June Book Club: Women and Child Care in China, a Firsthand Report from Ruth Sidel

Ruth Sidel offers a report of how China liberated women from the "bitter past" through the reorganization of mothering, childcare, pregnancy, and marriage.

In our last post, we discussed the post-communist transition in China and its affect on the capitalist world economy. Though China continues to be ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, we highlighted the wide gulf between communist governance in the revolutionary period and China’s now decades-long role as guarantor of the capitalist world economy. We also insisted that studying the governance of Communist China (pre-1970s) is necessary for those interested in transformational political processes, a conversation we wish to continue. Women and Child Care in China takes up this same orientation, with special attention to the liberation of women.

Ruth Sidel, a psychiatric social worker who worked with young children, went to China as a guest of the Chinese Medical Association. While there, Sidel visited nurseries, kindergartens, factories, and homes to understand how society was reorganized specifically to liberate women from the “bitter past” that existed prior to the 1949 revolution, when exploitation and domination structured society as well as the family system.

While the Communists, in their 1950 Marriage Law, “abolished arranged marriages, outlawed paying any price in money or goods for a wife, outlawed polygamy, concubines, and child marriage, prohibited interference in the remarriage of widows, and guaranteed the right to divorce for the wife as well as the husband,” this legislative change was simply a starting point. Workplaces, homes, and childcare were also restructured so as not to be predicated on the oppression of women — and these changes required an innovative mix of practical and ideological experimentation among the masses (22). This was not communism by decree — or what the revolutionary communists would criticize as “commandism.” Sidel’s report gives insight into the social process of women’s emancipation, as well as the revolutionary methods employed in the workplaces, schools, homes, and all levels of Chinese society.