Yan’an’s Labor Heroines and the Birth of the Women of New China

This article discusses the labor heroines of Yan’an and their cultural representation in the context of the early 1940s. It shows how the phenomenon of women’s labor heroism was formed during these years and it points out the rifts, contradictions and multiple understandings in the representation of labor heroines and their ideal role in the revolutionary process. In particular, this study highlights the co-existence of an instrumentalist and an idealist approach to women’s participation in production which is attributed to the double temporality in the Chinese Communist Party’s self-positioning at the time. The short-term necessities of the War of Resistance justified an instrumentalist approach which made labor heroines a “work force.” New Democracy, on the other hand, as a period of incipient socialism, opened the temporal horizon towards the future and moved revolutionary discourse from “memory” to “prophecy.” Writers embraced this creative space and imagined the social relations of a pacified, socialist society. Reportage as genre, labor heroines as subject and utopianism as orientation in time formed the basis for totally new conceptualizations of women’s liberation through work, restituting women’s agency and placing them in new sets of social relations.