Mao Era Gender

Intro

What does it mean to have grown up in the Mao era? This book is a collection of memories by nine Chinese women who grew up during the Mao era and now live in the United States. The authors attend to gender in a way that most males have barely noticed and they also reflect and share their lives in the United States. In this book, it contains as varied as these women’s lives. The burgeoning rebellion of a young girl in northeast China. A girl’s struggles to obtain for herself the education her parents inspired her to attain. An exploration of gender and identity as experienced by two sisters……These memories are crafted with honesty.

During the Cultural Revolution, women made substantial gains. Many broke into higher-paying jobs in industry,

People even needed to be praised for the basic human rights they deserved to have. And later on, A new policy carried out: “People should be judged by their own deeds rather than their family background”. And yet, it was the beginning of the gender changes in Mao Era. During the changing process, a large number of secondary students were sent to the countryside or to state farms to receive reproduction from the poor and lower-middle class peasants. Female zhiqing learned farm work very fast, and did not give up easily, they were also extremely healthy and never missed work. Naihua - the secondary students were sent to the countryside or to state farm was ranked “First-grade laborer”, the highest ranking for all villagers and not even all the male zhiqing got this ranking but she strived to get it because she had excellent performance on farming skills, strengths, attitude towards work. Although we can see some little differences among these Chinese women, the fact was they did not have a strong sense of women as a category and group as it never occurred to them that they were all connected as

In that century, ‘qingnian’ means Youths while ‘Funu’ means Women and these two groups of people will be treated extremely different, especially the one who is called fun. WangZheng used her mother as an example of the deep-rooted idea of feminist in China. She practiced foot-binding which most of the Chinese women did in the past, she also takes care of her family by staying at home cooking and doing laundry, while in fact that all these seem to be the responsibilities of being ‘funu’ in China. Besides, females mostly did not have any opportunities to go to education. In my point of view, although this issue already becomes the history of China, in our modern society nowadays, this kind of situation and mindset still appear in our daily life. Therefore, it will be a huge step for China to