P257-258 妇女能顶半边天，离了妇女没吃穿

 In theory, women were supposed to be liberated by becoming productive members of society and working in the public sphere. ... In reality, the majority of urban women did not work in state-owned enterprises. Moreover, when CCP ideological discourse and propaganda attempted to work out the gendering of the spaces of work and domestic life as well as the role of women in both, it perpetuated images of the home as a female space.  ... Song argues that in the early 1950s, women were encouraged to join the workforce, but that between 1956 and 1958 they were mobilized to leave public work for housework, and that beginning in 1958 political discussions focused on collectivization of household labor.... while the images of women working at home may have depicted female productivity in the domestic realm, the captions suggested otherwise—that housework was not productive work. ... Because the public workplace was the state-sanctioned productive sphere, male workers became citizens through their relationship to this production. In contrast, a woman’s relationship to public productive work, and thus her political status, was always tenuous. As quickly as a woman was mobilized into the productive forces, she could be asked to leave to make room for male employees. The gendered representations of work and home that began in the 1950s laid the foundation for the dichotomy of going out to work and returning home that continues to haunt Chinese women today. In other words, the so-called traditional role of housewife that women were summoned back to, especially after market economic reforms in the 1980s, is itself an invention of the 1950s.