The present study explores the experiences of married couples with women's liberation and gender equality in the 1950s in urban China.It moves away from state centeredness to examine the interactive processes amon...The present study explores the experiences of married couples with women's liberation and gender equality in the 1950s in urban China.It moves away from state centeredness to examine the interactive processes among state, family and individuals. Particular attention is given to the ways in which married individuals constructed their national identity and obligatory relations with the state as social agents. Data come from in-depth interviews of 80 elderly married individuals in Beijing in the summers of 2000 and 2003.It was found that women's liberation in the 1950s was imtimately interwined with and served China's nationalist and class projects.The multifacetedness of women's liberation revealed its dual nature:women's rights and obligations went hand in hand, largely at the expense of womem's pursuit of their personal freedom. However,the subordination ofwomen's individualistic emancipation to larger causes should not be merely interpreted as women'scompromise to the party state, but rather as a result of the conscious choice that women made in the course of pursuing gender obligation equality.Under the above circumstances, gender in urban China in the 1950s was contructed differently at state and family levels.While at the state leve, both women and men wered molded into non-gendered“state persons”,within the household,husbands and wives still largely followed traditional gendered division of labor. Consequently,neither men nor women in the 1950s had achieved personal freedom,but both had reached the obligation equality. In this case, not only gneder equality could be achieved in the abasence of women' s individualistic liberation, but also the meanings of the two notions were different from those developed in the West. Therefore, Western feminist theories in China must be modified to capture the historical context of state-socialist China in order to fully understand the meanings of its women's liberation and gender-equality.展开更多
文摘The present study explores the experiences of married couples with women's liberation and gender equality in the 1950s in urban China.It moves away from state centeredness to examine the interactive processes among state, family and individuals. Particular attention is given to the ways in which married individuals constructed their national identity and obligatory relations with the state as social agents. Data come from in-depth interviews of 80 elderly married individuals in Beijing in the summers of 2000 and 2003.It was found that women's liberation in the 1950s was imtimately interwined with and served China's nationalist and class projects.The multifacetedness of women's liberation revealed its dual nature:women's rights and obligations went hand in hand, largely at the expense of womem's pursuit of their personal freedom. However,the subordination ofwomen's individualistic emancipation to larger causes should not be merely interpreted as women'scompromise to the party state, but rather as a result of the conscious choice that women made in the course of pursuing gender obligation equality.Under the above circumstances, gender in urban China in the 1950s was contructed differently at state and family levels.While at the state leve, both women and men wered molded into non-gendered“state persons”,within the household,husbands and wives still largely followed traditional gendered division of labor. Consequently,neither men nor women in the 1950s had achieved personal freedom,but both had reached the obligation equality. In this case, not only gneder equality could be achieved in the abasence of women' s individualistic liberation, but also the meanings of the two notions were different from those developed in the West. Therefore, Western feminist theories in China must be modified to capture the historical context of state-socialist China in order to fully understand the meanings of its women's liberation and gender-equality.
