This article is part of a large project on feminism in the People's Republic of China. Focusing on the flagship publication of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), Women of China, during the first 17 years of the PRC, I intend to recapture a past that had barely any chance to become known to the English-speaking world before it was “forgotten” in China.Footnote ¹ The article does not claim to be a comprehensive study of the magazine, which published 238 issues by the end of 1966.Footnote ² Rather it highlights a few of its features to illustrate socialist state feminists' cultural practices in the socialist revolution. The term “socialist state feminists” refers to women Communist Party members in powerful positions who consciously promoted women's empowerment and equality between men and women. Although many of these women may never have defined themselves as “feminist,” I use the term to distinguish them from Communists who had little commitment to gender equality, to establish a feminist genealogy in 20th-century China and to locate their activism in the context of global feminist movements.

Going further than previous scholarship on literary and visual representation of gender and class in popular arts and media of the Mao era,Footnote ³ this study extends a gender lens to the historical process of producing symbols, icons and discourses in the production of “CCP propaganda” or “Maoist gender discourse.” Aiming to address the concealment and erasure of a socialist feminist history, it treats Women of China as a dynamic site of feminist contention through revealing the behind-the-scenes stories that were crucial to understand feminist struggles in socialist China. It uses interviews with eight retired senior officials of the ACWF and three generations of editors of Women of China conducted in Beijing from 2006 to 2010, in addition to memoirs and biographies of women in the CCP published in the past two decades in China. Internal documents compiled by the ACWF since the late 1980s also provide indispensible contextualized information on the internal workings of the ACWF and the relationship between this gender-based mass organization and the Party.

Socialist state feminist practices express both identification with and divergence from the male-dominated power centre. Close attention to the ways in which state feminists identified with the Party Centre's agenda, quietly diverged from its imperatives or openly challenged sexism in the Party may help us understand how gender functioned in socialist state and ideological formation. This study is therefore an effort to redefine the Communist Party and socialist revolution by bringing women back to the centre stage. Communist women's innovative operation within the political system challenges the widely held assumptions of a “totalitarian state.” Indeed, precisely because of their faithful adherence to the Party's mass line (qunzhong luxian 群众路线), state feminists effectively created a public space that enabled diverse voices of women and men from different social and geographic locations to be heard. Their identification with the Party Centre could simultaneously empower and constrain them, a contradictory reality underlying their innovative strategies to realize their visions of women's liberation in the construction of a socialist China. Understanding their strategies and visions, I argue, holds the key to a fuller picture of the early PRC.

Women of China epitomized the complexity of socialist state feminist endeavours in multiple dimensions. It allows us to trace tension and contention between state feminists' persistent preoccupation with women's liberation and the Party Centre's rapidly shifting priorities in political, economic and military affairs, and between state feminists' attempts to follow the Party's agenda and their efforts to meet the demands of women of diverse social backgrounds in the socialist revolution. This article tackles the complicated entanglement of webs of relations and dynamic interplays of contradictions by focusing on the key players in the magazine, the shifts in its contents and the themes of the covers. Life stories of leading figures of the magazine are highlighted to add a personal dimension to their revolutionary performances. Special attention is paid to the discrepancies between the contents characterized by changing themes and formats as well as a multiplicity of voices, and the cover images representing consistent themes. The meanings of such discrepancies and disconnections present a key puzzle in my investigation of socialist state feminist efforts to build a feminist cultural front.

Leading Actors behind the Scenes

Women of China was the only national women's magazine to circulate continuously during the years before the Cultural Revolution.Footnote ⁴ The magazine first appeared in Yan'an on 1 June 1939 when the Communist Party was engaged in the resistance against Japan.Footnote ⁵ It suspended publication in 1942 but was revived in July 1949 as Women of New China, under a resolution of the First National Congress of Chinese Women on the eve of the founding of the PRC.Footnote ⁶ The magazine's editors in Yan'an and after 1949 were mainly from the cohort who joined the Communist Revolution in the 1930s. Women of New China was officially affiliated with the newly established All-China Women's Democratic Federation (ACWDF).Footnote ⁷ A member of the Executive Committee of the ACWDF and Director of the ACWDF's Propaganda and Education Department, Shen Zijiu 沈兹九 (1898–1989), was appointed the revived magazine's first editor-in-chief.

Shen belonged to the May Fourth generation. From a comfortable business family in Hangzhou, she attended the Provincial Girls Normal School in Zhejiang and taught in an elementary school after graduation. She married at 17 and had a daughter, but her marriage soon ended in tragedy when after graduating from the Philosophy Department of Beijing University her young husband died of typhoid during a visit home. Shen rejected the confinement of widowhood in her husband's wealthy family, and in 1921 went to study in Tokyo, leaving her daughter with her mother. She returned to China in 1925 where she continued to pursue an independent career by taking on teaching positions in Huangzhou. However, she found her identity as a “little widow” continued to attract unwanted attention so she decided to “overthrow the arch of chaste widowhood” by a second marriage.Footnote ⁸

Shen Zijiu's second husband was an official whose gender prejudices became intolerable to Shen and she ended her marriage in 1931.Footnote ⁹ Up to this point, Shen had consistently pursued May Fourth feminist ideals of gender equality and women's liberation by insisting on equality in marriage and maintaining an independent career. Her failed second marriage, the Japanese invasion in 1931 and the bankruptcy of her father's silk company prompted her to look for a new direction in life. She went to Shanghai where she was hired by Zhongshan Culture and Education Institution to translate Japanese articles for the journal Collection of Current Affairs (Shishi leibian 时事类编). She shared a rental house with her film director brother Shen Xiling 沈西苓 and extended her circle of friends, most of whom were left-oriented young intellectuals and underground Communists. After a year working as a translator she was invited to edit The Women's Garden (Funü yuandi 妇女园地), a newly created weekly supplement of the Shanghai News (Shen bao 申报). This new position marked a turning point in Shen's life.

In the initial issue of The Women's Garden published on 18 February 1934, Shen revealed her discontent with the outcome of the May Fourth feminism to which she had adhered. Alongside her criticism of emancipated and intellectual women for their concerns with modern trends, love and the arts, her descriptions of the hardship suffered by rural women and female factory workers expressed a strong sympathy with women of lower classes. The Women's Garden, she stated, was a space for women to raise their demands and to pour out their sufferings. Shen soon found herself busy receiving young women visitors who wanted to contribute to this work and, supported by their links with the underground Communists, she moved on to found the magazine Women's Life (Funü shenghuo 妇女生活) when the weekly supplement was suspended by the Nationalist government in 1935.Footnote ¹⁰

Women's Life swiftly made Shen Zijiu a celebrity. As a leading activist in mobilizing women's participation in the national salvation movement, she attended the 1938 Lu Mountain meeting of women organized by Song Meiling 宋美龄, after which she became head of the cultural affairs group in the reorganized New Life Movement Women Supervision Committee. In this role, she became involved in promoting a coalition of women of different classes and political persuasions for the resistance, and in running literacy classes and political training workshops for women factory workers. Shen formally joined the CCP in 1939 and in 1940 Zhou Enlai, having decided to maintain her public identity as a non-partisan social activist, assigned her to assist Hu Yuzhi 胡愈之, a renowned writer, translator and journal editor and a CCP member since 1922, working among overseas Chinese in Singapore for the resistance war. Shen married Hu and during the post-war years the couple worked together to set up the South Sea Press, publishing progressive journals to reach overseas Chinese. They returned to China in 1948. Shen became editor-in-chief of Women of New China and her husband was appointed the first director of the State Publishing Bureau in the PRC.Footnote ¹¹ Lending much prestige to the new magazine, Shen's appointment guaranteed the transmission of a feminist heritage originating with the May Fourth era.

Women's Life also introduced many middle and high school girls to the CCP, some of whom became Shen's colleagues in Women of New China and the ACWF after 1949. Among them was Shen's successor in the magazine, Dong Bian 董边 (1916–98). Discrimination and mistreatment accompanied Dong's childhood. The third daughter of a small landlord in Shanxi province, she was blamed for her family's misfortune to fail to produce a son. She started to work in the fields and do chores at home at the age of five. After four years' elementary school, Dong staged a hunger strike to protest against her father's decision not to allow her to continue her education. Her father relented and she went on to complete her primary and middle school education in Xin county. As the only girl in her class, she went alone to Taiyuan to take high school entrance exams and was accepted by Taiyuan Girls High School, an elite school in the capital of Shanxi province. The quiet poor student from a small village excelled in her class and she dreamed of going on to Beijing University and, like Shen Zijiu whom she had come across in the pages of Women's Life, of becoming an educated independent woman.Footnote ¹²

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, a crucial event that drove numerous young students out of schools and into the resistance to save China, decisively changed the course of Dong Bian's life. Intellectually and politically stimulated by the feminism and nationalism advocated in Women's Life, she joined the Eighth Route Army in 1938. She stayed in Yan'an for eight years and excelled as a student at the Women's University and Yan'an University. She was selected to work in the Party Central Political Research Office in 1941, the only woman researcher in her group. There she met Tian Jiaying 田家英 (1922–66), a talented young writer and recent divorcé from Chengdu. Dong and Tian's romance was nurtured by their shared political and intellectual concerns, and when Tian proposed to Dong, she raised three conditions before agreeing to marriage: “First, family affairs should be decided by the woman; second, help each other and progress together; third, feelings for each other should not be estranged because of transfer of posts.” Tian accepted all three conditions and they married in 1942. Tian kept his promise, and when Dong decided in 1944 to leave her new-born son with a village woman in order to pursue her work, he agreed to her decision.

Dong was assigned to various posts in charge of local district Party branches or land reform work in the Jidong area of Henan province, separated from Tian for three years. At the end of 1948 they reunited in Xibaipo, the new location of the CCP Central Committee. Tian was assigned a new post as Chairman Mao Zedong's secretary, and Dong was assigned to study at the Party's school. However, with her activist commitments, Dong wanted to engage in grassroots work, and the opportunity came when Deng Yingchao issued her an invitation.Footnote ¹³ Dong was assigned to the editorial of the new magazine Women of New China and, tutored by her idol Shen Zijiu, swiftly rose to the position of deputy editor-in-chief. After Shen was transferred to the Chinese Democratic Alliance in 1956, Dong became editor-in-chief, a position to which she devoted unswerving energy until 1966.Footnote ¹⁴

During her 17 years' tenure in the magazine, Dong Bian wrote numerous articles, initially under her own name but then, as was standard practice at the time, anonymously as part of the “the editorial group” or “reporter of the journal” after she became the deputy editor-in-chief. Shen Zijiu's name also only appeared once as an author in an early issue. In an era when being an anonymous hero was the promoted behavioural norm, Dong remained unknown to the general public. In any case, fame and fortune were not in her vocabulary. Writing editorials and essays for publication or drafting work reports for the ACWF were simply part of her responsibilities. She was also extremely frugal in her lifestyle, for example preferring to take the bus to work rather than the chauffeur-driven car to which as an official she was entitled.Footnote ¹⁵ Her “Yan'an-style” leadership brought huge savings to the press of Women of China. She was also responsible for initiating the compilation of the history of the Chinese women's movement by the ACWF after the Cultural Revolution. She edited many volumes of memoirs of “elder sisters,” the Communist women leaders of the first cohort who died in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her extraordinary efforts for these publications in her old age demonstrated her determination to produce a women's history of the Chinese revolution. However she never wrote a memoir of herself. Self-effacement, a characteristic “virtue” of Dong Bian and many other Communist women leaders, contributed to the concealment of these important historical actors.

Making a Popular Women's Magazine in Socialist China

For these activists, the founding of the PRC marked the beginning of a long-awaited time when women's liberation would no longer be put on the back burner. The mission statement of Women of New China made it clear that the magazine aimed to “help its readers correctly and comprehensively understand the way to achieve women's liberation in new China.”Footnote ¹⁶ It also did not hesitate to call on women's active participation in socialist revolution and socialist construction since this was understood as the way to achieve women's liberation. With the double theme of “participation” and “liberation,” adopting the Party's mass line as the guiding method, the magazine soon evolved into a public forum for state feminists to express their visions of a new socialist China as well as a major site for their discursive practice in the pursuit of women's liberation.

Shen Zijiu played a major role in fashioning the socialist feminist magazine in its initial stage. It was Shen who insisted that the magazine be financially self-supporting. In her memoir, Dong Bian reveals that Shen was discontented with the initially stagnant sales of the magazine when the People's Press managed its publishing and marketing.Footnote ¹⁷ Establishing a financially independent Press of Women of New China thus suggested Shen's vision of a women's cultural space exclusively run by the ACWDF, not bogged down by other state-run institutions that were beyond their control. Women of New China became financially self-reliant in 1953, the point at which the state stopped its subsidies. Once it had its own marketing networks, sales of the magazine rose rapidly from 10,000 copies for its first issue in 1949 to over 300,000 in 1955 and close to one million in the 1960s. By then subscriptions had to be restricted because of a shortage of paper. Some 95 per cent of the sales went to individual subscribers and retail, and the rest went to the government and the Women's Federation system. It ranked among the top four magazines in the Mao era.Footnote ¹⁸ In February 1967 when the magazine suspended its publication in the Cultural Revolution, the press had a surplus of 600,000 yuan, considerable wealth at the time.Footnote ¹⁹

What accounted for this rapid increase in circulation during the pre-Cultural Revolution Years? What mechanisms were set up to promote the magazine's popularity besides its effective marketing? Changes in the content suggest editors' constant exploration to extend its influence. At the founding of the PRC, 95 per cent of women in China were illiterate. Constrained by this reality, the magazine set out to target two groups of women: those with a middle-school education and above and government officials at the county level and above. Although it was primarily designed as a vehicle for women officials to exchange their experiences in women-work,Footnote ²⁰ the magazine also emphasized educating literate women and transforming them into new women in socialist new China. In order to expand women's intellectual horizons and transform their world views as well as way of living, Women of New China allocated significant space to domestic and international political affairs (activities of the Women's International Democratic Federation were highlighted to connect Chinese women with the international women's movement and to forge global sisterhood),Footnote ²¹ Marxist theory and Chinese women's history, in addition to brief reports of how women workers, peasants or urban women students took the new road of becoming socialist new women.

This pedantic or even dogmatic form of education might be adequate for the already “converted,” that is, women CCP members in official posts who were expected to use the magazine as teaching material in training women in diverse locations, thus repeating the format of Women's Life that targeted urban educated women in the 1930s. The urban focus, though, had a different historical context now that the Party was shifting its attention from rural-based warfare to urban-based industrialization. The magazine's mission statement reflects the Party's agenda by centring on the importance of women workers and urban industry.

However, these urban-focused editorial policies were soon questioned by readers of the magazine. In response to a request for feedback, the Advocacy Department of the Shan-Gan-Ning Women's Federation sent in two letters that were published in the May 1950 issue. A large-size font in bold in the contents highlighted the special column “Critical views of Women of New China.”Footnote ²²

The first letter, signed by the Advocacy and Education Department of the Shan-Gan-Ning Women's Federation, stated that in order to provide suggestions for Women of New China, the Department hosted a special meeting to collect feedback from all women officials. At the top of the list of nine concrete suggestions is a critique of the journal's urban orientation. “The allocation of the space in the magazine tilts more towards the urban than the rural. We hope you will try your best to increase space on the rural without neglecting the urban work.” More impressively, the letter devoted a large part to describing how the Department reviewed its own work and found its own faults in reporting rural and ethnic minority women. The Department had only contributed four reports on women in the north-west region, and of these “not even a single report was on rural and ethnic minority women in the north-west region. We have to seriously admit our own responsibility for this shortcoming.” To redress this problem, the Department set up mechanisms such as submitting one contribution to the magazine each month on women in the north-west region, and developing a grassroots network of correspondents in the whole region to enable adequate reporting of rural women, in addition to plans of active involvement in marketing the magazine.

The second letter signed with a single author's name, Li Qiyang 李屺阳 (1918–), gave a detailed analysis of the magazine's column on texts for teaching literacy to workers and peasants. The author pointed out that the texts were detached from rural women's lives and the explanation of large political concepts were probably suitable for women officials but beyond the comprehension of women with little education. “In short, the literacy texts for workers and peasants are not suitable for the rural society. But in today's China the great majority of Chinese women are rural women. I think in the future it would be best if popular teaching texts in Women of New China take into consideration the great majority of women in the country.”

Li Qiyang, 32 years old in 1950 and a Party member for 13 years, had worked for a long time among rural women in the north-west region including Yan'an and was the director of the Advocacy and Education Department of the Shan-Gan-Ning Women's Federation (soon renamed North-west Women's Federation). It was apparently she who organized the meeting to review their own work on the representation of women in the region under their jurisdiction and made effective plans and suggestions for improving both Women of New China and the work of her own Department. In 1951 Li also founded the first women's pictorial in the PRC, The Northwest Women's Pictorial, targeting illiterate rural women. Rural women could barter one egg for one copy of the Pictorial. In 1952 she was promoted to the position of interim director of the Advocacy Department of the ACDWF, suggesting that the editors of Women of New China appreciated both her constructive suggestions and her work in the North-west Women's Federation. In any case, it was Shen Zijiu who had introduced the high-school graduate Li Qiyang to the Communist camp of resistance back in 1937.Footnote ²³

What is especially notable here is that the leadership of the magazine initiated the solicitation of readers' criticisms prior to the Party Centre's similar action. The CCP Central Committee issued a formal decision on 19 April 1950. “The Decision on Starting Criticism and Self-criticism in Newspapers and Journals” pointed out that the Party held political power across the entire country, but that shortcomings and mistakes in its work might very easily jeopardize people's interests: its leadership position could induce conceitedness, and result in rejection and suppression of criticism. Therefore, the Central Committee decided to call for people's open criticism “of all the mistakes and shortcomings in our work in all the public occasions among the people and masses, especially in newspapers and journals.”Footnote ²⁴ It is unclear if the top Party leaders got the idea from their wives in the ACDWF who had started such action four months earlier. However, the editors of Women of New China felt it necessary to emphasize that they had started the review process long before the Party Centre's decision. The August 1950 issue included a “One-year summary of Women of New China monthly journal” by the editorial board. It stressed that editing a magazine for such a diverse readership was very challenging, and the editors knew they must have many shortcomings. Therefore, “before April this year we had already arranged review work.” Now following the Party's decision, they decided to engage in a more thorough process of criticism and self-criticism. The summary was a product of this process.Footnote ²⁵ The case demonstrates that these state feminists were far from passive followers of the Party Centre. In their devotion to the cause of women's liberation their agency and initiatives often placed them in the vanguard of the Party. The Party's decision in 1950, however, also reflects the ethos in the CCP at the initial stage of its tenure as a state power holder.

The most visible improvement of the magazine following Li Qiyang's constructive criticism is expressed in the appearance of rural women on the cover. Before the May 1950 issue there had been no cover images representing rural women. But afterwards images of rural and ethnic minority women exceeded images of women workers, becoming the most prominent cover themes throughout the Mao era. This shift in representational orientation, preceding the central government's shifting attention to rural collectivization, demonstrates the advocacy of lower-ranking women officials in the cultural representation of women in the periphery. Although illiterate rural women and women who belonged to ethnic minorities were unlikely to read the magazine (let alone submit their opinions), local women officials did keep these women's interests in mind.

From June 1950 on, the covers of Women of New China portrayed an array of images of smiling rural and ethnic minority women holding bundles of grain or vegetables, carrying baskets of cotton or dirt, operating tractors or engaging in agricultural experiments, or attending the highest state conventions and even toasting Chairman Mao at a state banquet. This contributed to the formation of a new symbolic order that unambiguously disrupted deeply entrenched gender, class and ethnic hierarchies.Footnote ²⁶ The constant appearance of such images on the cover conveyed a powerful message that women of the labouring class, or to use the widely circulated term at the time, laodong renmin 劳动人民 (labouring people), were now the dignified masters of new China. Proudly adorned in peasant outfits when mixing with state officials or urban labour models, rural women exuded confidence and self-assurance. There was no trace of anxiety of being seen as “backward” or “rustic” (土). Rhetorical schemes of “othering” by the urban elite would not become dominant until the post-Mao era when class realignment was in motion and modernity was redefined as Westernization. The images of rural and ethnic women prominently presented in the official media are historical evidence of a time when socialist state feminists were striving towards their Communist goal of eliminating gender, class and ethnic inequalities in China.

To increase the appeal of the magazine, the editors also set out to organize three groups, or in their term “three troops” (sanzhi duiwu 三支队伍). The first was the troop of correspondents. Women of New China expanded its local networks of correspondents to include women and men working at the rural county cultural centres. By August 1950 there were already over 1,300 correspondents nationwide. To raise the quality of reports from the grassroots, the magazine ran periodic training workshops. The second was the troop of readers. With the assistance of local Women's Federations, editors regularly hosted meetings of readers' groups in urban and rural areas to hear readers' feedback after the publication of each issue. The third was the troop of professional writers and artists. The magazine regularly solicited literary and art works from renowned professional writers and artists to enhance its appeal; cartoons, for example, emerged in 1955 as a welcome device for criticizing erroneous ideas and practices. The magazine's prestige is shown by the frequent contributions from famous writers and artists. Literature editor Duan Yongqiang 段永强 (1932–) proudly recalls how easy it was for him to solicit articles from famous writers,Footnote ²⁷ and art editor Shi Yumei 时玉梅 (1925–) who graduated from the Central Arts Academy fully utilized her social network to solicit top artists' paintings sometimes without having to pay.Footnote ²⁸

To guarantee the magazine's connection with the masses, a group of four editors was responsible for compiling summaries from readers' letters each month as the basis for editorial decision-making for the following issue. About 80 per cent of the space of each issue was designated to readers' letters and contributions from local correspondents and professional writers who produced short stories and biographies of heroines. The remaining 20 per cent was for editors' articles. Editors were also required to do fieldwork in rural villages and urban factories periodically, in line with the Party's tenet “from the masses and to the masses.Footnote ²⁹ Hou Di 侯狄 (1924–), who joined the editorial board in 1954 and became the deputy editor-in-chief in 1956, remembered what Dong Bian often emphasized:

In my interviews with Hou Di over a span of three years, she never failed to emphasize the mass line and attributed the popularity of the magazine to editors' persistent pursuit of “making the magazine close to the life of the women masses.”

A major innovation in engaging a broad range of women readers occurred almost by accident. In 1954, Shen Zijiu, reading through submitted articles, found one reporting on the suicide of a woman official. Yang Yun had been separated from her husband by ten years of war, and committed suicide when she eventually found her beloved husband only to discover that he had just remarried. Shen decided to create a forum discussing “Why did Yang Yun commit suicide?” as a way to guide women towards a revolutionary outlook on marriage and the pursuit of the revolutionary cause. Publicizing a Party member's suicide was unprecedented in official magazines. Readers responded with vehement and diverse opinions on Yang Yun and her husband and sales rocketed from 117,000 to 340,000 copies during the five months when the debate was going on.Footnote ³¹

Once the format of inviting readers to participate in debate had proved an effective way to extend the magazine's influence, the themes were not limited to shaping women's revolutionary outlook. A few months after the conclusion of public discussions on the suicide case, Hou Di, then the head of the editorial group for readers' letters, brought to the attention of the editorial committee a letter from a woman teacher Liu Lequn 刘乐群 condemning her high-ranking official husband's affair with a young woman. Liu's case could be characterized as representative at a time when many male Communist officials were busy changing wives after they entered urban areas (replacing old with young, rural with urban and illiterate with educated women). Hou Di, at the time 31, and her colleagues of the same cohort “all felt the tendency repulsive.” She explained in the interview: “In the base areas the gender ratio was sometimes one woman to 100 men. So those men would feel lucky to just get hold of a woman. But upon liberation they wanted to change wives. We in the editorial committee sneered at the phenomenon as ‘replacing a donkey with a horse (qi lü huan ma 骑驴换马)’.”

This sentiment was also shared by the senior cohort. After verifying the validity of Liu Lequn's accusation, Shen Zijiu approved the exposé to be the focus of a daring forum “Why was our conjugal relationship broken?” in order to “educate people to establish Communist morality in marriage and family.”Footnote ³² But when the husband Luo Baoyi 罗抱一 learned of this, he pleaded with the editors not to publish Liu Lequn's letter, promising that he would not divorce her. The top executive official of the ACDWF, Zhang Yun 章蕴 (1905–98) had a meeting with Liu Lequn and said that the ACDWF would leave it to her to assess if her husband genuinely wanted to fix their marriage or if this was just a ploy to avoid the exposé. Liu decided that it was the latter. Consequently, the sensational forum featuring Liu's original letter appeared in the November 1955 issue.

Readers' response was phenomenal. The number of letters soared from around 4,000 to over 8,000 each month over the eight months of the forum, and sales totalled over half a million in 1956. One thousand copies sold out instantly in front of a department store in Wangfujing, the heart of the business district in Beijing, when a shop clerk loudly hawked that Women of New China had printed a story on the morally degenerate assistant to the Minister of International Trade.Footnote ³³ When asked if they had any apprehension about criticizing a prevailing phenomenon among high-ranking male officials, Hou Di replied: “No. We were young and simple-minded. Unlike people today worrying about this and that, we just wanted to speak out against whatever we thought was wrong. We were bold and fearless.”Footnote ³⁴ However, they also used careful strategy. The editors solicited strong support from high-ranking male officials who had stable marriages and resented the tendency to change wives since it tarnished the image of the Party. The forum included essays by Xie Juezai 谢觉哉, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and Xie Xuegong 解学恭, the Party Secretary of the Ministry of International Trade where the accused husband worked, condemning “bourgeois individualism” and calling for Party members to uphold “Communist morality.” To obtain a contribution from the Chief Justice, an editor waited at the gate of the Supreme Court for hours until he stepped out of his office.

Rather than a one-dimensional tool for educating women to form a socialist outlook, the exposé of a male official's affair highlighted another dimension of the magazine. It demonstrated how state feminists used the dominant political language (in this case “Communist morality education”) to shift the magazine's target of education and legitimize their gender critique of what was quite a prevalent sexual practice among male officials. This manoeuvre revealed the continuation of the gendered tensions in the Party that had been generated by the new Marriage Law of 1950. Many Communist women had feared that the new law's radical clause of unconditional divorce would put their marriages in jeopardy; in conditions of gender inequality and double sexual standards, freedom of divorce was more likely to benefit men with power and money and place divorced women in a predicament. The trend for male officials to “change wives” in the early 1950s proved the validity of their fear.Footnote ³⁵ Although the editors involved in the exposé all had stable marriages, their enthusiastic participation in the forum demonstrated their resentment of the Party's double standards of sexual morality. Their tactful yet conservative appeal to “Communist morality” expressed their desire to exercise some leverage in a system of unequal sexual power relations.

“Educating Society about Women”

In sharp contrast to the shifting themes and multiple voices of the contents, the covers of Women of China presented a consistently stable theme throughout the 1950s and 1960s: the celebration of women's work in all walks of life. Placing working women in the centre of visual representation of socialist women has multiple meanings. It suggests the identification of women with the project of socialist state building by highlighting their diverse public roles, celebrates their contribution to socialist construction, and by extension glorifies and elevates the work they perform, no matter how ordinary, thus raising them to the rank of the leading class of the socialist polity.

The magazine's cover images of urban women during the 1950s depict them almost always in roles previously associated with men. They include the first woman locomotive operator Tian Guiying 田桂英, the first group of women pilots, a housewife-turned-brick layer, a ship's captain, a shipping company's electrician, the head of a shift in a power distribution station, and so on. These images can be interpreted in several ways. First, as Tina Mai Chen has argued, images of seemingly emancipated women were invoked to symbolize broader transformation in the new socialist China.Footnote ³⁶ Second, they can be understood as a means to inspire women readers to move beyond their familiar domestic environment to participate in industrialization. However, when we look more closely at the political and economic context in which these images were produced, a very different interpretation emerges: that they were part of a concerted effort by state feminists to challenge sexism inside and outside the Party.

In the early 1950s the economy was only just beginning to recover from the devastation of wars and depletion of capital. The unemployment rate was high. Urban unemployed women, especially the lower classes who desperately needed a wage to support their families, wanted to be gainfully employed in socialist construction.Footnote ³⁷ However, the road to women's liberation was blocked by Communist officials. The problem was so rampant that Deng Yingchao had to make a strong appeal to the Party Centre to redress it. At a national conference on ideological work hosted by the Central Committee in July 1951, Deng pointed out the seriousness of “feudal thinking” that was often reflected in the minds of Party members and officials.

To address this grave situation, Deng proposed that the Party's ideological work should “use Marxist Leninist theory and Mao Zedong thought to engage in the struggle against feudal thinking, against its various forms of restricting and confining women, resolutely break the notion that ‘women can do nothing,’ and replace it with the view that ‘women can do everything’.” She emphasized that such educational work should first be conducted among Communist Party officials:

The sharp critical tone illuminates the prestige Deng herself enjoyed as a senior Party member and wife of Premier Zhou Enlai. However her critique demonstrates the fissured nature of the Party. Although conceptually women's liberation had been on the Party's platform from its inception, institutionally male officials blocked women's entry into the public domain. Obviously, the deeply entrenched gender regime based on differential labour and the spatial division between men and women did not evaporate upon the CCP's assumption of state power. On the contrary, as Deng exposed, the gender regime remained entrenched in the minds of many CCP officials. A cartoon in Women of China in 1956 entitled “Three women are not as good as one man” vividly captures how women often encountered dismissals. An arrogant male official tells the first woman: “You have too much housework. You should resign and go home!” He says to the second woman holding a sick leave request: “No, you cannot ask for rest. You should resign!” To the third woman who is pregnant, he says: “Pregnancy affects production. You should resign!” He is finally relieved when he succeeds in maintaining an all-male working environment. “Now we can guarantee our work.”Footnote ⁴⁰

It was during this important talk that Deng Yingchao articulated a tenet that would become a guideline for the ACWF's advocacy: “Educating women about society and educating society about women.” Party officials became an important part of “the society” that state feminists proceeded to educate and transform. It was obviously a difficult mission to accomplish judging from the many exposés of discrimination against women published in Women of New China in the first half of the 1950s. On 6 March 1957, Deng went to the CCP's national conference on ideological work to call again on Party officials to “establish the notion that the whole Party should be involved in women-work; to establish the notion that ‘women can do everything’ in ideological and educational work.”Footnote ⁴¹ At this time state feminists still had to fight hard battles to crack open male-dominated gainful employment for women, especially lower-class women. As observed in recent scholarship, for many women the Great Leap Forward in 1958 was a watershed in Chinese women's liberation.Footnote ⁴²

The intense gender struggle depicted by Deng Yingchao, in the form of a teleological battle between rising socialism and declining feudalism, cautions us to learn to decode feminist language in order to trace state feminists' discursive manoeuvres. “Feudalism” was one of the three “big mountains” that the CCP avowed to overthrow. After 1949 it could claim the accomplishment of toppling the other two, “imperialism and bureaucratic capitalism,” and Deng legitimately highlighted the remaining one. However, her usage of the word “feudalism” in this context was similar to what we mean today by a combination of “sexism,” “patriarchy,” “masculinism” and “misogynist.” Once this is understood, socialist state feminist texts can be read in a different light. Rather than deviating openly from the Party line, state feminists invoked an item high on the agenda of the Party, anti-feudalism, to legitimize their gender-specific claims. It is in such simultaneous congruence of rhetoric and deviation in meaning that state feminists were most effective in inserting their own agenda or transforming and expanding definitions of Party lines. The rapid adoption of “feudalism” (fengjian zhuyi 封建主义), “feudal thinking” (fengjian sixiang 封建思想) or the abbreviation “feudal” (fengjian 封建) with a gender inflection in everyday speech even by illiterate rural women attested to the considerable success of state feminists' strategy in the socialist state propaganda.

Deng's talk as well as many articles and cartoons in the magazine indicate that images of women breaking gender barriers in employment were a representational device of state feminists to “resolutely break the notion that ‘women can do nothing’.” The cover of the magazine was a cultural forum in which state feminists deliberately engaged in a gender struggle when they represented women as versatile and capable socialist constructors. This understanding helps explain the huge discrepancy between a single-minded focus on celebrating women's accomplishments in social production and the diverse subjects responding to women's needs in daily life in the contents of the magazine. On the cover images child-care, care for the old or serving food were rare. When they did appear, such images always depicted women in the context of collective facilities such as daycare centres or canteens, mostly in the Great Leap Forward. They expressed socialist feminist advocacy of socialization of housework.

When I asked Hou Di why the covers never showed women's domestic life during the Mao era, she replied instantly: “At that time we never thought about that. It is hard to imagine how low women's status was at that time!” She recalled a letter from a reader who challenged the magazine's propagation of equality between men and women by saying “women are like flying a kite under the bed” (that is as high as they can go). “That saying incensed me so much,” Hou Di emphasized, “that I still remember it clearly today.”Footnote ⁴³ So much was at stake in visually representing women that the editors used the precious space of the cover as a window display to convey the important message “women can do everything, and do well in the public arena!” This motive was also behind their decision to use photographs for the covers, a practice conspicuously different from other journals at the time. In Hou Di's words: “Real people and real deeds have stronger impact on people in our advocacy.”

Hou Di's unhesitating reply that the editors had never thought about visually representing women in a domestic setting deserves further probing. At one level, it illuminates the primary understanding of women's liberation by this cohort of state feminists. Women's liberation, according to Engels, was based on women's participation in social production in an economic system of public ownership. In the past three decades feminists both inside and outside China have criticized the applicability of this simplistic thesis to the practices of Chinese women's liberation in the Mao era. However in the specific cultural context of new socialist China, socialist state feminists confronted two interlocking imperatives: the move from the control of private ownership of a conjugal family to an autonomy enabled by financial independence through socialized productive work, and a revolution to destroy a gender regime based on the spatial differentiation of nei/wai (inner/outer). Socialist public ownership did not automatically undo gender segregation. Male officials blocking women's entrance into the public domain had less to do with economic profitability than with maintaining the gender order. In other words, a Marxist project of women's “participation in social production” generated powerful locally grounded dynamics and resistance. Lacking analytical tools other than the all-encapsulating term “feudalism” to confront mounting challenges and obstacles, socialist state feminists forged ahead with their innovative daily practices, including grabbing any representational space available to propagate women's accomplishments in the public arena.

The radical implications of repeated visual representations of labouring women can be further explored with reference to recent scholarship on women and gender in China. Joan Judge locates the disruption of “the regime of feminine virtue” of the Qing Dynasty at the turn of the 20th century when women of the elite class ventured outside the domestic confines by attending girls' schools, going abroad and becoming involved in revolutionary activities. The public appearance of elite women changed the gender norm that associated chastity, the highest virtue for women, with domestic seclusion.Footnote ⁴⁴ Louise Edwards demonstrates how elite women used their privilege of education to legitimize their demand for equal rights to political participation in the first part of the 20th century, since historically the right to rule was linked with the privilege of education of male literati.Footnote ⁴⁵ These and many more works on the Republic era have shown clearly that women of the elite class successfully challenged gender segregation, gaining respectability in public domains in metropolises. But for lower class women, both rural and urban, the gender regime of feminine virtue continued when the PRC was founded. As Gail Hershatter and Lisa Rofel demonstrate, performing manual labour outside the home, either in the fields or in the factory, jeopardized a woman's chastity and reputation.Footnote ⁴⁶ Within this context, the meanings of socialist state feminists' exclusive visual representation of labouring women in the public domain become clearer. It manifests their keen sensitivity to what trapped the great majority of Chinese women: an intertwined regime of gender and class that placed women doing manual labour outside the home at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Thus it was inconceivable for that cohort of feminists to use images that located a woman inside the home as a signifier of women's liberation.

Meaningful Discrepancies

The gap between the contents and the cover of the magazine had another dimension. The cover did not always keep pace with the political tempo while the contents generally followed the Party's imperatives by assigning at least an editorial in each issue to discuss the main government decrees. An example of visible dissonance can be found in 1957. The Anti-Rightist Campaign charged ferociously through urban China beginning in mid-May 1957. On 22 May, the ACWF held a meeting to inform all the officials and staff in the headquarters of the significance of the campaign.Footnote ⁴⁷ The cover of the June issue belied this new political agenda, featuring a baby girl looking at a little chick. The ACWF followed the Women's International Democratic Federation decision to make 1 June International Children's Day in China, and the June cover of a baby was also an indirect expression celebrating motherhood.

If the June cover had an uncompromising prerogative, what about the following issues when the Anti-Rightist campaign intensified? The cover of the July issue portrays a smiling woman hairdresser serving a young girl. Readers would have been totally unprepared for the intense animosity and harsh condemnation of rightists in the contents. Throughout the political storm of the campaign, the magazine steadfastly adhered to its principle of visual representation, celebrating women role models or ordinary women living a new life. Only the cover of the November issue diverged from this theme. It is a painting of a Russian girl and a Chinese girl jointly saluting the image of Lenin to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The cover's attention to the international political events makes the indifference to domestic politics even more puzzling.

The art editor Shi Yumei solved the puzzle when I asked her about the editorial decisions that led to the cute baby picture in June 1957. First she told me proudly that she took the picture and the baby was her neighbour's child. Then I questioned further:

This instance of the omission of a rampant political campaign in the magazine's visual representation thus largely reflects Shi Yumei's personal tastes and political position, which were shared by the editors-in-chief who had the final say on the cover. It is worth noting that the absence of the anti-rightist campaign was also a feature of the covers of Youth of China, the Communist Youth League's journal, though its covers generally demonstrated a conscious effort to follow the Party's main agenda.

Meaningful discrepancies can be found between the covers of Women of China and those of Youth of China. The covers of four issues of Women of China in 1952 used a sketch in charcoal portraying the trio of the worker/peasant/soldier, a familiar subject in a familiar format. However, all three figures on the covers of Women of China are female. The absence of men in this otherwise familiar trio reveals a clear feminist rejection of male-centred visual representation in socialist China. The trio in Youth of China are usually men and if a woman is included she unfailingly represents the peasant, standing either on the side or behind the male worker.Footnote ⁴⁸ Her gendered subordination is conveniently deployed in representing the subtle hierarchy among the leading classes of the proletarian socialist state. The image was so prevalent and pervasive that no one could imagine what it would look like if a woman replaced the male worker who was always positioned in the centre. Hence the all-women trio on the covers of Women of China represented a significant feminist challenge to the hegemonic symbol of the Mao era, a symbol that simultaneously signifies a conscious transformation of the class order and an unconscious continuation of gender hierarchy.

Further evidence of a Chinese socialist feminist consciousness comes from photographs of women militias on the covers of both magazines. Such pictures became popular after the publication of Mao's poem on women militias in 1961. The militia photographs in Youth of China always portray the women under the guidance of men, highlighting their subordination.Footnote ⁴⁹ But covers of Women of China consistently place women militias in the centre and autonomous. When I showed the images from Youth of China to Shi Yumei, she responded immediately, “Hmm, giving prominence to men again. I would never select such a picture. And even if I did, our leader [Dong Bian] would never approve of it. Our magazine is Women of China. We gave prominence to women. On this issue we [Shi and Dong] held identical views.”

Before the Cultural Revolution, editors of Women of China controlled the magazine as their turf, a space where they created a distinctive socialist feminist visual culture. It was not until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in mid-1966 that they discontinued the representational device of extolling women's diverse accomplishments. When I asked Shi Yumei why Chairman Mao's images replaced women labour models, she replied: “For the sake of safety. Even top Party leaders were frequently condemned. We could not guarantee [the political stability of] any labour model. So it was the safest thing to do to put images of Chairman Mao on the cover. Besides,” she added candidly, “I very much worshipped Chairman Mao, too. I had experienced the old society and was very grateful to him for the changes in new China, despite my own political frustrations.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The monopoly of Chairman Mao on the cover, a prominent example of how state feminists followed the political norm of the day, announced the collapse of the feminist cultural front created by state feminists of the ACWF.Footnote ⁵¹