Iron Girls
Iron Girls is a term that was popularized in the People's Republic of China during the 1950s through the 1970s. It was used to define a new idealized emerging group of working women who were strong and capable of performing highly demanding labor tasks, usually assigned to men. These tasks included repairing high-voltage electric wires, working at farmland, or heavy physical work. Beginning during the Great Leap Forward, Iron Girls were a symbol of shifting gender norms during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, and in the years following the cultural revolution they faced harsh criticism. Iron Girls relied on the idea that men and women were inherently equal, but this idea was criticized by some feminists for its emphasis on the division of labor.
Accounts of Iron Girls are limited, aside from state propaganda which was circulated during the Cultural Revolution. Propaganda images emphasized women with strong physical attributes as well as their ability to perform in jobs which had been dominated by men in the years prior to the Cultural Revolution. Firsthand narratives in the form of memoirs which focus on other social issues at the time are some of the only pieces of evidence of the era available to historians, making it difficult to understand the reality of life as an Iron Girl.
The relative equal opportunities for women in labor was a deviation from traditional Chinese models, where there was a large gendered division of labor. After the death of Mao Zedong, the idea and depictions of Iron Girls would be heavily mocked and the Chinese government would encourage women to take up traditionally female roles.
Origin
Iron Men
Iron men initially referred to male oil workers in Daqing. Wang Jinxi was the first "Iron Man," or model worker, at the Daqing oil field. Wang Jinxi and his drilling team took the train to Saertu on March 25, 1960. However, his drilling machine had not arrived yet. On April 4, he and his crew finally found their drilling machine in a train car on the Binzhou line, but there were no machines available to move the sixty tons of equipment. Wang and his team moved all the equipment several kilometers to their work site over four days and had it installed by April 11. The host of the family assigned to house Wang found him sleeping next to the power generation when he did not turn in for the night and said of him, "Your team leader is an iron man!" At the First Daqing Oil Field Technology Colloquium at the Anda Railway Workers' Club, General Yu called Wang to center stage and pronounced, "Learn from the Iron Man! Salute the Iron Man!" News of the Iron Man spread throughout the Daqing oil field so that workers would visit Wang's site. Following Kang Shi'en's Ten-Thousand-Person-Swearing-In-Conference on April 20, new iron man worker models arose, including the "Red Flag" work units.Creation of the Iron Girl
The term "Iron Girl" originated from the Dazhai Young Women Pioneer's Team for agricultural production.Dazhai is a village located in Shanxi province. Dazhai women have participated in arduous farm-work since the 1930s. Most of Dazhai's able-bodied men left the village for the Second Sino-Japanese War, leaving the women to take a more prominent role in agricultural work. These women continued working the fields after the war. In the 1950s, Mao Zedong's government required county officials to work in the fields for a month each year. In 1959, Zhao Mancang and his team of officials worked the fields in Dazhai but after 10 days of working with the men, they decided to switch and work with the women. Zhao said, "Originally we thought working with women in the fields would be less strenuous, but actually women's labor was more intense... Dazhai women had a particular habit while working in the fields. They did not chat and often continued working without any break. So following women in the fields for one week was even worse than before. Some on our team had such severe bodily pains that they could not sleep at night. Our county judge did not even have the strength to hold his bowl after a day's work in the fields. He dropped his bowl in the canteen." Dazhai women worked hard to produce grain in the poor mountainous region.
In 1963, a flood destroyed the terraced farmland surrounding the main village and collapsed many of the cave houses. Twenty-three girls, ages thirteen to sixteen, formed a youth task force to help restore the village. Chen Yonggui, the illiterate village leader, told the girls to leave early one day but they refused, saying, "Since the men do not go home, we will not go home, either. Why should we go back first?” He responded by saying, “You girls are made of iron!” Following this interaction, the girls renamed their youth task force the Iron Girls Brigade. This was the first use of the term "Iron Girls." Stories about these women began to circulate: "one cut her finger to the bone but kept on working, another became a crack shot in the militia."
The Shanxi provincial head told Mao Zedong about Dazhai in 1964 due to the large harvest they accomplished the year before despite the flood. Mao made Dazhai a national model for agriculture. Mao organized the "Learn from Dazhai in agriculture" campaign. Stories of the Iron Girls Brigade were spread through national publicity.
Guo Fenglian
Guo Fenglian was the first nationally recognized Iron Girl. She worked the fields in the 1950s, saying that girls worked hard "to produce more grain so that we would be able to fill up our stomachs; and that would also be our contribution to socialism.” In 1963, at the formation of the girl's youth task force, Guo Fenglian was elected the brigade leader at age seventeen. With the promotion of Dazhai in 1964, she became a national celebrity. She received so many admiration letters that her team members had to help her respond. She met both Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai and became friends with Mao's wife Jiang Qing. In 1973, Guo was promoted to the head of Dazhai and joined county, provincial, and national leading bodies. In 1980, following the end of the cultural revolution, state rhetoric against masculine women rose as they tried to push a return to femininity. Due to this, Guo lost all leadership positions she had previously held.History
Qing Empire
Under the Qing Empire, and to a degree the Republic of China, labor was heavily gendered* which was exacerbated through practices such as footbinding and the civil service exam. Upper-class women were expected to spend the majority of their time inside the home where they were tasked with managing the household. Girls of these households would generally be educated in fields such as weaving and art which were seen as advantageous traits to have when it came time for arranging marriage. Boys were expected to spend the majority of their time studying for the civil service exam and were educated by tutors and even their educated mothers. Men who passed the civil service exam were often away from home as official government work required for men to travel to outside provinces.For lower-class families the gender stratification was not as wide. Most lower-class men and boys could not afford the lessons needed to pass the civil service exam and women did not have their feet bound as tightly as privileged women. In many farming families women would often work alongside their male family members despite having bound feet.
Maoist China
Mao Zedong saw labor as the tool of women's liberation. In his writings Mao Zedong saw rural peasant women as less oppressed by men than other women due to their ability to work and attributes many of rural women movements to their ability to work and therefore have a say in family and political issues.Under Mao Zedong's government, many of the social structures and laws surrounding women and marriage were discarded and replaced with a system that emphasized the similarities between men and women. The 1950 Marriage Law would outlaw many of the previous systems of marriage such as arranged marriage and concubinage. In addition to this, it made obtaining a divorce easier for both genders and equalized the distribution of property after divorce.
During the 1950s, urban Chinese women started to join male-dominated fields. A way to promote women's new roles under collectivization was the formation of labor models. Labor models were idealized women who excelled in production and were used by the state to encouraged other women to follow their example and mobilize. Women's participation in male fields was praised. The Great Leap Forward's focus on total workforce mobilization resulted in opportunities for women's labor advancement. Women did traditionally male work in both fields and factories, including major movements of women into management positions.
This tendency continued during the Cultural Revolution as even more rural women were incorporated into men's agricultural work. The Iron Girls propaganda helped advance these efforts as they were national labor models. According to the Chinese Communist Party's central committee, the increasing participation of women in heavy industry was a result of answering the state's call. The term “Iron Girls” became popularized around the 1960s, which was a metaphor to represent the young working women in the rural countryside. The first Iron Girl brigade was formed in 1963 in Dazhai in order to address the agricultural losses caused by a flood. They appeared as a model production squad, and were able to shoulder heavy labor with their “iron shoulders, hence the name. Initially, the brigade did not have the goal to contend with men or challenge traditional gender norms. However, when Mao Zedong used the Dazhai brigade as an example of mobilization techniques, they started to facilitate different agendas. In the wake of Dazhai's Iron Girls brigade propaganda, many new specialized groups started to form in an array of different male-dominated fields
Localized labor shortages and feminization of agriculture also contributed to the rise of the Iron Girls. Men were migrating towards non-agricultural sectors, like joining the army or working in cities. Men had more opportunities, so when they left, women had to replace their work. During the 1960s, agriculture was feminized in many areas, as women were responsible for 87.5% of agricultural work at the time. In urban areas, women's brigades were also on the rise, because of the government's new employment policies: with the sudden employment of a large number of educated females, the government had to assign some of them to physically demanding tasks, rather than just the bureaus. Therefore, they did not have another choice. Yet even in the frontlines, women outnumbered men, and each brigade was only assigned a few men to boost morale. Then when there weren't enough men, all-women groups were formed and they were assigned tasks that other people did not want to do. However, the single-sex groups started demonstrating high levels of productivity, because they were able to draw from a gender-based identity which was rooted in increasing their confidence and strength. Furthermore, women's brigades became a source of pride for the workers, because their work was attracting attention and respect from the public, which further incentivized them to work enthusiastically. In addition to their commitment to their work, the women were also applauded for being loyal and following instructions carefully. Therefore, many local administrations were inclined to utilize their services, since they were faithful to commanders, and were increasingly productive after even after minimal incentives.
The ability of women to perform the same tasks as men was emphasized during the Maoist era and the Iron Girls who took up traditional masculine roles, such as electricians or tractor drivers, were celebrated by Chinese media. However, the vast majority of Chinese women still did not work in these traditionally masculine fields and continued to work in areas such as textiles, which were historically dominated by women. Although the rhetoric of the Iron Girl helped women achieve praise and prominence in fields they were typically excluded from, its main goal was not to address women's issues or liberation. Feminism was considered bourgeois by the Chinese government and the industrialization and development of the state were the primary motivating factors for the state to push for further inclusion of women in more “masculine” fields.