Posted on 09/26/2017 9:41:16 AM PDT by EdnaMode
My grandmother likes to tell stories from her career as a journalist in the early decades of the People’s Republic of China. She recalls scrawling down Chairman Mao’s latest pronouncements as they came through loudspeakers and talking with joyous peasants from the newly collectivized countryside. In what was her career highlight, she turned an anonymous candy salesman into a national labor hero with glowing praises for his service to the people.
She had grown up in the central province of Hunan, where her father was a landlord. She talks about her mother as a glum housewife who resented her husband for taking a concubine after she had failed to give birth to a boy.
“The Communists did many terrible things,” my grandmother always says at the end of her reminiscences. “But they made women’s lives much better.”
That often-repeated dictum sums up the popular perception of Mao Zedong’s legacy regarding women in China. As every Chinese schoolchild learns in history class, the Communists rescued peasant daughters from urban brothels and ushered cloistered wives into factories, liberating them from the oppression of Confucian patriarchy and imperialist threat.
But the narrative of an across-the-board elevation of women’s status under Mao contains crucial caveats.
While the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao’s words and policies did little to alleviate women’s domestic burdens like housework and child care. And by inundating society with rhetoric blithely celebrating its achievements, the revolution deprived women of the private language with which they might understand and articulate their personal experiences.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Progressivism isn't about fighting Oppression.
It is about becoming the Oppressors.
Yeah. Anything about forced sterilization?
Funny thing—with all the love for communism all over the place, I don’t recall ever in history any carefully thought out, concrete explanation of why it’s such a great idea.
And was Grandma allowed into the USA? How many articles did she write that ruined the lives of innocent people?
Girl babies were also disproportionately aborted, a practice which continues. Not a lot of opportunity for them, yes?
I guess that explains why communism can only be supported under cover of darkness.
And the most important mandate of communism is that no attempt should ever be made to actually understand what it is.
I love old magazines and we purchased a few old readers digest issues. One had a story about how good women had it under the nazis.. some things never change..
As a result, communism is only understood by those who refuse to follow it.
Oh yes, and all of those people who died during The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are a testament to women’s lives improving under Communism.
What next for this pathetic band, are they going to tell people that women’s lives in Cambodia improved under Pol Pot and his Killing Fields and with people being jailed or killed for wearing glasses or speaking more than one language or being too happy or too lazy?
Good point. Agreed 100%.
That sort of socialist terminology was old and stale by the 1940's. Perhaps the Times is still stuck in the 1930's.
Anyway, here we see a communist Chinese soldier executing someone who isn't quite socialist enough. I doubt if the executed man's wife was then better off. But maybe the soldier's wife got a good laugh out of it. So I guess the Times would call it a wash.
They fared just as badly as men.
The comments section is closed, I guess ‘cause some people were a tad skeptical.
Well they probably didn’t enjoy their forced abortions. God have mercy.
Not to mention most of the aborted kids were little women aka girls.
I have two friends who grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
They worked in the fields unproductively like others like themselves, both were young physicists and not farmers.
One day the local commune leader came and all of the people were instructed to form 2 lines, males in one line and females in the other.
The local leader then declared that each was married to the person closest in the other line.
How’d that work out?
They could only be together 2 weeks each year while on vacation.
Later when the rules became more lax, they emigrated to the USA, she became a citizen and he moved back to China. Their daughter married a Dutch guy and moved to the Netherlands. That was 15 years ago. None of them have kept in touch since.
Ain’t socialism romantic?
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