Finding Women in the Nation: State Feminism in Socialist China (1949–1964)

Even if the seeds fall on gravel, we must plant a few trees in the wilderness for future generations.

In the early days of the New China, there was a group of women who held important positions in state institutions, with women's liberation as their political goal. They experienced the baptism of the May Fourth Movement, grew up during the revolutionary war, firmly believed that women's liberation was at the core of China's socialist revolution, and were committed to promoting gender equality within a highly patriarchal power system.

This book is the first to examine the socialist state polity through a gender lens, revealing a long-unrecognized internal gender political struggle. From the organizational development of the Women's Federation and the political crises it faced, to the unfolding of feminist practices in the cultural sphere, Wang Zheng meticulously analyzes a large number of primary archives and historical materials to demonstrate the action strategies of feminists in the socialist state: how to strive for subjective expression at the margins of power, how to assert their stance in a hidden way, and how to use mainstream political language to voice their demands. Their daily and sustained efforts loosened the seemingly monolithic system, accumulated transferable experience for women to take groundbreaking actions in the national process, and thus constituted an indispensable chapter in the "genealogy" of Chinese feminism.