Club Jacobin

"Deng [Yingchao, head of the CCP Changjiang Bureau Women’s Department] illustrates the new ideal of ‘virtuous wives and good mothers’ more completely in her later article titled “Criticism on the article ‘Darkness in Blue’” published in 1940. This article claims that Deng opposed the opinion argued by a writer named Duan Mu that ‘women had their right to enjoy themselves in their own happy families by being a good housewife and mother and being satisfied with managing a small family.’ Deng emphasized that women‘s liberation could not be separated from social and national emancipation. She writes, ‘women should step out of their small families and establish the sense of big social family.’"