Leiden University Student Repository

Buijtenhuis, Laura (2018)

Winning women or wiped-out wives?

Bachelor thesis | Chinastudies (BA)

For a long time, common belief among researchers on women in China has been that starting already before the Cultural Revolution, women were mobilized to work according to the needs of the Party, and that gender erasure took place during the Cultural Revolution. Within this research, six propaganda posters were examined, along the lines of the importance of models for the CCP. The posters were meant to paint a positive picture on whatever the Party needed from the people, in order to mobilize them. The Party encouraged women to start working in labor fields traditionally occupied by men, because of labor forces, and propagated this as a means of achieving gender equality, while actually the opposite was achieved. The Party uses gender equality as a means to get people to do as it wanted, and this came to its climax during the Cultural Revolution, however the Party never made gender equality a real priority. Even though gender equality was never really established, propaganda posters...Show moreFor a long time, common belief among researchers on women in China has been that starting already before the Cultural Revolution, women were mobilized to work according to the needs of the Party, and that gender erasure took place during the Cultural Revolution. Within this research, six propaganda posters were examined, along the lines of the importance of models for the CCP. The posters were meant to paint a positive picture on whatever the Party needed from the people, in order to mobilize them. The Party encouraged women to start working in labor fields traditionally occupied by men, because of labor forces, and propagated this as a means of achieving gender equality, while actually the opposite was achieved. The Party uses gender equality as a means to get people to do as it wanted, and this came to its climax during the Cultural Revolution, however the Party never made gender equality a real priority. Even though gender equality was never really established, propaganda posters did give women the believe that equality is a possibility.Show less

Cultural Revolution

Propaganda poster

Gender equality

Author

Buijtenhuis, Laura

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Chinastudies

Supervisors

Schneider, Florian

ECTS Credits

10

Language

en