Women, Resistance and Revolution (31 page)

Having shown their power in this dramatic way, the women were able to persuade husbands not to beat their wives. This kind of conflict developed throughout China. Old ideas went very deep and men in the party were in no sense exempt. In some cases the communist cadres among the men clung to the old ways. Veteran revolutionary fighters thought they deserved young wives. More commonly though they simply did not notice the women’s problems until the women pointed them out. In the Rocky Mountain Commune in Greater Peking there was a great public health campaign to clear up the streets and eliminate flies, mosquitoes, rats and the sparrows which eat the grain. Everyone was very busy. Women began to combine in households in order to look after their children. Grandmothers took on these responsibilities. The men remained quite unaware of the facilities needed by the women. The women became exasperated and started producing posters and notices criticizing the men and putting their demands. They stuck these up on the walls. They said to the men: ‘You think we aren’t needed for socialism? If we are, why don’t you help us organize.’
¹⁸

Thus the beginnings of the most fundamental liberation began – women began to think for themselves. All this was a profoundly educative process. The education of women in China since the revolution is not just a matter of going to school or college, or training, though these are of course vital. It is the experience of finding a place and a voice after centuries of belonging to the disinherited and dumb. Li Kuei-ying, a woman in her thirties, a pioneer of peasant origin, describes how when she was made leader of the women’s labour group in her cooperative in 1953:

I wanted to get the women as a group moving. I wanted to get them to break away from the past.

That winter I opened a winter school. We helped the women to make shoes and clothes and to improve their agricultural tools. We gave them lessons in feeding poultry and in spinning. We had discussions after the lessons. We tried to get the women to tell us themselves what things had been like before, and how it was now, and how it ought to be in the future. For example, they said: ‘My feet were bound so that I could not walk. In the old society, a woman was not supposed to go beyond the threshold of her home for the first three years of her marriage. We weren’t allowed to cat on the Kang, but had to sit on a stool when we ate, and if my parents had decided to marry me off with a cur, then I had to be content with a cur. But now you are allowed to see your husband before you marry, and you can refuse to marry him, if you don’t like the look of him. The old society was bad and the new is good.’ We discussed whether women are men’s equals or not, and most said: ‘Within the family, man and woman are equal. We help the men when they work in the fields and they should help us in the house.’ But many of the older women said: ‘Women are born to attend to the household. A woman cannot work in the fields. That can’t be helped. It is just that men and women are born different. A person is born either a man or a woman. To work in the fields or in the house.’

Slowly all the women gained confidence. At an open discussion about the future of the cooperatives two of the women spoke. They said, ‘The old women still say they don’t understand things and are just women, and that it is the man’s business to decide and that the women should do as the men decide. But we say that we do understand. We are women and we know what this discussion is about.’

They opposed a dividend on land and wanted more investment. An old man tried to silence them. ‘We should not listen to women when it is a question of serious business. They understand nothing. After all, they are only women and ought not to disturb our discussions. We don’t need to concern ourselves with what they have said.’
¹⁹
But Li Kuei-ying’s brother disagreed. He pointed out that every other Chinese was a woman. They should be listened to. He felt they spoke sense and agreed with them about investment.

The revolution secured economic independence, equality within the family, social welfare, improved working conditions – but most important, it enabled women to find their own voice. Much more complex is the question of sexual liberation.

For the first time in history the mass of Chinese women are now in a situation where sex can be separated from reproduction. The Chinese attitude to birth control has been much misunderstood in the west. They are steadfastly anti-Malthusian; like the early English working-class radicals they reject the control of population growth as a substitute for social change. However, they discourage large families because they feel the children don’t get enough attention and they want the mothers to be able to take part in productive work and political and social life. There has been a shift in tactics however. In the fifties they concentrated on pamphlets, booklets and radio programmes which explained in painstaking detail how to use
contraceptives. During the sixties this emphasis was more on public health workers and medical journals and the campaign was more action-oriented: teams of mobile medical workers touring with films, exhibitions, posters, displays in market-places and halls, and meetings of 1,000, or small groups of four or five people. Some meetings took the form of personal testimonies: peasant women who were using I.U.C.D.s or diaphragms would tell other women of their experience with them. They are experimenting with the pill but don’t think it safe yet. In the fifties abortions were available in theory though probably not generally in practice for the peasant women. During the sixties, however, as a result of much discussion and experimenting with simple methods, they devised a suction device which can be used in areas where there is no electricity and which results in very little blood loss. Though the peasant women want abortions they are terrified of surgery and Chinese medical journals place a lot of stress on the need to explain the operation and reassure them. Sterilization is just beginning, though lack of medical personnel and the fear of surgery have combined with the men’s suspicion not to make it very common. ‘It requires the most persuasive thoughts of Mao Tse-tung to convince the average Chinese male that vasectomy is not castration and that he will not experience any loss of sexuality.’
²⁰

When the birth control propagandists arrive in a town they first try to win the support of the peasant organizations, especially the women’s organizations. A member of the women’s organization told Jan Myrdal:

In certain families with lots of children, the women would like birth control, but their husbands won’t. In these families the husbands say: ‘There’s not going to be any family planning here.’ Then the women go to them and try to talk sense into them. We say: ‘Look how many children you have. Your wife looks after the household and sees to all the children and she makes shoes and clothes for both of you and the children, but you don’t think of all she has to do or of her health, but just make her with child again and again. Wait now for three or four years. Then you can have more if you want.’ Usually, they will eventually say: ‘If it isn’t going to go on all one’s life, then all right. But if she’s going to go on with birth control for ever, then I’m not having any.’ In these cases, all goes well and usually they decide not to have any more afterwards. But in other cases, the husband just says: ‘No’. Then we women speak to him about it every day, till he agrees to birth control. No husband has yet managed to stand out for any length of time, when we are talking to him.… It’s only their pride that stands in the way, and we have to tell them that such pride is false and not at all right. But there are, too, families where both husband and wife are agreed that they want children all the time. We can’t do anything there. The whole thing’s voluntary. The chief thing is to have a healthy family, and that the mother feels all right.
²¹

But it is not always just the men who are doubtful. An English surgeon, Joshua Horn, asked many village women about their attitudes after a meeting and question session on family planning:

Their answers revaled two conflicting, but perfectly understandable trends. One was that in the past they had been too poor to raise children, many had died at birth or starved to death and those who survived had gone hungry, naked, unlettered. Now that there was food and schools for all, and life was pleasant and secure, why should they restrict their families? This view was warmly supported by grandparents steeped in the Confucian tradition that many grandchildren brought them honour, prosperity and social security.
²²

The others were for birth control but not sure if it was possible to manage it.

The gradual improvement of medical facilities has nearly eradicated venereal disease from which tens of millions of people suffered before the revolution, and made pregnancy and illness less of a nightmare. The grannies still remember the wise old woman, filthy, dirty and covered with lice, her hair falling over her face, waving her horse’s tail and muttering words that no one understood, who told you to sacrifice an animal you didn’t have and accept fate until whoever was doomed to die died, but the young women are familiar with doctors from the town, and health workers trained from their own village.

All these changes interact upon the position of women in the family. Indeed, it seemed at first when the communes appeared that the Chinese were creating an alternative family. During the late fifties the whole pattern of women’s lives changed because of the attempt to involve them in production and the development of the communes first in the countryside and then in the towns. New communal forms of living evolved under pressure. Often these were on a small scale and very makeshift. A small group of housewives from
about twelve households got together and wondered what they could do. The chairman of the local neighbourhood committee said why didn’t they become a neighbourhood production team. This simply meant that they started to make cloth shoesoles and paper bags for department stores in each other’s homes. As more work came in the question of how to look after the children and cook came up:

One of the housewives said, ‘If only we could have a dining-room and a nursery like the factories do!’ Another woman picked up the idea and said, ‘Why don’t we set them up ourselves?’ and before she could finish, the other women started agreeing. One of them offered a kitchen knife, others turned over pots, pans, and various utensils. One woman known for her good cooking volunteered to take over the kitchen and another said she would take responsibility for the nursery.
²³

All this was very pragmatic; communal facilities ranged from the rather grand to the very simple – sometimes they were in new buildings or converted old ones, like the dining-room which had been appropriately a temple to the god of the soil. But although many of the traditional functions of the family were socialized there was no conscious intention of creating a new basis for the family, nor was there an effort to break down the distinction between male and female roles in relation to small children.

Chinese women become indignant when the communes are said in the west to destroy the family. They claim that instead they make the relationship of the family more stable by removing the old causes of tiredness and frustration. They also like to keep the evening meal a family affair.

Nor are the Chinese forthcoming about the female orgasm. Ting Ling and Agnes Smedley were much criticized for putting forward theories of ‘free’ love and sexual liberation. A very strong puritan streak exists in the Chinese women’s movement. However, it would be to misunderstand this to interpret it in terms of the hypocritical ‘puritanism’ we know as a hangover from the authoritarian repression of middle-class Victorian society. It resembles rather the earnest desire to purify the spirit felt by the seventeenth-century puritans. Bed was so much the symbol of slavery that the Chinese woman sought to escape from it as a means of asserting her emancipation. One woman commented to Simone de Beauvoir as they watched
a scene at the opera in which the young heroine struggled to escape from the unwelcome embrace of the emperor: ‘That’s why Chinese women wanted the revolution, in order to have the right to say no to that sort of thing.’
²⁴

Romantic love in the accepted western sense is very strange to the Chinese, although the right to a free marriage played such an important part in the liberation struggle of girls in the towns. Because women’s subservience was so completely institutionalized the young people especially in the country were and still are very reserved. Quite often boys and girls in the same village are too shy to propose. One of them, usually the boy, will go to an older person who will act as a go-between. Propaganda stories just after the revolution encouraged the young in the villages to talk to each other and to go on moonlight walks. The peasant girls choose boys who are good workers and of even temper. People do not say of girls that they are beautiful or ugly, but that ‘she looks well enough in her way’. In the towns, though, the girls, regardless of their simple denim clothes, are held to be a little more knowing. ‘In the towns the girls will tell you the same as those in the villages but they will only do that because it is the thing to say. In reality, town girls want smart dashing-looking boys.’
²⁵

The term ‘Shanghai miss’ still persists for town girls who put on airs and graces. The ethic of service, thrift and industry emphasizes abstinence and control. Late marriages (mid-twenties) are encouraged, and there is a general distrust of extravagance and display. This goes with the attempt to create the culture for a new work-discipline so that China can develop industrially. After the Great Leap Forward of 1958–9, when women were propelled into production, three bad harvests followed and energy was concentrated on restoring past production levels, not establishing new ones.