Delia Davin (1944–2016)

Delia Davin will be remembered by scholars above all for the book she wrote in the 1970s on the changes wrought by the Communist Party on women’s lives in the early years of People’s Republic of China. Like many of the best scholarly works, this book was the expression of things that Davin cared about at a very deep level, in this case the position of women in society and the impact of socialism in China. Davin’s appreciation of the tension between these two concerns grew out of a remarkable life story, which gave her work its great impact on subsequent scholarship and shaped her career as a scholar of Chinese society. Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976) took as its focus the alliance between the women’s movement in China and the Chinese Communist Party, ‘its aims, its problems, and its achievements’. Starting from the early Communist base areas in the 1930s and 40s she described the development of Communist Party policy on women. From the start, she argued, the Party subordinated what it called woman-work (funü gongzuo), that is to say work to change the position of women in society, to its goal of creating a communist state. Once that state was created and the Party had come to power women’s work was again subordinated, this time to issues of economic development. The main body of the book discusses the impact of this subordination in three areas: the introduction of new patterns of family life through the 1950 Marriage Law, rural women’s agricultural labour and especially the issue of equal pay, and urban women’s participation in the labour force and political life. Davin’s work covers the period up to to about 1960 and she argues that while there were undoubtedly considerable achievements that transformed women’s lives in many ways there were also institutional barriers to women’s progress within the Chinese Communist state.