Women in China

Just as the government of mainland China has undergone extensive change in the last 100 years, so have the women of China as they struggled to adapt to a changing political landscape. This paper will review the book Personal Voices (1988) by Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, and discuss some of the societal changes, as well as personal changes, that many women have gone through from pre-Liberation China to 1980s People's Republic of China (the time period covered in the book). Specifically this discussion will focus on the different roles that women have in society and how those may or may not have changed, as well as what progress has been made in establishing women's equality, and what setbacks that women have undergone in relation to equality and their respective roles.

According to the Honig and Hershatter, when the Chinese reflect on their history there are three eras to contemplate: feudal, or pre-Liberation China, Mao and the Cultural Revolution, and the current period of experimental market economy and working towards the Four Modernizations (agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense)(1988). In addition, China is a society where the roles of a person are as much a community decision as they are a private decision, despite the move towards more private freedoms. It is in this milieu that Chinese women must find their way as workers, intellectuals, mothers, wives, and contributors to the well-being of the stat

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ls Brigade. These were groups of young women, typically unmarried, who worked together in what had been considered male jobs: brick laying, building, laying roads, working on electrical and sewage conduits, as well as other heavy labor jobs. This was a period where equality meant the erasure of gender, or the idea that a woman could do a man's job (but a man was never asked to do a woman's job). The collective, or work unit, was considered more important than the family. During this time, not only were women not forced to marry, but many chose to defer marriage in order to have more time to give to the state in work and study (Honig and Hershatter, 1988). Free Market Economy and the Opening of China The opening of China and the relinquishing of full control over work units and local government, while allowing for more personal freedom, also changed women's roles once again. The opening up allowed for a backlash, supported by "scientific" studies discussing biological gender differences. The relative freedom of work units allowed them to fire women and replace them with men, thus proving that attitudes towards women had never truly changed. In fact, once farm collectives were disbursed back into the hands of families, th

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