The Ugly & the Beautiful

From all over the countryside they descended on Peking last week--swarms of muscular women in tight pigtails, laborers' boots and identical blue boiler suits. The glorious revolution, said Madame Soong Ching-ling, U.S.-educated* widow of Sun Yat-sen and now People's Vice Chairman, had brought about a great change in Chinese "esthetic views . . . The fragile, slender and sentimental girls, whom the exploiting classes regarded as pretty, are ugly and degenerate to the working people." Banners flaunted high, red-and-gold streamers clutched in their hands, the emancipated women of Red China cried back their full-throated approval: "What was beautiful is now ugly! What was ugly is now beautiful!" It was International Women's Day, and no fewer than 10,000 Hero Women and members of Women's Groups were on hand for the big rally. There was Hsu Hsueh-hui, who lost both hands "in a fight with Kuomintang bandits" and now wears an artificial pair made in the Soviet Union "especially for shaking hands with other people." Captain Chen Chi-yen ("The party made a pilot of me, a 32-year-old peasant girl") was there, and so were the "Seven Fairies" of the Hupeh tea plantation, who had found a way to pick 1,102 Ibs. of tea leaves a day. "All sisters in our country," cried the chairman of the National Women's Federation, "spur your horses again and again!"

"Do Good." Ever since 1950, when the Communists decreed them equal to men, the women of Red China have been spurring. Today nine out of ten of them have jobs, and when they get together, boasts the weekly Women of China, they "do not gossip any more, but talk about how to accomplish their production task." When that subject palls, they switch to discussing the Five Goods (e.g., "Do good in self-study"), and after that, the Seven Stills ("Some women still indulge themselves in ideas of conservatism, self-abasement and dependency").

But the Communist press is not alone in noting the change--the eager women of the militia, the emaciated girls toiling in the communes as if possessed. To some recent foreign travelers to Communist China, the most striking thing about the women is the pleasure they take in power: they are the real militants of the new order.

They may work for only $4 a week and have their children brought up in factory nurseries. But they themselves stay around the factory after hours searching for some improvement to be made--or someone to denounce. Expelled priests and escaped deviationists report with remembered horror on the teen-age girls screaming for their executions, or serving as their fanatic inquisitors.

Men Shoppers. In fact, the Communists seem to be erecting a new matriarchy. Two weeks ago 80 million women were "organized" to see the new film, Silver Blossoms in the Sky, the story of China's female paratroopers. And in Shanghai, Peking and Canton, one Swiss traveler observed the weirdest sight of all--long lines of dutiful men who had been sent out by their women before dawn to wait, shopping baskets in hand, for the markets to open.

Sometimes, even in People's China, there are women who hesitate. Last month a "Mrs. X" wrote to the Peking magazine Chinese Women for advice. "My husband," she said, "is showing rightist tendencies. He complains about the party and our glorious leader, Comrade Mao. Should I denounce him? We have been married a long time and he has been very good to me." The answer: denounce. The reason: "In a socialist state, love between a husband and wife is bound up with their enthusiasm and affection for the enterprises of socialism. If Mrs. X did not denounce her husband, she would be depriving their love of the political basis on which it was founded. Thus there would be no happiness in their home life."

* Georgia's Wesleyan College.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.