In Place of a Conclusion
Return to Women’s Liberation in China
In Place of a Conclusion
The road to women’s liberation via the Chinese revolution has been only roughly sketched. To see it in greater detail requires a clear understanding of Chinese society, its past history as well as its present contradictions—an understanding, clearly, that we have yet to achieve.
We also need to understand more about all manifestations of women’s oppression in our own countries. Such understanding comes only with an unlimited awareness and ever closer contact with the mass of our women compatriots. To the question, “What is to be done?” the only proper answer is, “Everything!”
The women of today are involved in their own struggle because in the past their oppression has always been denied, and their revolutionary hopes and dreams have always been reduced to a slim catalogue of legislative and budgetary demands appended to the end of any self-respecting party manifesto. And yet that struggle will not be understood, and therefore will not succeed, as long as we in the women’s movement ignore the other forms of exploitation suffered by other oppressed people. Some members of the Women’s Liberation Movement have attacked this idea in the mistaken belief that it would be mere charity. But to pay heed to others’ oppression doesn’t mean acting “charitably” to those who are oppressed. Rather it means understanding that women’s oppression is like all oppression—the product of an exploiting society, in our case a capitalist society. It means that the only way women have of achieving their liberation is via the revolution.
Whether we like it or not, women as a group and the proletariat are interdependent—not like two playing cards that support one another, nor like two nations allied together, but in the same way as the links of a chain are interdependent. If criticism of female roles and functions is our starting point, and if our aim is truly to expose the real link between the specific oppression of women and the entire social edifice of exploitation, then we must raise our sights to a global critique of society.
Seen in such a light this book stands as a contribution to the vital debate on the role of women in our revolution—a debate that is only just beginning.