Peter Zarrow China in War and Revolution, 1895 1949 (2005)

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.Chinesewomen would not be free as long as imperialists, warlords, and perhaps capi-talists enslaved all Chinese.Some women thus became professionalrevolutionaries and politicians dedicated to a larger struggle, of whichwomen s rights was one part.Chinese feminists (that is, women s rights activists, whether or not theyused the terminology of feminism), mostly women, had been sharply disillu-sioned by the failure of the revolutionaries to support female suffrage in1912.Still, they continued to use the language of citizenship and nation-alism to justify their demands for gender equality.China could be neither astrong nation nor a just nation without the full and unfettered participationof women in its civic life.By the early 1920s, the new Guomindang seemedthe only major party willing to acknowledge the justice of women s claims.But222 Nationalism and revolution, 1919 37women also organized their own groups.The United Women s Associationsrepresented networks of largely middle-class women in China s cities.Theypursued women s issues within the existing political framework.The UWAcould put hundreds and even thousands of women on the streets to demon-strate for the vote.Success was achieved in Hunan when women were electedto the provincial assembly and several country assemblies.Like othergroups, the UWA was in a constant process of defining itself; it facedinternal conflict over decisions such as whether to admit concubines, forexample.Given its appeal, the GMD saw the benefits of an alliance with theUWA.Even the Communists pulled back on their criticisms of bourgeoiswomen to attract their support.The United Front was thus committed to women s equality, inheriting theNew Culture movement s attack on the traditional patriarchy that vestedauthority in the senior males of the family line.This was quite a direct inheritance many of the early Party leaders, especially in the CCP, haddeveloped the very language of liberation and rights that applied to women.As we have seen, the women s question was central to intellectual concernsof the period.Men such as Chen Duxiu and Zhang Shenfu, and for thatmatter Mao Zedong, did not abandon their feminism when they becameCommunists.They and their colleagues proposed changes in the legal andsocial status of women that would have amounted to a cultural revolution.Many tried to change themselves: to live personal lives that recognized theequality of the sexes.At the same time, we may note that the price of suchdecisions could be high.Chen, Zhang, and Mao all abandoned their firstwives as the unwanted products of arranged marriages.They found new loversand wives among the minority of educated, activist women.Abandonmentat least gave the first wife the option of staying at home in the countryside asthe official first wife.Divorce, though seeming more modern to Communistmen, was still a disgrace that led in at least one case to a first wife s suicide.But to modern, freethinking urban women, companionate marriage oreven partnerships bypassing formal marriage altogether was a criticalmark of their own liberation.At the same time, many women pursued their liberation entirely outsideof Party structures.On the one hand were practical questions: the search foran independent career with or without marriage.Teaching in one of thegrowing number of girls schools was probably the most popular option, butwomen became lawyers, writers, publishers, nurses, and doctors as well.Onthe other hand was a change in consciousness.The historian Wang Zhenghas described this as a liberal feminist discourse to distinguish it from amore politicized view of women as (merely) one part of a larger revolu-tionary process.15 She emphasizes that women used May Fourth ideals ofhuman rights to argue for an essential same-ness between men and women.In this way, in their own minds, they were able to break old gender bound-aries.It is true that the human was modeled in male form; liberal women,then, did not demand equality as women who were essentially different butIdeology and power in the National Revolution 223still equal to men, but rather as human beings who were as intelligent, asstrong, as patriotic, and generally as capable as men.Yet, again, this describes a relatively small proportion of women wholived in cities and had access to education.Women workers factory hands,servants, prostitutes, and coolies, as well as farmwives who struggled tosurvive on a daily basis were in no position to challenge gender boundariesin this way.And numerous middle-class and upper-class women werecontent to be good wives and wise mothers without directly challengingthe patriarchal system.There is little reason to think that men, evensupporters of feminist points of view like the liberal Hu Shi, the CommunistChen Duxiu, or the cultural radical Lu Xun, made the equality of the sexesa core element of their consciousness.But the emergence of women as acompletely new social category was a consciousness-altering experience forwomen, beginning in the late Qing and achieving a kind of universality inthe 1920s.In this sense, we cannot assume that either women workers ormiddle-class good wives were unaffected by the radical changes of theperiod.Indeed, the good wife, wise mother ideal justified many breakswith patriarchal tradition.However, some elements of gender hierarchyproved indelible.The GMD and the CCP themselves remained largely patri-archal organizations [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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