers were hunted down:

From the cities came reports that ‘the Women’s Association was summarily disbanded … along with various unions in the city, all of whom were charged with being Red’; and in the countryside, observers claimed that, ‘girls and women were killed on the evidence of their bobbed hair alone’.
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The nationalists were torn in their approach to women’s rights. They needed the support of women, but many of the demands even of the liberal feminists were too radical for their rich male supporters. In the 1930s they tried to reimpose Confucianism through the New Life Movement. In contrast the communists had a clear commitment to the liberation of women and gained the support of non-party feminists in the towns. When they were forced out into the countryside, they passed through places where female emancipation was completely unknown. Here they made contact with peasant women who for the first time were able to express their grievances with the hope of change. When the war against Japan started in 1935 the party continued this work on a greater scale and also made contact with supporters of women’s liberation in the towns controlled by the nationalists again. By the time the Second World War ended it was clear that there was widespread sympathy for the communists in very different strata of the population. This was reflected in the women’s organization set up in 1949, the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation, which included many non-communist women, including the Young Women’s Christian Association. It helped to educate and organize women locally and act as a means of articulating the feelings and demands of women to the party organization.