HOMEBOUND WOMEN: THE ‘RETIRE AND RETURN HOME’ DRIVE IN 1957-58 CHINA

Abstract

This thesis, an academic exercise situated within the Anglophone scholarship on Mao’s China (1949-1978), surveys the ‘Retire and Return Home’ policy (late 1957 – early 1958) in the People’s Republic of China, wherein many urban Chinese working women faced either the reality or the prospect of retrenchment from their posts. Contrary to popular beliefs and scholarly accounts, the Chinese party-state at the turn of 1957 briefly betrayed its initial stance of women’s total liberation, valorising women’s domestic values and sending urban women home. To understand this puzzling anomaly, this thesis surveys the rationale behind the ‘Retire and Return Home’ drive. It examines, first, the evolving party-state’s stance towards women’s work and housework in the 1950s until the ‘Retire and Return Home’ drive. Second, it contextualises the anomalous policy within the larger imminent crises in the Chinese political economy, in particular, overpopulation and resource drains in the urban centres. Third, it historicises the complicity of the All-China Women’s Federation, an organisation within the party-state hierarchy founded to guarantee women’s interests, in women’s domestication within the perilous politics of 1957. Sources-wise, this thesis relies on a variety of materials, namely, national newspaper articles, government’s publications, and internal government documents in the 1950s. Employing gender as not only a useful, but also an indispensable category of analysis, this thesis sheds new lights on the entangled relationship of politics and gender in 1950s China.