How the Iron Girls movement changed women in China---The power of discourse in constructing social norms

This dissertation is the first study of the Iron Girls Movement as a successful case of state feminism in China. My working hypothesis is that public policy in post-Mao China works against gender equality and has become the cause of discrimination in the job market. The legislation that was meant to protect women's rights and interests has in fact hurt women more than it protects them.;By turning back to look at the achievements of the Iron Girls during the 1960s and early 1970s, my interviews and research have discovered how far women could go without a law of "protection" for women. Contrary to the current mainstream of China's indigenous feminist theories, often called "female-ist," which takes the Iron Girls movement as devastating women's bodies and takes the Cultural Revolution as a disaster for women's liberation movement, I maintain that state feminism in China reached its period of greatest prosperity during the Cultural Revolution. The political movements during the Cultural Revolution actually pushed women's liberation movement to its highest development. The Iron Girls Movement proved how successfully state intervention could create gender norms by using language as a site to construct a new discourse. My dissertation returns to the Iron Girls movement and reevaluates the state's "patriarchal" feminism during the Mao era. I use interviews and camcorder lens to bring back and re-display the history of the Iron Girls and make their voices heard.;My study has found answers to the following questions: Why was the Iron Girls movement repudiated when its participants had enjoyed the highest equality with men? Thousands of women declared that they benefited from being Iron Girls, and they continue to say so today. Why did the Iron Girls movement become the main reason both for advancing the Chinese women's liberation movement and for bringing it to an end? How did this dramatic change begin? One would not be able to understand how Chinese indigenous feminism has developed into female-ism without knowing the history of the Iron Girls movement.;I regard my research as a contribution to a growing body of scholarship on state feminism and on building China's own feminist gender theory. Efforts to develop gender theory in China without attending to this neglected history are overlooking a valuable source for future development. Narrating women's experience is no longer only reflecting the fact of their being oppressed; rather, the narrating per se offers the power of constructing a new discourse, able to subvert the status quo. Bringing the experiences and the circumstances of the Iron Girls back into current feminist debates looks to aspects of Maoist public policy to construct fresh feminist discourses in China.