Page 118 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Constraining women’s political work with
‘women’s work’

The Chinese Communist Party and women’s participation in
politics

Louise Edwards

One of the key markers used to identify the relative status of women internationally is a
comparison of the percentage of women working as politicians. This marker has come
into common use over the course of the century and derives from the ‘ladder of progress’
narrative established by the women’s suffrage activists from the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The suffrage activists accurately predicted that the level of women’s
engagement with formal politics would be a key measure of a country’s level of
‘civilization’. At the close of the twentieth century, league tables of progress are
commonplace features of United Nations statistics charts and Women’s Studies readers
(Neft and Levine 1997). The assumption behind these ratings charts is that women’s
engagement in formal politics indicates women’s access to formal political power—
women’s ability to influence legislative changes that would represent women’s interests.
Within this logic, women politicians would work for women’s social and economic
interests through their access to formal political power.
Over the course of the twentieth century, this apparently unproblematic conception—
women politicians working to enhance women’s interests—has been cast into doubt.
Women politicians are far from a homogeneous group. The political identity of women
working in the political arena is framed by a myriad other markers—class, residential
status, ethnic origin and level of career ambition. Similarly, the women citizens these
women politicians aim to represent are likely to have diverse economic and social needs
and aspirations. The identification of a discrete, unified constituency—women—
temporarily disclosed these other differences. Women working in politics have proved to
be as varied in their political interests and agenda as men politicians.
Over the course of the last 100 years, powerful political interests have made good use
of women’s desires to work in government to buttress or consolidate causes that have
little interest in feminism per se. Simplistic calculations about the numbers of women
working in politics often reveal little about women’s status but a lot about well-
entrenched political inequities in a given society. For example, Mina Roces has explained
how the election of women Presidents in the Philippines is connected directly to kinship
politics—where the women represent particular family and clan groups—rather than a
feminist ascendency (Roces 1998). In China during the 1970s the numbers of women
working in top central political bodies was high by international standards. However, in
the case of the membership of the Politburo, these women were wives of high-level men