Of Women and Washing Machines: Employment, Housework, and the Reproduction of Motherhood in Socialist China

Abstract

Biology is not supposed to be destiny in socialist China. In contrast to class societies where supposedly “men occupy the position of the ruling class… and women become the household slaves of men and the instruments for producing more men,” in China men and women together are said to hold up the sky (biantian). Women are no longer enslaved by reproduction; if they are oppressed, it is merely because remnants of feudal thinking, superstition and backwardness still exist in China. Or so it is argued by representatives of the Chinese leadership. Here I will posit a different view. Rather than blaming feudalism or China's lack of development, I suggest that contemporary political and economic decisions have reinforced sex inequality in China. In this article, I argue that social and economic policies since the Third Plenum of the llth Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party have created conditions which impose on women (and men) sex-differentiated roles in production and reproduction. These new public policies sustain the traditional definition of women as household labourers and reproducers of men.

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

“…The history of the bourgeois Shanghai family of the Republican period was rediscovered and partially valorized (W. Yeh 2005). The phrase "virtuous wife and good mother," which had circulated in the early twentieth century (Borthwick 1985), enjoyed a resurgence (M. Wolf 1985;Honig and Hershatter 1988;Beaver, Hou, and Wang 1995;Milwertz 1997), as did the notion that women were primarily responsible for the healthy development and moral education of children (Robinson 1985;Croll 1985c; Davin 1989;Jacka 1990Jacka , 1997Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005).…”

“…Data drawn from the 1990 and 1995 censuses, however, showed a 7 percent decline in paid labor among young women in cities and towns, some of it linked to women remaining at home to care for children (Parish and Busse 2000). Studies of numerous sectors have documented job discrimination against women during the reform era, associated with perceptions that women's household and childrearing duties incur extra costs for the work unit and make women less productive workers or even that women properly belong in the domestic domain (Hooper 1984;Robinson 1985;Honig and Hershatter 1988;Jacka 1990;Woo 1994;Brownell 1995;Croll 1995; Gates 1996a;Riley 1997; Evans 2000;Parish and Busse 2000; J. Zang 2005). As they were in the Mao years, women continued to be clustered in collective rather than state-owned enterprises and in lower-paying sectors that could be regarded as an extension of the gendered domestic division of labor: catering, textiles, health, and early childhood education (Robinson 1985;Bian, Logan, and Shu 2000).…”

“…White 2003). Since virilocality continued to be the dominant marriage pattern through collectivization and decollectivization, farming families had immediate practical reasons to value sons over daughters, who would leave the family and the community at marriage (Robinson 1985). With the weakening of the collective, families expected to rely almost exclusively upon their sons for old-age support, although the Marriage Law of 1980 held sons, daughters, and grandchildren alike responsible for care of the elderly (Potter 1985;Mu 1999).…”

“…In the countryside, by contrast, the one-child policy collided with the re-emergence of the household as a fundamental unit of production; the dismantling of rudimentary collective welfare guarantees; the emergence of peasant households wealthy enough to pay hefty fines for excess births; and a general weakening of state control over peasant mobility, income, activities, and its own local branches (Wasserstrom 1984;Potter 1985;Croll 1985c;Davin 1985;Davis-Friedmann 1985;Dalsimer and Nisonoff 1987;Greenhalgh 1990Greenhalgh , 1993Potter and Potter 1990; T. White 2003). Since virilocality continued to be the dominant marriage pattern through collectivization and decollectivization, farming families had immediate practical reasons to value sons over daughters, who would leave the family and the community at marriage (Robinson 1985). With the weakening of the collective, families expected to rely almost exclusively upon their sons for old-age support, although the Marriage Law of 1980 held sons, daughters, and grandchildren alike responsible for care of the elderly (Potter 1985;Mu 1999).…”

“…The history of the bourgeois Shanghai family of the Republican period was rediscovered and partially valorized (W. Yeh 2005). The phrase "virtuous wife and good mother," which had circulated in the early twentieth century (Borthwick 1985), enjoyed a resurgence (M. Wolf 1985;Honig and Hershatter 1988;Beaver, Hou, and Wang 1995;Milwertz 1997), as did the notion that women were primarily responsible for the healthy development and moral education of children (Robinson 1985;Croll 1985c; Davin 1989;Jacka 1990Jacka , 1997Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005).In the late 1980s, the northern village of Daqiuzhuang briefly gained notoriety when it made women's return to full-time housework a linchpin of village economic development strategy (Jacka 1990;Beaver, Hou, and Wang 1995). A popular TV soap opera aired in 1991, "Yearnings," featured a character who gained a serious national following because of her selfless attempts to sacrifice for an uncaring husband and a disabled adoptive child (Rofel 1994b; Evans 2002).…”