Page 120 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

WOMEN’S POLITICAL WORK AND ‘WOMEN’S WORK’ 107
the dominating political parties—the Nationalists and the CCR Civil liberties were
limited in both the PRC and the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan (the Nationalist
Party fled to this island on their defeat in the civil war in 1949). One consequence was the
curtailing of feminist political action beyond the authorized ‘women’s work’ of the
parties’ policy platform. The function of women party members was thus constructed as
‘women’s work’. Their task was primarily to mobilize and politicize the mass of women
in China to participate in party activities and implement party policy. Antagonistic action
against patriarchal power and privilege—which informed the early feminist campaigns of
the 1900s and 1910s—has been neutralized by the binding of ‘women’s work’ to ‘party
work’. This trend was evident within both the Nationalist Party and the CCP but has
reached its full power within the PRC and its consolidated one-party rule since 1949.
‘Women’s work’ is positioned in a domesticated marital relationship with party work
(real work, men’s work) and China’s women politicians became wives of the party
machine.
As this chapter will demonstrate, a number of problems for women’s work in formal
politics emerged as a result of the hegemony of ‘women’s work’. These emerged from as
early as the formation of the idea of ‘women’s work’ in the 1920s and many continue to
plague women working in PRC politics today. Throughout the twentieth century, women
activists record tensions between party work and feminist work. Records of this period
reflect the resentment of women politicians that their energies are isolated in the low-
status political arena of ‘women’s work’. The reification of ‘legitimate’ political action by
women within the ‘women’s work’ rubric requires careful examination. This chapter
focuses primarily on women’s political participation in the PRC but draws examples from
the Nationalist Party history where comparisons are informative.

Women’s work, party restructuring and the left wing

In the 1920s, China’s political landscape for the remainder of the twentieth century was
being shaped by the emergence of the two main political parties—the CCP and the
Nationalist Party. The Soviet Union, through its Comintern wing for international
outreach, provided a template of party structure for the revitalizing Nationalist Party from
1923. In addition, the Comintern provided support for the CCP, which emerged in
Shanghai in 1921 (Li 1956:442). Following Comintern advice and in the spirit of left-wing
solidarity, individual CCP members joined the larger Nationalist Party. From within this
uneasy alliance ‘women’s work’ developed its major features and concomitant problems.
‘Women’s work’ was the prime task of the Party’s Women’s Department. In this
management structure, women’s concerns were regarded as having a unique place. This
privileged status—there was no Men’s Department—provided recognition of women’s
particular oppression within Chinese culture but simultaneously isolated women’s issues
from central party concerns. At each Nationalist and Communist Party branch, a
Women’s Department was supposed to be established and women cadres charged with
the task of engaging in ‘women’s work’. The ideological imperative for a special women’s
department developed at this time within conceptions of ‘women’ as a disenfranchized
constituency worthy of mobilising. Other constituencies were also identified—‘workers’,