Recent scholarship on village-level elections in China suggests that the promise of political reform has fallen short when it comes to rural women. Over the past two decades, and particularly since the introduction of the Organic Law, the numbers of women active in leadership roles at the village level have decreased dramatically.Footnote ¹ This pattern of decline has mirrored a national trend in which numbers of women at all levels of political office have been reduced.Footnote ² The increasing tendency for positions of leadership to be dominated by men is remarkable in a nation that has long tied its national project of liberation to the liberation of women. It is also remarkable at a time when many parts of the developing world are prioritizing the election of women, including at the local level.Footnote ³ Within a generation, China has relinquished its place as a role model when it comes to rural women's empowerment, and is now itself the target of reform efforts by external funding agencies and international organizations.Footnote ⁴

The sharp decline of women representatives at all levels of governance since the beginning of the reform era is generally seen as stemming from two mutually interacting sets of phenomena. First, scholars note that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has undertaken significant ideological and institutional changes during the reform era, changes which have downplayed the importance of equality on the national agenda. The earlier ideological emphasis on nannü pingdeng男女平等, or “sex equality,” particularly the notion that “women can do anything men can do,” quickly faded out as a central message of the Party once the economic reforms began. Just as important was the Party's decision to abolish or significantly reduce its application of gender quotas, to reduce funding to the Youth League and the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), and to de-prioritize the need to promote women.Footnote ⁵ Gao Xiaoxian's article in this volume, for example, demonstrates the extraordinary efforts involved in attempting to obtain funding from formal political institutions to promote women's election in villages.

Second, and related, scholars point to the re-emergence of traditional beliefs about the inabilities of women to assume positions of leadership during the reform era.Footnote ⁶ Male bias and discrimination in the nomination and selection of female candidates, for example, is a widespread phenomenon throughout China, as Gao's article here demonstrates.Footnote ⁷ In rural areas, men are generally believed to be more capable than women in political decision-making.Footnote ⁸ With respect to questions of “sex equality,” the withdrawal of the state from governing many dimensions of private life during the reform era seems to have revealed a rural society relatively unaffected by several decades of Maoist egalitarian ideology, including the mass campaigns focused on women during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Although the vast majority of rural women now work outside the home, a key transformation wrought by the labour mobilizations of the 1950s, they are generally not expected to have the skill level necessary to compete in the market or at the ballot box without the aid of state intervention.

In this article I re-think the complex legacies of the Maoist era and their relationship to the contemporary decline in rural women's leadership. By focusing on some of the gendered dimensions of rural development policy, it becomes evident that many “traditional” beliefs about the abilities of rural women were given new life during the Maoist era. Building on three decades of scholarship which shows that most rural women struggled with the double burden of housework and fieldwork during the early years of the Maoist era,Footnote ⁹ I argue that rural development policies relied upon the rural mother as a household manager, up to and during the Great Leap Forward.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, rural development policies harnessed the “liberated” labour of women activists in a very different way.

Prior to the Cultural Revolution rural women had two dominant paths of “liberation” or jiefang 解放 available to them: one that involved a liberation through the (female) body and household, the path of dangjia当家, and one that involved a liberation from the constraints of the (female) body and household, the path of fanshen翻身. Although women and women leaders frequently pursued their liberation through combining elements of the two, such a path could prove perilous. In practice, the simultaneous implementation of these deeply different paths proved so overwhelming that few saw themselves as physically and ideologically capable of providing leadership. Rather than politicizing a new generation of women to take up positions of local leadership, therefore, the maternalist and egalitarian development policies of the Maoist era may have contributed to the marginalization of most rural women from standing for office altogether.

These dynamics are well exemplified by the story of a unique women-led Mu Guiying Brigade that emerged in the region of Jiangnan just prior to the start of the Great Leap Forward (1958–60). For several years, approximately 1957–62, the brigade was led by a woman Party Secretary, a woman accountant and a women's head – an extraordinary development, even for a time in which women's leadership was being widely promoted. A focus on the Mu Guiying Brigade, so-named for a Song Dynasty woman general,Footnote ¹¹ highlights some of the deeply uneven and in many ways unexpected embodiments of “women's liberation” in the socialist countryside.

This article is based primarily on interviews I conducted with the three women leaders in 2001 and 2004. I also interviewed over 150 additional individuals (farmers and retired officials) in both Jiangsu and Henan, including retired leaders at the brigade, commune, county and provincial level. I spent the most time with Women's Head Lin, whom I interviewed twice in the presence of other former women's heads, as well as multiple times one-on-one in her home and at the village government's offices. I interviewed former Party Secretary Yang privately twice in the office of the plastics factory where she was employed. Yang no longer lives in the same part of the county as the (former) brigade: the target of political attacks during the Cultural Revolution, she was purged in 1967. I only interviewed former accountant Fan once, in 2001, in her workplace. All the interviews were tape recorded and conducted in the presence of an assistant whom I had hired to help me navigate the local dialect.Footnote ¹² In addition to drawing upon interviews, I reference a range of documentary material, including County archival documents, County Annals, as well as speeches, reports and writings from the CCP leadership both before and after the founding of the People's Republic of China. In order to protect the confidentiality of those interviewed, all individual and place names are pseudonyms.

In the first section I discuss three dominant renderings of the rural woman that emerged in CCP policy discourse: “the country woman,” “the household manager” and “the activist.” The “country woman,” I argue, was by definition a backward subject in need of state intervention. In contrast, “the household manager” was a subject whose new status in the democratic socialist family drew on and contributed to the reproductive and productive work of the local economy: a new socialist domesticity. Finally, the figure of “the activist” was a Maoist subject primarily concerned with socialist construction, a task that may or may not have included duties associated with mothers and their domestic realm.

In later sections I turn to the case of the Mu Guiying Brigade to illustrate the ways in which rural development policies refracted at the local level. Specifically, I locate the Brigade within a maternalist geography, and its primary leader, Party Secretary Yang, within a dangjia path of liberation. I then contrast this domesticated expression of liberation with what seems to have been the dominant path of liberation for the three women: a Maoist path of fanshen. All three women leaders on the Mu Guiying Brigade were in their late teens when they first became politically active, and only one, a widow, was a mother. Their description of their struggles to gain the acceptance and trust of their communities reveals the inherent contradictions in their work. Indeed, as I discuss in the final section, the simultaneous implementation of the two paths of liberation only served to exacerbate the original policy “problem”: the backward country woman. Ultimately, I argue, the country woman and her political unacceptability may be as much a vestige of Maoist-era policies as it is of the supposed retreat of the state since the onset of the economic reforms.

Protocols and Practices of the “Country Woman”

In her seminal work on the discursive construction of funü 妇女, or woman under state-led nationalist Maoism, Tani Barlow suggests that the “socialist state consolidated gender difference on the material grounds of scientific physiology.”Footnote ¹³ Building on Barlow, I explore how the “liberation” of rural women took place through CCP mediated “problem representation.” This discursive approach to policy focuses on the way in which both problems and solutions are generated through policy language, concepts and categories.Footnote ¹⁴ Because my emphasis is on policy “effects,” that is the discursive embodiments of policy at the local level, the analysis only glancingly addresses the complex elite politics that constituted the formation of particular policies – including the dynamic efforts of many senior leaders of the CCP women's movement.Footnote ¹⁵ Rather, this article is primarily interested in outlining particular policies as discursive formations in order to understand how they were understood, implemented and transformed at the grassroots.

Dominant contemporary representations of the “low skill level” of rural women as a policy problem can be directly traced back to the way in which educated elites identified “rural women” during the first decades of the 20th century.Footnote ¹⁶ As is now well established, during the May Fourth Movement leading intellectuals focused on the plight of the oppressed Chinese woman as a symbol of all that was wrong with China.Footnote ¹⁷ Early members of the CCP put much greater weight on women's liberation than communist movements elsewhere because of their emphasis on an enlightenment narrative in which women's emancipation was to play a defining and central symbolic role of an emerging nation-state.Footnote ¹⁸ It is no coincidence that this original representation of the “Chinese woman” emerged at the same time as new boundaries between “country” and “city” were being defined as well. In particular, the same elite intellectuals were inventing the Chinese “peasant” or nongmin 农民 as backward and a major obstacle to national development and salvation.Footnote ¹⁹ I suggest that these processes of invention were intimately linked and, if one looks closely, one of the foremost symbols of Chinese backwardness and conservatism in these nationalist narratives was none other than the nongcun funü 农村妇女, the “country woman.” Indeed, while the figure of the “oppressed” Chinese woman included the female factory worker, many of its early depictions focused on a young woman increasingly likely to be living in country towns and villages: an illiterate, physically crippled and emotionally high-strung woman oppressed by patriarchal, Confucian authority.

Karl Marx famously dismissed peasants as having the revolutionary potential of a “sack of potatoes”Footnote ²⁰ – a sentiment that would be mirrored in the early Chinese Communist movement. By way of contrast, Mao Zedong sought to harness the revolutionary potential of peasants, including that of rural women whom he identified as even more oppressed than male peasants. In his early musings on peasant revolution, for example, Mao argued that rural women were not only dominated by political, clan and religious authority, they were also subject to the authority of their husbands.Footnote ²¹ But it is also true that Mao and the rest of the CCP leadership would continue to regard Chinese peasants as “backward” subjects that required the enlightened leadership of the Chinese Communist Party to emancipate and modernize. Footnote ²² Moreover, if not mobilized properly, peasants, especially women, could turn reactionary. Mao thus did not just see the country woman as a victim, he may have also seen her as a potential threat to the revolution and to the project of socialist construction in the countryside. In 1955, for example, Mao drew upon the image of the foot-bound woman “tottering along” to attack what he felt was his comrades’ conservative approach to collectivization.Footnote ²³ Like many other communist leaders of the time, Mao and others in the CCP leadership may have feared the “natural conservatism” of older, rural women and their corrosive influence on their kin and communities.Footnote ²⁴

When the CCP first focused on the country woman in a top-down, comprehensive way, however, it was not with the goal of liberating her from the family, but rather of re-shaping her domestic labour power as it was practised within and outside the home. As has now been well-documented, in 1943 senior CCP leaders purposefully set aside explicit reference to “feminism” (funüzhuyi 妇女主义), “marriage freedom” (hunyin ziyou 婚姻自由), “economic independence” (jingji duli 经济独立) and “opposing the four old oppressions” (fandui sizhong yapo 反对四重压迫), seeking instead to mobilize rural women in support of the war effort through production and education.Footnote ²⁵ The importance of this shift should not be underestimated. It had the full backing and involvement of many in the senior leadership, including Cai Chang, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai, and it would profoundly shape the contours of women's mobilization in the countryside for years to come.

In the document that laid down the shift in policy, “production” was to be the new measure of woman-work.Footnote ²⁶ But production, the report unequivocally stated, was not to be organized in isolation from household work. In fact, the report blends various forms of labour, including weaving, raising pigs and silkworms, planting, cooking and housework as equivalent activities. As it was defined in this period, then, woman-work was meant to realize the fuller integration of the peasant household into the socialist economy. Protecting “rural women's interests” meant understanding their physiological and emotional limitations, and honouring the familial duties which they were bound to uphold. The goal here was not the liberation of an individuated or collective subject, therefore, but the realization of a new, more dignified status for the rural woman in the context of her household, neighbourhood and family fields. Zhou Enlai gave a vivid illustration of this idea in his talk, “On good wives, wise mothers and the duties of motherhood.”Footnote ²⁷ Zhou laid out a vision of socialism in which motherhood, a “natural duty,” is accorded the true recognition that it deserves: “the most glorious responsibility in the world.”

During the late 1940s and 1950s, the concept of liberation as jiefang would once again be visible in elite CCP discussions about rural women. But embedded in the language of the new laws and policies of the regime were repeat references to mothers and their financial and reproductive roles in the new collective economy.Footnote ²⁸ In this vein, the path to realize liberation would also assume a new domesticated version, one that grew out of the old concept of dangjia, or the ability to manage household affairs.

In her reflections on the 1950 Marriage Law, Deng Yingchao noted how in the past the vast majority of rural women had no status in the household. According to Deng, the term dangjia de 当家的, head of the household, was virtually synonymous with the word husband in some parts of China.Footnote ²⁹ Deng advocated that husbands and wives share home management, including care of the children. However, over the course of the 1950s, dangjia de increasingly became a feminized status, assumed by the mother-in-law or daughter-in-law.Footnote ³⁰ Importantly, the concept of dangjia, household management, included responsibility for the financial well-being of the household. Indeed, the shifting of power relations in the household, from older generation to younger, and from men to women, coincided with development measures that relied upon household financial austerity to address the problem of a “backward” rural economy.Footnote ³¹ As shall become evident in my discussion of Gaoshan below, women as household managers were being folded into the CCP's strategy for local survival. But in so doing, the very definition of “liberation” was being re-written. Indeed, dangjia zuozhu 当家做主, to be master of one's house, had a strong revolutionary meaning: to be master of one's destiny. In the rural household where the master was replaced by the mistress, dangjia zuozhu offered a newly domesticated version of women's liberation.

Of course, rural development policy was increasingly dependent upon women labouring outside the home. Marina Thorberg estimates that across China the participation of rural women in production was 40–55 per cent in 1955, 60–70 per cent in 1956, 50–65 per cent in 1957 and 80–95 per cent in 1958 and 1959.Footnote ³² Moreover, during the Socialist High Tide and the Great Leap Forward, the establishment of dining halls and childcare facilities was expected to liberate the labour of rural women from the fetters of housework, an expectation seemingly at odds with the dangjia path of liberation. But there are two points to remember here. First, as in Yan'an, participation in “side-line” production was frequently featured as women's entry-point into this outside work, and was viewed somewhat interchangeably with housework itself.Footnote ³³ In other words, as collectivization intensified the site of the household was simultaneously expanding into, and being subsumed by, the new collective structures – and ultimately into the site of the brigade itself. Second, policies that encouraged women to undertake greater responsibility for side-line activities and field work were marked for their consistent emphasis on the “special problems” of women labourers: including menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation and the “special burdens of housework.” In so doing, these policies marked women as physiologically bound subjects, destined for motherhood.Footnote ³⁴

In sum, the new laws and policies in the People's Republic offered a domesticated path of liberation for the rural woman in which gender difference would always be physiologically based. I have defined sex equality previously as Marxist maternalist equality: a form of women's liberation that stressed physiological gender difference and linked women's equality, maternal health and family harmony to the larger project of nation and state-building.Footnote ³⁵ In a comment reminiscent of the “Good wives” talk by her husband Zhou Enlai over a decade earlier, Deng Yingchao drove this definition home by explicitly linking the establishment of “sex equality” with the “moral and good social practices” of “respecting mothers and caring for children.”Footnote ³⁶ This comment was made, no less, in Deng's 1954 speech commemorating the promulgation of the PRC's new constitution.

If rural women were to transform themselves into household managers, local women leaders were to transform themselves into household managers writ large, becoming the local “aunties” or “elder sisters” in charge of an expanding sisterhood of familial management. Women's heads, in particular, were expected to serve as role models of how to work in the fields, to implement “equal pay for equal work” (tonggong tongchou 同工同酬), to ensure that women were assigned to lighter work when menstruating, lactating, pregnant or having just given birth, and, when appropriate, to develop collective structures such as childcare and canteens or dining halls to lessen the household burden of women. They were also expected to “manage” their own families while simultaneously maintaining their health.Footnote ³⁷ The fictionalized character of Li Shuangshuang, who enthusiastically applied her new writing skills to agitate for collective dining and childcare during the early days of the Great Leap Forward, was an ideal type of this figure.Footnote ³⁸

But the “auntie” or “elder sister” model of leadership was constantly destabilized by another far more ubiquitous model: the Maoist activist. Whereas the household manager eliminated her backwardness in the context of the household (familial and collective), the Maoist activist liberated herself ideologically and physically from the country domicile in order that she might directly contribute to the national project of socialist construction. As Evans notes, this form of liberation “excluded the possibility and experience of gendered difference, and constructed women as the same kind of subjects as men.”Footnote ³⁹

The political activist was supposed to be a total believer in Party teachings, to serve as a catalyst for mobilizing the masses and to submit herself willingly to the needs of her organization, be it the Youth League or the CCP itself.Footnote ⁴⁰ Unlike the household manager, the activist was largely devoid of familial attachments. She was an autonomous agent capable of contributing directly to the task of socialist construction through her miraculous feats, whether on the farm or on the factory floor. Moreover, it was the process of physically engaging in collective work that enabled the activist to transform her consciousness and assume a socialist (utopian) subjectivity that was, ultimately, devoid of maternalist content.Footnote ⁴¹ This process, first delineated by Mao Zedong in Yan'an, involved applying subjective initiative (zhuguan neng dongxing 主观能动性) to overcome obstacles and assume a super(hu)man status.Footnote ⁴² One had fanshen, or freed oneself, when one had physically and ideologically turned oneself over. In the words of Tina Mai Chen:

Beginning in the Socialist High Tide of 1956–57, rural development policy would increasingly emphasize the Maoist process of subjective initiative as a means of modernizing the country. This emphasis would reach its apogee in the Great Leap Forward, when every adult man and woman was expected to “Leap” into Maoist activism, often as part of sex segregated military-style command units. As I have discussed elsewhere, many local activists defined local development priorities solely through the lens of Maoist activism. As a consequence, some were opposed to woman-work, or tasks associated with women, and either ignored calls to protect the health and welfare of women and their children, or, in some cases, advocated the disbanding of local women's organizations altogether.Footnote ⁴⁴ But others willingly performed their own Maoist liberation of physical sacrifice while implementing maternalist development policies.Footnote ⁴⁵ One of the most striking examples was that of the three leaders of the Mu Guiying Brigade. This case is worth a closer look because if any brigade were to have “thoroughly liberated” women and realized a new sisterhood of socialist women this brigade should have been it.

At Home on the Brigade? Women Take Charge

Wang Zheng's description of housewife mobilization in Shanghai in the early 1950s suggests that at least some women were extremely keen to respond to the new state's call to organize, and did so on the basis of a collective identity of women as homemakers.Footnote ⁴⁶ Consequently, “neighbourhood work,” formerly considered a public (wai 外) man's domain, became increasingly understood as a feminized private (nei 内) sphere. The feminized expansion of the “household” that took place in urban Shanghai, I would suggest, was mirrored in the neighbouring countryside of Jiangnan, albeit through a somewhat different process.Footnote ⁴⁷ First, the nature of household work itself was changing. Since the early 1950s, women had been encouraged to be frugal in their household activities, including activities involved in sideline production.Footnote ⁴⁸ They were also being encouraged to build upon the new rights of the Marriage Law and Land Reform to exercise more control of (dangjia) finances at home.Footnote ⁴⁹ In 1957, Gaoshan county participated in the national movement to “Diligently, thriftily build the country, and diligently thriftily manage the family” (qinjian jianguo, qinjian chijia 勤俭建国,，勤俭持家), the Two Diligences Movement, which linked homemakers to the new collective economy.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Two Diligences Movement encouraged women to practise thrift and conservation at a time when the availability of grain to rural inhabitants was on the decline.Footnote ⁵¹

Second, as collectivization intensified, rural women were increasingly being urged to take on responsibility for the collective work of the brigade, including wet rice and silkworm cultivation. Indeed, by 1956 some 90 per cent of women in Gaoshan were participating in production outside the home.Footnote ⁵² Villages across China emptied of men as they were mobilized to work on large construction projects. During the periods in which canal construction was taking place in Gaoshan, approximately 50 per cent of the villagers, mostly men, left the Mu Guiying Brigade to undertake this work. As a consequence of the rapidly expanding expectations placed upon women, the collectivization of housework became a more urgent priority for local women's heads.

Collectivization and the Two Diligences emerged as complementary strategies to increase production and control consumption. It was only during the autumn of 1958 when the dining halls first became mandatory that the language of the Two Diligences temporarily disappeared from official rhetoric. But it is important to remember that women and women's heads were largely expected to run the collective structures. Thus when grain reserves ran low in the spring of 1959, rural development policy once again incorporated household managers, both ordinary women and women's heads, as part of a strategy to rein in grain consumption.Footnote ⁵³ In sum, during the heyday of the Mu Guiying Brigade, local women were not only increasingly placed in charge of domestic production, but also of domestic consumption – all of this at a time when the site of the domestic realm itself was expanding.

Leader Yang, who became Brigade Party Secretary in 1957, presented a particularly vivid illustration of the domesticated brigade as a site of liberation. Since she had been recruited and trained as a Youth League member in 1953, she had served as a committee member of a lower stage agricultural producer co-operative, committee head of a higher stage agricultural producer co-operative, women's head, and Youth League Secretary. Prior to becoming Party Secretary, she said, she had found it challenging to implement equal pay for equal work because she lacked the authority of a primary cadre. After she became a Party Secretary, however, she found the work much easier. However, it was not just the fact that she was Party Secretary that facilitated her work, she told me, but that other women were running the brigade as well.

In this recollection, it was women's leadership that enabled the realization of equality within the brigade. Moreover, Yang's terminology of dangjia suggests a powerful image of managing the brigade as a household, an expression that she used in reference to the liberation of ordinary women as well. But the presence of fanshen, a word she also used frequently during our first interview, disrupts the maternalist flow of care. Indeed, she would repeatedly emphasize the intense hardship involved in being a leader at this time; she would also speak of the real suffering that ordinary women endured. The female leadership of the brigade may have enabled women to chulai 出来 or “emerge,” and thus fanshen, as she commented a moment later, but in so doing, individual families and the collective family itself began to crumble.

Numerous Gaoshan county archival reports from 1956 and 1957 speak of the high costs of successive years of collective mobilization: during the summer of 1956, for example, only 12,281 Gaoshan children were placed in childcare and kindergarten. A much larger number, 17,200, were looked after by relatives and neighbours, and 7,313 children were lacking any kind of “collective” care altogether.Footnote ⁵⁴ In 1956 alone some 131 children died accidentally from lack of supervision.Footnote ⁵⁵ According to Party Secretary Yang, the dismantling of family cooking stoves (“the hearth”) and the mobilization of canal construction teams during the early months of the Great Leap Forward were highly traumatic for many people, including some mothers who could not bear to leave their crying children behind.Footnote ⁵⁶ In 1959 and 1960, hunger beset the county and many women suffered from illness, including the horrific experience of uterine prolapse.Footnote ⁵⁷

In a sense, perhaps, it is most accurate to think of the expansion and destruction of the household during the Great Leap Forward as a simultaneous event that calls into question the coherence of Chinese socialist women's liberation itself. As the three women leaders of the Mu Guiying Brigade simultaneously practised different iterations of fanshen and dangjia, perceptions of home, loss and freedom would be significantly complicated by age, education and family status. They would also be complicated by the threat of starvation. The differing personalities, capacities and opportunities afforded the female leadership of the Mu Guiying Brigade reveal the fluid and complex ways in which they situated themselves in relation to the (impossible) task of liberating the “country woman.”

Written on the Body

Accountant Fan had had six years of primary education when she was recruited to record work points during collectivization in 1956. In the Great Leap Forward, she was first assigned to be an assistant accountant before being promoted to primary accountant. Fan recalled the challenge the women faced in amalgamating two natural villages into a brigade in 1958. Their youth was a significant drawback: Yang was only 20 and Fan just 19. Leader Lin, the Women's Head, on the other hand, was 27. Lin had been the first in the district to join a mutual aid team and was eventually recognized as a “pace-setting” mutual aid team head and awarded a cow for her efforts. She became Women's Head in 1956.

All three women expressed their deeply felt need to prove themselves capable despite their youth and gender. According to Yang, some on the brigade had questioned whether a “little girl” could become a brigade head, some thought her leadership strange and others initially dismissed her altogether.

Accountant Fan expressed very similar sentiments:

In her determination to prove herself Yang drew upon the Maoist conception of subjective initiative to outperform male workers and other male leaders.

For Yang, overcoming the limits of her female physiology was not a big deal. Despite the propagation of slogans that clearly warned of the health risks to menstruating women who worked in cold water, Yang plunged into canal construction during the early months of the Great Leap Forward.

Leader Lin, the Women's Head, also sought to defy local and official limitations on her body, although her perspectives on the liberating joys of household/collective management and on the limitations imposed by menstruation differed somewhat from Yang's. The somewhat contradictory perspectives of the two women may have arisen, in part, out of their very different family backgrounds. Whereas Leader Yang's activism took shape in the context of a Party family (her father had served as Head of the Peasant Union and several of her brothers were early Party members and cadres) and she was able to forestall marriage and motherhood until her late 20s, Lin was married and pregnant when she first emerged as an activist in 1950. Elected women's representative (funü daibiao 妇女代表) Lin threw herself into fieldwork. Her work horrified the local midwife, who was worried that other women might follow her example. “The old women in the village said I was spreading an evil wind, but the young people all wanted to learn how to do the work from me. I led the way.”

Lin's account of this period in her life focused on the gender reversal that took place between her and her father-in-law within a couple of years of joining her husband's household. When she first arrived she had little power; her new father-in-law not only demanded that she join him in the family fields but also that she sew for other people (a skill she did not have at the time). Within a year of Lin's husband's sudden death, however, Lin's father-in-law came to make a most unusual pact with her: he told her he would manage household affairs if she would manage the outside work.

In itself, for a father-in-law to transfer the responsibility of supporting the family on to the shoulders of a 22-year-old daughter-in-law is extraordinary. Lin explained to me that her father-in-law was able to overcome his reservations about the propriety of her working in the fields after he witnessed other women doing so. He also felt inadequate insofar as he was illiterate. It may be, however, that her father-in-law saw the real benefits to be accrued by a family member, even a young daughter-in-law, assuming leadership and status in the new political economy of the PRC. At that time, acquiring a cow would have been an incredible boon for a bereaved family struggling to make ends meet. But what I want to emphasize here is not simply that Lin's father-in-law permitted and encouraged her activism, but that, according to Lin, he seemingly inverted the gendered hierarchy of traditional authority. I suspect, although I am not able to confirm this, that Lin's particular narrative may have been constructed in the context of Lin's training, much in the same way that the histories of labour models were constructed in Shaanxi.Footnote ⁵⁹ Regardless, this particular re-telling had important implications for how Lin embodied her activism. For Lin, to be “outside” was tantamount to becoming a man.

In one of Lin's lengthy conversations with me, she described the challenges she faced in her early days as a co-operative leader. She particularly feared she would not be able to convince the older male villagers that she could do the work and as a consequence ended up planting more than 40 mu herself. She was so terrified that the crop would not grow that she obsessively checked on the fields with a torch at night. She also ceased menstruating.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the end, she told me, everything turned out “really well” and her father-in-law really believed in her ability to work. “I worked as fast as a man.”

Although Lin's narrative about her emergence as a leader emphasized the role of her in-laws, particularly her father-in-law, she nevertheless also emphasized that she “overcame hardship on her own.” As I learned in subsequent interviews, she separated from her in-laws when her son was seven years old (Lin said that her mother-in-law favoured Lin's nephews over her son), and for the most part single-handedly managed to care for her child with only occasional assistance from her former in-laws.

Like Yang, Lin was extremely proud of the achievements made by the Mu Guiying Brigade: “in our brigade women had the power” (women dui li shi nü de dang quan de 我们队里是女的当权的). She spoke of the brigade's determination to implement equal pay for equal work, and of the extreme happiness of ordinary women in 1958 when they were able to emerge and take charge (dangjia zuozhu le 当家做主了). But Lin was never able to fully embody the leadership she sought, despite the early encouragement and rewards. In her own words, she could not become a formal cadre (zhengshi ganbu 正式干部) because of the early death of her husband and the fact that she had a child to raise on her own (she chose not to re-marry until her son was grown in order to avoid the possibility of her son being mistreated): “I had no one at home. I had to do all of the housework.” When I mentioned that other women's heads had said to me “women's heads had it tough” she commented:

Ultimately, Lin's lack of decision-making power prevented her from participating in what she deemed the more exciting and manageable work as a leader during the Great Leap Forward: canal construction. Despite trying to convince the brigade leadership otherwise, she was assigned to “manage the elderly, women and children” at home, a job she considered far more onerous than leading work teams on the irrigation sites.

Lin's comments regarding the deficiencies of the brigade-as-household reveal some of the fundamental contradictions of the dangjia path of liberation. When she juxtaposes physically and ideologically strong young men against the “awful mess” at home, the brigade emerges as a feminized site of lack.Footnote ⁶¹ Lin's comments speak volumes about the status of woman-work and housework in the People's Republic: both were relied upon in policy but neither was really valued in practice. No matter how much Yang and Lin may have tried to implement an expanded domesticity of liberation, the ongoing denigration of household work within socialist construction barred its realization.Footnote ⁶²

The lack of access to education was a further barrier to liberation. To follow the path of dangjia, country women would have had to acquire new literacy skills and improve their level of ideological consciousness.Footnote ⁶³ But while the Great Leap Forward included much-publicized campaigns to increase the literacy levels of rural women, most women were far too overwhelmed with work to have time to attend study sessions, a finding consistent with Tong's findings on women's literacy attainments during this period.Footnote ⁶⁴ This was the case of one former production team leader I interviewed who would have liked to have become women's head but did not feel qualified because of her illiteracy and because she did not know how to ride a bike (and thus presumably get to meetings). “You can't do it if you aren't capable,” she said.Footnote ⁶⁵ Another woman I interviewed at the same time was also somewhat sceptical about the realization of sex equality after 1949. When I asked her if she had heard of feminism (nüquanzhuyi 女权主义) she remarkedFootnote ⁶⁶: “Feminism is when women manage the household (dangjia), today all women are in charge of the household. Things were better after Liberation when sex equality was advocated. Before Liberation when women had no power to speak, there was no point in women speaking.” But when I subsequently asked if she thought sex equality had been realized she said: “Things were hopeless before Liberation. Things were definitely unequal before Liberation. But after Liberation, it was mostly a lot of talk.”

At the same time, the path of fanshen was blocked to most country women as well. Given that the bodies of rural women were supposed to be protected, they were, by definition, foreclosed from liberation through fanshen unless they were able to transform themselves into sites of male heroism, as did Yang and Lin. In fact, many young women's bodies did transform when they ceased menstruating under the stress of overwork and severe malnutrition.Footnote ⁶⁷ But even then, they received little reward for their sacrifice. Despite Yang and Lin's insistence to the contrary, ordinary women on the brigade rarely received the same number of work points as men.Footnote ⁶⁸

How one practised liberation, and thus embodied funü, depended on a range of factors, not all of them stable. As Chen has suggested, CCP discourse was “rife with slippage from one body to another, one subject position to another.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Although Yang was functionally illiterate, a point Lin stressed at several points during our conversations, she fully inhabited the subjectivity of activist. Yang's full-bodied expression of Maoist activism, however, may have foreclosed the possibility of a shared appreciation of liberation among the ordinary women in the brigade. When I asked two women to evaluate Yang's leadership, they did not comment on her status as a woman leader but rather noted that she was a “hard worker” who did her job much better than did the current generation of leaders.Footnote ⁷⁰ Their lack of interest in Yang's gender or in the history of the Mu Guiying Brigade suggests that, unlike Yang, Lin and Fan, they did not celebrate their past through the lens of a shared socialist sisterhood.