With an ambitious plan to develop industry and collectivize agriculture, the PRC Party-state radically rearranged womenвЂ™s working lives and their social communities in both cities and rural areas. вЂњThe Socialist Construction of Women, 1949-78,вЂќ which is Chapter 8 of the book, considers women as objects and agents of state campaigns to end prostitution, establish thoroughgoing marriage reform, and retrain midwives across rural China. What concerns did people express through the language of gender? How did that language work, and why was it so powerful? Under what circumstances did women themselves articulate and act upon expanded possibilities for being a woman? Women and ChinaвЂ™s Revolutions explores what sort of work the symbol of Woman was doing. Sometimes women were decried as ignorant and dependent drags on the national economy, and sometimes they were glorified as mothers who could save the nation or heroines who could hasten the achievement of socialism. Sometimes Woman was deployed as a symbol of a weakened culture alternatively, Woman became a sign that China was entering the ranks of modern nations. The question of what women should do and be was a constant topic of public debate during ChinaвЂ™s transformation. The second theme of the book is the symbolic work performed by gender itself, work that intersected with womenвЂ™s lives and interests but was not identical to them. This labor was crucial both to the survival of households and to big state projects that depended upon women to work a double shift-for example, in the Mao era, the labor of women who put in one shift during the day in the collective fields and another at night bent over a spinning wheel or loom. WomenвЂ™s hidden reproductive labor included not only childbirth, but also feeding and clothing household members, raising and educating children, caring for the elderly, maintaining community ties, and producing handicrafts that generated income for their families. Some of it, however, was not so visible in the historical record. Some of that labor was recognized by state authorities or intellectuals, leaving a documentary record that allows us to reconstruct how and why womenвЂ™s labor was valued. The labor of women in domestic and public spaces shaped ChinaвЂ™s move from empire to republic to socialist nation to rising capitalist power. The first theme is the importance of womenвЂ™s labor, both visible and invisible. Two themes recur throughout Women and ChinaвЂ™s Revolutions. Building on the research of gender studies scholars since the 1970s, it establishes that ChinaвЂ™s modern history is not comprehensible without close attention to womenвЂ™s labor and Woman as a flexible symbol of social problems, national humiliation, and political transformation. The chapter that follows is excerpted from my book Women and ChinaвЂ™s Revolutions (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019), which asks: If we place women at the center of our account of ChinaвЂ™s last two centuries, how does this change our understanding of what happened? Women and ChinaвЂ™s Revolutions takes a close look at the places where the Big History of recognizable events intersects with the daily lives of ordinary people, using gender as its analytic lens.

Symbol for female in china