Tang Village's Women In 1950s: Class, Gender And Family Structure In The Village Study

After the foundation of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) carried out a series of political and economic reform in the countryside, such as land reform, collectivization, and the Great Leap forward campaign. The rural women staged in the social arena under the macroscopical backgrond in the early PRC period. Adopting empirical research method, and applying the local chronicles, newspapers, archival documents and oral materials, this dissertation makes an exhaustive study of the women's history of Tang village in northern Hunan in the 1950s. We try to return the rural women as historical agents and cultural builders to the history, and mainly discuss the rural women's complicated history in the 1950s from the perspective of class, gender and family structure.This dissertation is divided into three parts, namely introduction, body and conclusion, and the body has five chapters in total. The first chapter introduces the fundamental condition of Tang village, and discusses the woman problem which hidden in Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan and the land reform of Xianing. The second chapter retraces the women's history of Tang village before the foundation of PRC. Then this dissertation mainly cncentrates on the historical transformations of the Tang village's women during the 1950s. The third chapter describes the complicated relations between land reform, conscription, marriage reform and the women in Tang village, which study on the following aspects:women came out from the inner chambers during the land reform period, overt and covert subjects of women's name in the land certificate, women's initiative in conscription and marriage reform encountered land reform. The fourth chapter analyzes gender equality and class inequality in education during the period of collectivization, and describes the change from women's land right in land reform to women's field work in the advanced agricultural cooperative team, then analyzes the main cause led the women to field work was accomplished the mission of increasing the agricultural output. The fifth chapter exploers the women's history of Tang village during the period of the Great Leap forward as following:the history memory about construction of irrigation and water conservancy was completely different between male peasants and female peasants, the people's commune system has contribution to the emancipation of women, but the obstruction was more obvious, the fall of patriarchy not completely decreased the influence of traditional family stucture in the rural culture nexus.According to the research based on historical anthropology, studies in women's history and studies in political history, also a dialogue with Mao Zedong's Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan and Kay Ann Johnson's Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, this dissertation holds that ideological propaganda, class liberation and economic independence are not necessarily able to achieve women's liberation, family structure is also an important factor that impacting the rural women's liberation. The women's history of Tang village in the 1950s not only has the factor about gender equality and emancipation of women, but also has the contrary factor. Class, gender and family structure commonly constructed the rural women's complicated history. In this period, the country's policy always placed the class interests above gender interests, but some women in the village also adopted their initiatives to defend their gender interests. The foundation of the PRC in 1949 is not the unique periodization between modern rural women's history and contemporary rural women's history.