The annihilation of femininity in Mao’s China: Gender inequality of sent-down youth during the Cultural Revolution

Abstract

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao’s famous political slogan ‘The times have changed, men and women are the same’ (时代不同了, 男女都一样) asserted that men and women were equal in political consciousness and physical strength. However, the slogan’s seeming emphasis on gender equality misconstrued the concepts of equality and sameness. In-depth interviews with former ‘sent-down’ youth illustrate how state rhetoric appropriated a discourse of women’s equality to silence women and depoliticize gender as a political category. For urban sent-down youth, gender inequality was absent from public discourse, and conflict between the sexes was concealed by a state discourse that constructed class struggle as paramount. Gender as a category was credited with solely political and pragmatic meaning and was utilized as a means for the communist government to achieve its own political and cultural utopia.