Ellen R. Judd.
The Chinese Women’s Movement Between State and Market.
Stanford University Press, 2002, 216 pp.
$US 19.95 paper (0-8047-4406-8), $US 45.00 cloth (0-8047-4405-X)
Ellen Judd has been studying China since her days there as a Ph.D. student in the mid 1970s. The research reported in this book was carried out from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s, during which period she focussed on a particular region of northern China, the Shandong province, and within that the community of Huaili. In some senses, this book continues and refines the focus of her 1994 study - Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford University Press). Judd has, therefore, lived in and carried out research in China during particularly significant periods in recent history - spanning the last days of the Cultural Revolution, the ending of collectivisation and the institution of the reform era. Given the well known complexity of Chinese society, culture and politics, we need a guide with this kind of indepth and long term knowledge in order to understand what is happening inside society.
In this book, Ellen Judd provides a crisply clear, well documented and thorough account of the way in which ‘the women’s movement’ has responded to the new demands of the reform era and the increased salience of the market economy. Given the centralised and ruthlessly controlling Chinese state the ‘women’s movement’ does not mean what we understand by that term in Canada or other ‘northern’ countries - a loose coalition of extraordinarily diverse, informal, and certainly non-governmental groups, with equally diverse memberships (or no formal memberships) and agenda. In China, the women’s movement means the Women’s Federations of China, which is a formal part of the Chinese State structure, together with the Women’s Committees, which operate in local communities under the guidance of the Women’s Federation. This is a different kind of creature altogether from the one with which we are familiar, although Judd argues it is no less legitimate, nor, within the constraints obtaining in China, any less effective than women’s movements elsewhere.
Judd explains that the context of the reform period was less favourable to women than many previous periods, especially in that issues of equality and liberation for women tended to be painted with the brush of being outmoded, and therefore politically suspect. Many women previously in leadership positions lost them, and fewer women were promoted to visible high status positions. The Women’s Federation, therefore, began to focus on improving what they called ‘women’s quality’. The word ‘quality’ is problematic in our culture and indicates elitism in the Chinese context, but a campaign (or set of activities) aimed at improving women’s ‘quality’ successfully avoided the use of arguments about ‘equality’ and instead focussed on improving women’s opportunities to succeed in the new atmosphere of market competition. Judd, in fact, sees the pursuit of women’s ‘quality’ as a ‘domestic Chinese variant of gender-and-development’ (p. 27).
The particular focus of this book is on the way in which the ‘two studies, two competitions’ activities worked in the province of Shandong and the village of Huaili from its inception in 1989. Confusingly titled, this programme has four elements: ‘adult basic education, practical technical training intended to generate income quickly, competition among local women to achieve economic success and gaining recognition, and through that economic success, competition in making social contributions’ (p. 11-12). The ‘two studies’ was developed explicity in order to build ‘women’s quality’ in the rural communities. In order to understand the programme and its impact, Judd supplies us with very considerable and well researched data on the village, especially in terms of its economic activity; on the households that she interviewed over the years, and on women’s educational, economic and political careers. She also tells us a great deal about how the Women’s Federations operate, and how the local Women’s Committees, and ‘Women’s Heads’ are recruited and carry out their tasks. These are all placed within their political and social context and the difficulties they encounter there.
The reader is left with a deep sympathy with the women activists, who (as in many parts of the world) battle to improve the situation of women with limited resources, especially low levels of human resources and virtually no money, and certainly very little prestige or hope of advancement. Given the difficult circumstances, it seems impressive that the women’s movement has been able to accomplish so much in helping women set up ‘courtyard’ small scale enterprises and to participate in the local economic efforts, bettering themselves and their families in the new atmosphere of ‘competition’. But one of Judd’s motives in writing this book is to emphasise the active participation of ordinary Chinese women in shaping their own future. As she puts it, ‘The actual workings of women’s agency in modern and contemporary rural China utilize resources made available by state policies and programs and by organised arms of the state, such as the Women’s Federations, but their agency is grounded in the immediate structures of rural communities, and primarily dependent on the women themselves.’ (p. 7).
This is a useful and well researched book, reflecting a long period of reflection. It deserves a far wider readership than simply ‘Chinese’ anthropologists or sociologists. I hope it gets it.
Marilyn Porter
Department of Sociology
Memorial University
mporter@mun.ca
Marilyn Porter is not a scholar of Chinese society, although she has worked extensively on women’s economic activities in rural communities (especially in Newfoundland) and on women’s situation in Southeast Asia (especially Indonesia). Her perspective in this review is that of an ‘intelligent general reader’.
http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/cjscopy/reviews/chiwomen.html
July 2002
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