Marxist Maternalism, Memory, and the Mobilization of Women in the Great Leap Forward

Very little is known about how women farmers fared during the Great Leap Forward. Indeed, the vast majority of scholarship on the Great Leap Forward has focused narrowly on party and bureaucratic elites and not on explaining politics within rural communities. This paper addresses this gap in the literature by discussing the commonalities and divergences in recollections of women farmers in Henan and Jiangsu. It is argued that important discrepancies in memory within the same communities point to the uneven integration of state discourses about (women's) liberation at the grassroots. Whereas women who had the informal and formal support of party institutions could sometimes realize the freedom being promised by the party during the Great Leap Forward, women at the margin of these institutions often could not. Ultimately, an examination of these recollections suggests that while the Chinese Communist Party was able to shift the discursive ground by which women came to understand themselves in the post-revolutionary era, it has never been able to control the interpretation of this ground - not even among its most committed grassroots activists.