The Gender of MemoryRural Women and China's Collective Past

Hershatter, Gail

doi:10.1525/california/9780520267701.001.0001

Cited by 7 publications

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“…But this occurred just as extraction rose far beyond its sustainable material limits, and the socialisation of social reproduction was reduced to yet another form of self-reliant mobilisation of rural resources, of sacrifice for the greater good of socialism. Far from ending the peasant through the transformation of rural collectivesresponsible for their own profits and losses, and built through self-reliance -into 'communist communes' (Teiwes and Sun 1999, 95) or state farms 'owned by the whole people', and far from ending the gendered division of labour through the socialisation of social reproduction, both social forms continued in often hidden forms as yet more sacrifice to the future (Hershatter 2011;Eyferth 2015, 134).…”

Section: Socialist Periodmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory

2024

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here-we-are-qa-with-geremie-barme/. 3 Previous versions of Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5 and 7 have been published by the Journal of Current China Affairs as part of a special issue titled 'The Chinese Communist Party at 100'. An earlier version of Chapter 15 was published by Communist and Post-Communist Studies under the title 'Deepening the State: The Dynamics of China's United Front Work in Post-Handover Hong Kong'. They are reprinted with permission.

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Section: Socialist Periodmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory

2024

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“…Pregnant women, mothers of big families, and single mothers were all financially subsidized in the former Soviet Union. It also introduced honorific titles such as "Mother Heroine" (Russian: Mat'-geroinya) to encourage population expansion and assumed responsibility for children's moral development, education, health protection, and so on (Hershatter, 2017;Song, 2012Song, , 2013Wei, 2012). However, due to a lack of economic development and an inefficient communal production mode, the national acknowledgment and sharing of reproductive work only persisted in cities and some rural regions in a severely uneven way until the 1990s.…”

Section: Feelings and Responses Of The Women Leadersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heroines who are rebuilding their country: State–society circumstances and coping strategies of female leaders in post-genocide Rwanda

Batamuliza

Karangwa

2022

Chinese Journal of Sociology

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The labor arrangement of industrial society makes “production and reproduction” a contradiction that is both separate and interdependent. One of the significant consequences is the re-establishment of the responsibilities and boundaries of production and reproduction between the modern state, market, family, and gender. After the genocide against the Tutsi in 1994, Rwanda has made world-renowned achievements in advancing gender equality, especially women's participation in politics. It is the “twofold full-time producers” model that continuously sustains this huge achievement, which means that female leaders not only bear a highly demanding responsibility for production, comparable to men, but also undertake significant labor in social reproduction. The public policy of Rwanda has assumed a dual role in this process: on the one hand, the state has promulgated a series of gender equality bills, policies, and measures from top to bottom that actively promote women's equal rights in various fields, especially their political participation. On the other hand, against the background of a severe labor shortage and insufficient public welfare facilities, the responsibility of private families for social reproduction has been maintained and strengthened, while the traditional family structure and community culture's share of responsibility for reproduction has been irreversibly weakened during the conflict and modernization process. While these female leaders rely on their individual strategies and informal social support systems to cope with the dual burden, they still face scrutiny and doubt from the community culture. The consensus on the destiny of the country's development and the sharing of historical responsibilities demonstrated by Rwanda's female leaders shares many similarities with the Chinese women's liberation movement, which also provides an important inspiration and reference point for rethinking the path of women's liberation characterized by economic independence and “the supremacy of production”.

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“…As Francesca Bray has observed, in China's late Imperial period (from roughly 960-1911), motherhood was understood through the "duality" of the "natural" (or physical) and "social" mother, two roles that could be separated and often mapped onto a class hierarchy that valued the educational and moral contributions of the social mother most highly (Bray 1997:347). During the early decades of Communist Party rule, women's domestic roles-including their role in caring for and raising children--became almost invisible, as both rural and urban women were drawn into socialized production (Hershatter 2011). Many women, exhausted by the demands of work and political activity outside of the home, had little extra time to devote to childrearing, and it was not uncommon for small children to be cared for by their grandparents or even wet nurses (Chen 2015;Hershatter 2011).…”

Section: Childrearing and Motherhood In Contemporary Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…During the early decades of Communist Party rule, women's domestic roles-including their role in caring for and raising children--became almost invisible, as both rural and urban women were drawn into socialized production (Hershatter 2011). Many women, exhausted by the demands of work and political activity outside of the home, had little extra time to devote to childrearing, and it was not uncommon for small children to be cared for by their grandparents or even wet nurses (Chen 2015;Hershatter 2011). Caring for children was nevertheless still viewed as women's "natural" role (Evans 2005).…”

Section: Childrearing and Motherhood In Contemporary Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

The hard work of feeding the baby: breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China

Hanser

2017

J. Chin. Sociol.

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Drawing upon the concept of culture as a "tool kit" from which social actors draw pragmatically, this paper explores the relationship between cultural definitions of good mothering and breastfeeding among middle-class, urban Chinese women. We argue that an emerging culture of "intensive mothering" that focuses on infant feeding is taking shape among privileged urban women. Based upon interviews with new mothers in urban Shanghai, we describe the intense efforts and commitment by these women to provide their babies with breast milk, and we consider the complexities of their attempts to put mothering ideals into practice. We suggest that the linkage between breastfeeding and motherhood represents a "gendered burden" for Chinese women and that infant feeding has become important, early terrain on which new mothers grapple with their own and others' expectations about mothering and caring for a child. We show that intensive, demanding forms of parenting now extend into the earliest years of a child's life, a period largely neglected in sociological studies of parenting in China.

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The Gender of MemoryRural Women and China's Collective Past

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory

The Chinese Communist Party: A 100-Year Trajectory

Heroines who are rebuilding their country: State–society circumstances and coping strategies of female leaders in post-genocide Rwanda

The hard work of feeding the baby: breastfeeding and intensive mothering in contemporary urban China

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