Detailed bullet-point notes on traditional attitudes towards women, Mao's views on women, the 1950 New Marriage Law, educational and employment opportunities for women, the impact of collectivization and communes on women/families, abuse and discrimination, women's political opportunities.
Traditional attitudes:
- Women subject to the ‘three obediences’: to their father when young, to their husband
when married and to their son when elderly.
- Many women forced into arranged marriages and not allowed to own property or have any
independence.
- Girl babies were not valued as highly as boy babies, because a girl would be married into a
brand-new family by her early teens meaning she was not able to make money for her own
family. Also, a bride’s family would have to provide a dowry when she got married meaning
an economic burden for the family. Sometimes baby girls were denied food so that her
brother(s) could eat instead, and some desperate families even resorted to infanticide.
- Sometimes gifts were given to the family of the bride by the bridegroom’s family, enforcing
the idea that the bride was property that had been purchased.
Mao’s quotes on his views on women:
- Women are ‘an indispensable force in defeating the enemy and building a new China’.
- Mao blamed a young bride, Miss Zhao’s, suicide on ‘the rottenness of the marriage system’.
- He complained that while ‘a man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three
systems of authority – political, clan and religious’ women were ‘also dominated by men’
through ‘the authority of the husband’. He called these ‘four authorities’ over women ‘the
embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology’.
- Mao damned arranged marriage as ‘indirect rape’.
Educational opportunities:
- A survey of rural China in the 1930s suggested that only 1% of females over the age of seven
were literate enough to recognise a simple letter. This compared to 30% of males.
- It also showed that 45.2% of males and just 2.2% of females had received schooling.
The 1950 New Marriage Law:
- Women received legal equality: they could hold property and seek divorce.
- The paying of dowries and bride-prices was forbidden, as was child marriage.
- Marriages could not result from coercion: free-will was required.
- Later marriage and childbirth were encouraged so that people had ‘more time to read and
study, to participate in political activity . . . it enables them to study Marxism, Leninism and
the writings of Chairman Mao.’
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