ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate how communist ideological and legal changes were promulgated and elaborated in party propaganda during the PRC’s first 16 years, a golden era of progress in promoting gender equality and improving women’s rights. Using historical and documentary analyses method, analysis of 238 issues of official magazine Women of (New) China from 1949–1966, the authors found that first, compared with many contemporaneous Western societies, Chinese Communist Party propaganda appeared to place a relatively strong emphasis on gender equality and domestic burden-sharing by fathers. Traditional patriarchy was challenged and the roles of the father and husband were portrayed in novel and progressive ways. Second, underlying the shifting portrayal of gender roles during this period was a fundamentally instrumentalist conception of the relationship of all citizens, whether male or female, to the society of New China. Third, whether associated with radical collectivization, or with more conventional approaches to organizing labor, the restructuring of gender relations was typically portrayed less as an end in itself than as a means to the enhancement of productive efficiency. This helps account for the persistent contradictions or tensions between rhetoric of gender equality and the portrayal of proper gender roles in official propaganda.
