From Appearance to Disappearance

During the collectivist period of the 1950s and early 1960s, in order to pursue rapid economic development, the Chinese party-state adopted the strategy of high accumulation and low consumption "centered on production." The state consciously wove the gender division of labor into the large-scale production system, with the vast majority of reproductive responsibilities undertaken by women without compensation. Women's domestic work was not completely "invisible" to the state, and at times it put great effort into theorizing housework in order to establish a position for housework and those responsible for it in the socialist production system. Three groups of women—women workers, peasant woman, and the dependents of workers—and their relationship with production determined the state's different attitudes toward their domestic labor as well as their political status.