Les femmes du grand bond en avant: Miroirs et masques idéologiques

It has been largely demonstrated and is nowadays admitted that the «Great Leap ahead» (1959-1961) has been a crucial period in the history of Chinese women. During this movement, a great number of «housewives», which we shall here call the «women of the Great Leap ahead», were integrated by the State into wage workers. Communist authorities boast about an original emancipation of «housewives» that broke ground in the male-female equality policy in China. Probably for that reason, this «accomplishment» has rarely been questioned by historiography. However, this image of emancipation is very ideological. We aim at revealing the construction of an unequal employment system for these housewives, a category which is an ideological construction in itself, first through a study of the history of employment politics in the 50s and 60s, second through in-depth interviews of 15 «women of the Great Leap Ahead» who worked in the same company in Shanghai. In their professional lives, these «housewives» have been submitted to a casual employment system, with low wages and no career outlooks, and without social protection - a system which reinforced the stable employment system in the Maoist times.