Page 121 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

108 LOUISE EDWARDS
‘youth’, ‘merchants’ and ‘peasants’—each became targets of special party programs. The
Nationalist Party established a special bureau or department for each of these groups in
order to promote targeted propaganda campaigns (Fitzgerald 1996:276). The goal for
Women’s Department activists was to harness the energies and networks of the existing
women’s organizations—which were explicitly feminist in their anti-patriarchal agenda—
and draw these women into the party’s campaign for nation-building while promoting
women’s liberation. Gilmartin describes the project as follows: ‘The explicit aim of this
intense effort of mass mobilisation was to bring women into the political process, usually
for the first time, and make them feel like an integral part of the new political order that
was being created’ (Gilmartin 1994:198).
The formal structure of a Women’s Department grew directly from the model
provided by the Comintern. In 1919 the Bolshevik Party in the Soviet Union had formed
the Women’s Section, Zhenotdel, to mobilize the work of women for the cause of the
revolution. By 1921 Alexandra Kollantai, the main advocate for the establishment of the
Women’s Section of the party, also became the secretary of the International Women’s
Secretariat of the Comintern. China’s left-wing parties adopted her structure along with
the financial and moral support they received from the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, as
Christina Gilmartin has pointed out, the Chinese Women’s Departments also emerged as
a result of the sympathy for women’s liberation held among the reformist intellectual class
politicized during the decade of the May Fourth and New Culture Movements (1915–25).
‘The cause of women’s emancipation influenced many political activists of both the
Nationalist and Communist parties and predisposed them to support the development of a
large-scale women’s mobilization campaign.’ (Gilmartin 1994: 199). During these years
of ‘China’s Enlightenment’, the increasingly public role of women in all spheres of life
aided in this reformulation (Wang Zheng 1999). Thus, the combination of Soviet
structural modeling and the sympathy of Chinese reformist intellectuals for women’s
rights resulted in the establishment of special sections of party structure devoted to
‘women’s work’.
For a large part of the 1920s, the Women’s Department of the Nationalist Party
incorporated the energies of women leaders from both the CCP and the Nationalist Party.
Together CCP women members and Nationalist Party women members cooperated in
carrying out ‘women’s work’. Veteran political activist He Xiangning (1878–1972) led
the Central Women’s Department for the Nationalist Party from 1924 with the
formalization of party structures in that year (Gilmartin 1995:223). Other prominent
women political leaders led Women’s Departments in other metropolitan centres or
regions. For example, the communist martyr Xiang Jingyu was a driving force in the
Shanghai Women’s Department (Lin Jiling 2001:192). This spirit of cooperation ended in
1927 with the expulsion of the CCP members from the Nationalist Party. From this point
women’s work was divided along party lines—but it was nonetheless still constructed as a
discrete and separate section of political mobilization within both party structures.
The commitment to segregated women’s bureaux within the Chinese political scene
has continued through to the present. Women’s Departments operate in both the PRC
and the ROC. In the PRC the women’s-work organization is called the All China
Federation of Women (ACFW—Quanguo funü lianhe hui)—and on Taiwan it goes by the