Factory Girls after Socialism: Gender and Memory of the Early Reforms

Sarah Chang, Miami University Ohio

Scholarship on women workers during reform and opening-up has often emphasized shifting gender ideals after the end of Maoism. Scholars have also examined how women in state-owned enterprises were more vulnerable to layoffs and economic precarity than men as state enterprises declined. This paper approaches these questions from a different angle by considering women workers’ memories of the reform era. Drawing on oral histories with women employed at a steel tube factory in Chengdu, it explores the disconnect between the political and economic ruptures of the reform era and how women narrated their lives. Following Gail Hershatter’s insight that the signposts of memory map unevenly onto “campaign time,” the paper asks how the economic reforms were remembered by women workers. It finds that, rather than state policies and campaigns, interviewees framed their struggles through intimate narratives of married life and the burdens of motherhood. This paper places gendered memory alongside changing institutional discourse within the state factory. Reform-era propaganda reconfigured Maoist language about women’s labor to suit new economic priorities. In this process, terms previously associated with socialism were transmuted into a new gender lexicon of the reforms. Together, oral histories and factory materials show how Mao-era campaign language was repurposed by both factory authorities and workers to interpret the changing social conditions of the reform era. Ultimately, the paper argues that gender shaped not only women’s experiences of reform but also the historical terms through which these experiences were remembered and understood.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 150. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (I): A Hundred Protagonists