Family Life, Women and the Marriage Law

A Society Built on Patriarchy

Before 1949 Chinese family life was shaped by Confucian patriarchy. Marriage was arranged by parents, often when the bride was a child; bride prices were paid; concubinage was legal in wealthy households; and female infanticide remained common in poor villages. Women’s feet had been bound from c.1100 onwards in elite families, breaking the bones of girls aged 4–7 to produce the prized ‘three-inch lotus’ foot — an excruciating practice that left women unable to walk far or work the fields. Although foot binding had been in long decline since the late Qing reforms of the 1900s and was banned by the Republican government in 1912, the practice persisted in remote villages into the 1940s.

The Marriage Law of 1950

The 1950 Marriage Law was one of the first major laws of the new People’s Republic. Drafted with input from Communist women activists such as Deng Yingchao (Zhou Enlai’s wife), it set the minimum marriage age at 20 for men and 18 for women, banned the buying and selling of brides, and gave both spouses equal rights in property and divorce. Women lined up at courthouses across China in 1950 and 1951 to file for divorce; in 1953 alone the courts handled around 1.1 million divorce cases. For young women trapped in childhood marriages, the law was liberation.

A common student misconception is that the Marriage Law was universally welcomed. In fact rural backlash was fierce. Husbands, mothers-in-law and clan elders saw the law as an attack on the family economy — a divorced wife could leave with property and remarry. Reports of beatings, suicides and murders of young women who tried to use the law’s provisions appeared in CCP investigations through the early 1950s. Some local cadres, themselves rural patriarchs, refused to enforce it. The 1953 enforcement campaign, ‘Marriage Law Implementation Month’, was launched precisely because the law was being widely ignored.

Foot Binding Banned

Foot binding had been outlawed by the Republican government in 1912 but the practice continued in pockets of rural China through the 1940s. The CCP launched fresh campaigns in the early 1950s, sending women cadres into villages to inspect girls’ feet and prosecute parents who had bound them. By the late 1950s the practice was effectively extinct. Younger women regained the ability to walk normally and work in the fields and factories — a precondition of the workforce mobilisation that followed.

Communes Disrupt the Family

If the Marriage Law reshaped marriage, the communes of 1958 reshaped the family itself. Around 26,000 people’s communes absorbed roughly 99% of rural households. Family cooking was banned in favour of communal mess halls (about 3.4 million across China by mid-1959); childcare was collective; private plots were abolished. The CCP slogan was ‘production over kinship’. Women were enlisted en masse into the workforce, while older women ran nurseries and kitchens. For working women, this meant relief from the ‘double burden’ of paid labour plus domestic chores — in theory.

In practice the communes’ disruption of family life was deeply unpopular. The mess halls were poorly run, food was wasted, and during the 1959–62 famine they became sites of starvation. After the famine, Liu Shaoqi’s recovery measures (1962–65) quietly returned cooking to the household and re-allowed small private plots. The commune as an organisation survived until 1983, but the radical attack on the household economy did not last.

Women in the Workforce

Mao’s most quoted line on women is ‘women hold up half the sky’. Female labour-force participation rose dramatically: by 1976 around 90% of urban women of working age had paid work, an extraordinary figure by world standards. Propaganda celebrated iron girls — teenage girls in tractor brigades, oil-field work crews and steel mills, photographed driving heavy machinery and lifting sacks of grain. Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, became one of the very few women in the senior leadership and a powerful figure during the Cultural Revolution.

A second misconception is that Mao gave women equality. The reality was more limited. Women’s pay was lower (commonly counted as 7 work points to a man’s 10); housework was unchanged, leaving women with the ‘double burden’; the Politburo remained almost entirely male. Soong Ching-ling (widow of Sun Yat-sen) and Deng Yingchao were senior figures, but Jiang Qing’s power came from her marriage to Mao, not promotion through the party. After the Gang of Four was arrested in 1976, the iron-girl propaganda was quietly retired and gender norms in the countryside reasserted themselves.