12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A review, June 4, 2000
This review is from: Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Paperback)
In Engendering the Chinese Revolution, Christina Gilmartin examines the politics and history of the Communist Party between 1920 to 1927 with a gendered perspective. Gilmartin tries to define and analyze the tension and ¡§uneasy¡¨ relationship between class and gender, and between the Communist Party and the women¡¦s movement. Instead of giving an overview of women¡¦s history in the premodern period and telling the entire history of the Communist regime up to the present, Gilmartin focuses on the 1920s, which she suggests as a honeymoon period for the union of feminism and social movements. I would assume she concentrates on those years because it was a period under direct influence of the May Fourth and when the ideological origins for both feminism and socialism started to form. If this is true, she may be suggesting that there is no fundamental conflict between feminism and class struggle, but it was only the divide between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party, the practices and implementation policies that create the contradictions, starting from the later half of the 1920s.
In the beginning, she focuses on how women¡¦s emancipation is utilized as an anti-imperialist and anti-tradition ideology by the nationalist movement in the early 20s. Gilmartin emphasizes the influence of the May Fourth movement shaping the discourse on feminism. She argues that most male communists also embrace feminist issues at that time. Although some anarchists ¡§challenged the essentialist nature of the bond between nationalism and feminism¡Kthey did not¡K succeed in their aim of irrevocably breaking the tight connection between nationalism and feminism.¡¨ (21) However, besides emphasizing the nationalist fervor and intellectuals¡¦ wish in declaring a ¡§full-scare war on the entire Chinese cultural heritage,¡¨ Gilmartin stops short in explaining why people could not untie the connection. Why is nationalism compatible and tightly connected with women¡¦s issues without dispute? Is it because the May Fourth Movement is embraced with no dispute that every issue under its flag is taken in? Compared with the dilemma between socialism and feminism, nationalism does not seem to contradict with feminism.
The first part of the book is successful in analyzing the experiences of women activists in the party and how they overcome the obstacles in pushing their agenda and ascending in the party. The author has spent great effort finding and using the memoirs and biographies of activists to engender the history.
I find Chapter Four a bit loaded with the author¡¦s moral language though, especially in her examination of Chen Duxiu¡¦s and Zhang Shenfu¡¦s sexual and marriage life. (111) The reporting on Chen¡¦s and Shen¡¦s behaviors through digging into others¡¦ memoirs and accusations seem unnecessary and loaded with biased judgment, if her intention is to prove their inattention and unawareness of traditional notions of gender hierarchy and power dynamics.
Also, the section ¡§Female Complicity¡¨, her argument is especially weak and unconvincing. She starts off by commenting that women were taking positions that were already bounded by their gender role: ¡§By agreeing to do tasks that men were not doing, these women participated in the setting of the historical boundaries of female behavior and experience in the Chinese Communist party.¡¨ (113) She goes on in saying that ¡§most women revolutionaries at that time could not break through the psychological and tangible barriers to their assuming more egalitarian political roles inside the party.¡¨ She states outright that the maternal instincts of these revolutionaries impedes them in their rise in the party and in doing their tasks: ¡§The real constraints imposed upon the lives of many of these revolutionary mothers militated against their developing self-assertion and independence in the realm of politics ¡V attributes that were essential to their assumption of leadership roles.(113) Others who maintained leadership roles had to send their infants off so that they were ¡§in a position to devote all their time to developing those values and skills that were necessary for them to feel self-confident as decision makers and authority figures.¡¨ (114) Even though she uses an interview and a primary source to prove her case, it is not clear whether many women did feel adhering to ¡§muxing¡¨ becomes a barrier to their job duties . It seems that the author is casting her own judgment again in suggesting tasks like organizers and mangers ¡§can be seen as an extension of women¡¦s traditional roles as mothers and housekeepers.¡¨ In the second part of the book, Gilmartin turns to the mass movements, and suggests that the discussion of women¡¦s issues which was much embraced by intellectuals was silenced in the rural movements and organizing. Issues like emancipation and challenges to the arrange-marriage systems were avoided because of the strong patrilineages and the feudal order. Women who had a clear interest in ending women¡¦s social subordination were sent to Nationalist Women¡¦s department and were not sent to peasant organizations. (170) Nevertheless, Gilmartin states: ¡§the defeat of the women¡¦s movement was due less to public opposition or internal weaknesses than to the collapse ¡V in blood ¡V of the first United Front.¡¨ (9) Both parties then used gender issues as their weapons in propaganda and purges when fighting each other. After 1927, neither party was willing to ¡§repeat the full-scale assault¡¨ on patriarchal order. However, the legacy of the women¡¦s movement remains in that the Nationalist took up women¡¦s suffrage as their agenda and the Chinese Communist incorporated the language and rituals of women¡¦s emancipation after 1949, but an independent feminist program was seen as too threatening and dismissed, since they believe that economic independence would grant emancipation to women. The author suggests that the Nationalists made alleged accusations on the sexual immorality of female Communists during the White Terror: ¡§Radical women activists were portrayed as sexually promiscuous and a danger to the moral order.¡¨ (212) Xian Jingyu was executed and the official statement emphasized her sexual conduct and the breakup of her marriage. Her image was sexualized and condemned. The Nationalists and the warlord regimes viewed the ¡§ritualistic killing of women as a necessary means to restore order.¡¨ Female activism and political participation threatened the social order: ¡§The While Terror inflicted on these women served to repress the women¡¦s mass movement and to vividly demonstrate the penalty for political participation.¡¨ (212) Discussion on sexuality is suppressed and the sexual restraint on women was imposed in order to implement the new morality of the New Life Movement. The author raises an important point, but I am disappointed that the connection between political activism, the sexualizing of women, and the violence happened at that time is not further explored and examine in the book. The author quickly shifts her focus to the legacy of feminism without analyzing the implication of the new sex codes.
Even though she questions the gaps between the rhetoric and practices of both the Nationalist Party and Communist party at the end and agrees that ¡§the union of feminism to a socialist-nationalist revolutionary movement was basically an ephemeral relationship without significant benefit to the goal of fundamental gender transformation¡¨, she maintains a positive outlook for the Communist regime: ¡§After the Communist state was established in 1949, a significant core of Communists continued their efforts to end gender oppression. The campaigns in the early 1950s to end arranged marriages, for instance, revealed the enduring legacy of the feminist phases of the Chinese movement.¡..............
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