Women, Resistance and Revolution (30 page)

The manner in which feminism interacted with a revolutionary consciousness is well illustrated in the remarkable life of Ting-Ling, whose real name was Chian Ping-tzu. Aged thirteen, after a personal
revolt against the family system she led a demonstration of girls from her school – Chou-Nan Girls’ Middle School – which surrounded a session of the Hunan Provincial Council and demanded the equality of women and the right to inherit property. Later in the twenties at school in Shanghai she describes how the students helped girl workers on strike in the big weaving mills at Pootaing:

We collected money on the streets and went out to do propaganda for the strike, to encourage the workers and explain the reasons for their action. We went from one group of girl workers to another, but it was hard to talk with them because of different dialects and some of us had to have an interpreter. The girl workers were surprised to get support from students and much interested in us.
¹⁰

The gulf between the privileged and the disinherited was extreme. Ting Ling says that when she went to factories she was ‘a little afraid … because the workmen in the streets make jokes about us’.
¹¹
For Chinese women revolutionaries there was also the traditional sexual barrier between upper-class women and lower-class men, which made such political work all the more extraordinary. In 1922 she became an anarchist; they were full of dreams of utopias, they wanted to make cooperative villages and do away with government. This was in marked contrast to the Marxists. ‘They only said Marx was correct and you must join us because we are the only correct party.’
¹²

Apart from her direct political activity, Ting Ling managed to become a failed movie star, a successful novelist and fall in and out of love several times. In the thirties she initiated the New Realist Literary Trend, through a radical literary magazine,
The Great Dipper
, and taught classes for workers who were beginning to write realist stories. When the Sino-Japanese war broke out she returned to political organizing.

Han Suyin, the author of
The Crippled Tree
,
The Mortal Flowers
and
Birdless Summer
, was less explicitly connected with a political movement in pre-liberation China. Child of a marriage between a Belgian middle-class woman and a Chinese railway engineer, she was brought up amidst squalor and conflict – children running after rats to eat them, her mother screaming as a woman thrust a fetid stinking bag of pus under her eyes: it was a child faceless, the nose and eyes gone into one running putrid sore; her mother shouted at
her father ‘I will go back. I don’t want anything to do with this vermin, these yellow vermin of yours.’
¹³
Han Suyin tried to forget she was half Chinese, until the war against Japan. On board a ship returning to China she met her future husband Paohuang, who was going to serve in Chiang Kai-shek’s elite corps. For nine years she submitted to Pao’s idea of women in order to be reborn Chinese; he lectured her on virtue, tore up her books and negated her ability to work and create with Confucian morality: ‘A woman of talent is not a virtuous woman.’ Han Suyin somehow emerged, but not without scars. ‘The fundamental ambivalence of our relationship, its extremes of vehemence and hatred, passion and love and cruelty, its obsessional force, hobbled me for a long time.’ When he finally allowed her to train as a midwife, Han Suyin saw girl children born and rejected by their mothers. They dared not show the baby to their husbands, it had to be suffocated, strangled, pushed into a water bottle, or just abandoned. It was a girl and hence it was worthless.

She overheard Pao and his fellow officers talking sometimes with a sneaking respect for the strange Red bandits who turned the whole population into combatants, who encouraged slave girls to rebel against their masters, who did not insist on chastity, and who incited peasant women to stand up and denounce their husbands’ misdeeds. Han Suyin could see no hope, but slowly came to perceive that China no longer belonged to men of her husband’s class, but to the despised and disinherited coolies ‘carrying, pulling, tugging, carrying the war and the festering corruption of their masters on their backs’. Imperceptibly such women disengaged themselves from privilege to be born again.

Their experience was just part of a much larger growing consciousness among women, in which personal immediate resentment against particular aspects of their own oppression became connected with the general revolutionary movement. Innumerable new folk tales and dramas now commemorate these ‘nameless’ women. Millions of women who had lived since the beginning of time only to labour and give birth, carrying Pao and the ancestors of Pao on their backs, serving the imperial invaders, moved for the first time into individuality and history. The Communist Party formed the organizing egency through which very diverse experiences of exploitation and humiliation encountered each other and could be channelled into
concerted political action. Ideologically Mao’s old indignation about the desperate situation of Miss Chao continued. He had seen her bound by ‘three iron cables’ (society, her parents and her future in-laws).
¹⁴
Writing later on the oppression of women he wrote of ‘four thick ropes’ binding them down – politics, clan, religion and men – and maintained that these could only be broken by a communist revolution.
¹⁵

However, women were not prominent on the Long March. Some women fought as guerrillas but they were usually kept in the rear in production work. K’uo Ch’un-ch’ing actually went to the lengths of disguising herself as a boy and received the highest award the army had. She was only discovered when she was wounded.

After the communists defeated the nationalists and took power, the beginnings of women’s liberation can be seen in three stages – land reform, the revolutionary marriage law, and the experiments in cooperative farming and the commune. At Long Bow, in Luchang County, Shansi Province, in April 1948, women came to report on the progress that had been made in the mobilization of women. There was much disagreement about what was needed but all the women said women should be able to get and keep a share in the land. In
Fanshen
William Hinton describes this: ‘In Chao Chen Village, many women said “When I get my share I’ll separate from my husband. Then he won’t oppress me any more.” ’

In Chingtsun the work team found a woman whose husband thought her ugly and wanted to divorce her. She was very depressed until she learned that under the Draft Law she could have her own share of land. Then she cheered up immediately. ‘If he divorces me, never mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll get my share and the children will get theirs. We can live a good life without him.’ Another woman in the same village had already been deserted once. Her second husband was a local cadre, but he oppressed her. When a member of the team visited her, she wept, ‘Chairman Mao is all right, but women are still in trouble. We have no equality. We have to obey our husband because our life depends on them.’ After the new law was explained to her, she said, ‘This is really fine, I can have my own share now.’
¹⁶

The right to a share in the land was only the beginning. Article Six of the Constitution adopted in September 1949 declared: ‘The People’s Republic of China abolishes the feudal system which holds women in bondage. Women shall enjoy equal rights with men in
political, economic, cultural, educational and social life. Freedom of marriage for men and women shall be enforced.’

It is all very well to make constitutions but quite another matter to put them into effect. The Marriage Law was published along with the Land Law on 1 May 1950. The real issue was not sexual relations but the shattering of the traditional family. It ended the superior position of the man over the woman, it ended forced marriage, it secured monogamy and equal legal rights. ‘Bigamy, concubinage, child-betrothal, interference with the remarriage of widows and the execution of money or gifts in connection with marriage shall be prohibited.’ Husband and wife had the right to free choice of occupation and free participation in work and social activities, and equal rights in the possession and management of property. Divorce was to be granted when ‘husband and wife both desire’. Responsibility for formulating and enforcing these new laws which related to women was with the All-China Democratic Women’s Federation.

Though women were in complete support of the land laws there was considerable uneasiness among the older women about the changes in the family because they felt these to be a threat to their position of authority and respect. Free choice in marriage, for instance, meant a loss of control over daughters and daughters-in-law. All this was very difficult to change. There was deep hostility between the young wife and the mother-in-law. Propaganda posters showed them going off to night school together. Sometimes intense psychological pressure replaced the old physical restraints; young girls were almost compelled to marry husbands of the family’s choosing. When the women and girls came from the Women’s Movement and tried to enforce free choice in marriage they met bitter opposition. Some of them were murdered. One father murdered his own daughter. On other occasions in their enthusiasm they forced men to eject their concubines. With nothing to support them these women committed suicide. Because of all these problems the federation was forced to call a halt in some areas and the campaign did not resume momentum until 1953.

However, gradually welfare facilities and improvements in education training and work conditions were giving women an independence which was more than a constitutional affair. In the early 1950s women were prominent in administrative positions. For instance Mme Li Teh-chuan was Minister of Health, Mme Sun Yat-sen,
Chairman of the National Committee in Defence of Children and of the People’s Relief Administration and the China Welfare Institute. Miss Shih Liang, a lawyer, was Minister of Justice. This prominence was not without effect. A great deal of work was done. By 1952 744 women and child health centres had been set up and 156 children’s hospitals. Besides these the Women’s Federation and the cooperatives set up their own health stations. The Labour Insurance Law of 1 May 1951 brought social security in case of accidents, fifty-six days of maternity leave with full pay, made it illegal to dismiss women workers when they were pregnant, and ordered all factories with over 500 workers to set up their own medical service.

Despite all these changes women still found themselves economically dependent on men. Fragmentation of the land only made it economically unviable. Though some women wanted to own their own land, others inclined towards social ownership. Some took the initiative in forming cooperatives. Still the money for work was not paid to the young women but to the father-in-law, because under the cooperative payment for labour was made on the basis of work points, with the whole family as a unit. In the families with the old feudal ideas the women were still controlled by the men. Women too found themselves working in the cooperative all day but still doing all the housework and looking after the children. Here the development of the communes was most important. They provided a real system of social security for women. First there was economic independence. Payment for labour was based on work grades. Each person was paid according to his or her work and the money was paid directly to each individual. With this new-found economic self-determination went a great increase in respect for young women within the family. Also, because the communes provided a truly social environment which through communal restaurants, crèches, houses of respect for the old, gave women the opportunity to play an active role in social and political life, the great problem of abstract ‘equal rights’ placing women actually at a disadvantage was avoided. Within the social organization of the commune it was possible to recognize the situation of women, as women. For example, the women’s committees devised significant health rules. Women were not to work in wet places during menstruation, expectant mothers were to do only light work, and nursing mothers were to work near home.

It would be a great mistake to think of these changes as coming easily. Not only was there great backwardness and poverty but the emergence of women implied a total and permanent cultural re-creation. It demanded a complete reorientation of consciousness, for men as well as women. Such transformations come painfully and with great effort. Hinton describes how in Long Bow a few poor peasant women wives of leading revolutionary cadres organized a Women’s Association. They voiced their own bitterness. They discovered they could speak and found they had as many grievances as the men – if not more. They began to be conscious of themselves as ‘half of China’:

But the women found as they organized among themselves, attended meetings and entered into public life, that they met more and more opposition from the men, particularly from the men of their own households, most of whom regarded any activity by wives and daughters-in-law outside the house as ‘steps leading to adultery’. Family heads, having paid sound grain for their women, regarded them as their private property, expected them to work hard, bear children, serve their fathers, husbands and mothers-in-law, and speak only when spoken to. In this atmosphere the activities of the Women’s Association created a domestic crisis in many a family. Not only did the husbands object to their wives going out; the mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law objected even more strenuously. Many young wives who nevertheless insisted on going to meetings were badly beaten up when they got home.
¹⁷

Among those who were beaten was the wife of a poor peasant called Man-ts’ang. When she came home from a Women’s Association meeting she was beaten as a matter of course. But instead of accepting this and staying at home she made a complaint against her husband. A meeting of the women in the village was held and Man-ts’ang was asked to explain himself. Contemptuous and unrepentant he replied that he had beaten his wife because she went to meetings and ‘the only reason women go to meetings is to gain a free hand for flirtation and seduction’. The women argued angrily and he answered them. In rage they rushed at him, knocked him down, kicked him, tore his clothes and pulled his hair while he begged for mercy, promising never to beat his wife again. Apparently he kept his promise for his wife was known as Ch’en Ai-lien, her maiden name, from that day.