Being Chinese | How far Chinese women have come since my grandmother’s time

I have more equal status than my grandmother did in the pre-communist era. But young women are still pushing back against discrimination

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Women in period costume record a dance with a phone in Beijing on February 25. Photo: EPA-EFE

Published: 9:30am, 8 Mar 2025

When it comes to women’s changing roles in society, China has much to be proud of. The stories of my family – my grandmother, a one-time prostitute; my mother, a lifelong factory worker; and myself, a writer – bear witness to Chinese women’s progress.

Women of my grandmother’s generation endured harsh lives, but she suffered more than most. Born in Zhenjiang, an ancient city on the bank of the Yangtze River, she lost her parents to famine as a child and was taken in by her aunt, basically as a servant. When she blossomed into a beauty at 14, her aunt’s husband sold her to his brothel in Yangzhou. Women in those days were treated like commodities.

At the establishment called the Pavilion of Spring Fragrance, she met my grandfather, a small-time grain dealer. Smitten by her, he bailed her out and installed her in his household as his concubine, but her inferior position led to constant bullying by his wife and children. In 1949, after Mao Zedong took power, men could keep only one wife. My grandfather chose his sweet-natured concubine and perhaps for that reason alone, my grandmother loved Chairman Mao.

The first legislation of the People’s Republic of China was the 1950 Marriage Law, which abolished arranged marriages and concubinage. Around the same time, the country moved to promote literacy, on the road to equal rights to education and employment for women.

Growing up in Mao’s China, my mother certainly fared better. After finishing middle school, she was assigned a job at a state-owned factory that produced intercontinental missiles capable of reaching North America. She was deeply grateful for this “iron rice bowl”, a job for life.

For most of her career, my mother performed one task: acid pickling, a process that involved lifting heavy metal parts into tanks filled with acid. It was hard work, yet Mao’s idea of gender equality denied the physical differences between men and women. The model women then were the “iron maidens” of Dazhai, who dressed like men and could carry as much “night soil” – a euphemism for human excrement, which was collected at night for use as crop fertiliser – as their male comrades.