‘Flower vase and housewife'

In March 1992, China’s national women’s newspaper complained that the country’s burgeoning advertising industry was casting women in two contrasting roles, both of which had adverse implications for women’s lives in modernising China:

[There is] the open ‘modern flower vase’ type, luxuriously adorned and bejewelled, proponent of advanced consumerism’…[and] there is the traditional virtuous wife and good mother who is generally associated with kitchen utensils, washing machines, refrigerators, and other consumer goods related to housework.

(Zhongguo funü bao, 20 March 1992:3) ² Starting from a situation of imposed austerity and asexual representations at the end of the Mao era in 1976, post-Mao China presents a striking case study of the creation of a gendered consumer culture. This culture is only beginning to emerge, but women are already being utilised to create and manipulate personal desires, both as consumers and as sexualised objects of consumption. ³ This chapter examines the ‘flower vase and housewife’ roles currently ascribed to women in the context of China’s modernisation, particularly the growth of a consumer society and culture set against reduced state control over people’s everyday lives. ⁴