men were never the slaves that they have sometimes been painted. In
many parts of China, long before the Pacific War, women worked in the
fields with their husbands. Elsewhere they worked in secondary
agricultural industries (weaving, preparation of food conserves, home
industries, and even textile factories) and provided supplementary
income for their families. All that "liberation" in 1950 really meant
was that women had to work a full day as their husbands did, and had, in
addition, to do house work and care for their children much as before.
The new marriage law did, indeed, make both partners equal; it also made
it easier for men to divorce their wives, political incompatibility
becoming a ground for divorce.

The ideological justification for a new marriage law was the
desirability of destroying the traditional Chinese family and its
economic basis because a close family, and all the more an extended
family or a clan, could obviously serve as a center of resistance. Land
collectivization and the nationalization of business destroyed the
economic basis of families. The "liberation" of women brought them out
of the house and made it possible for the government to exploit
dissension between husband and wife, thereby increasing its control over
the family. Finally, the new education system, which indoctrinated all
children from nursery to the end of college, separated children from
parents, thus undermining parental control and enabling the state to
intimidate parents by encouraging their children to denounce their
"deviations." Sporadic efforts to dissolve the family completely by
separating women from men in communes--recalling an attempt made almost
a century earlier by the T'ai-p'ing--were unsuccessful.

The best formula for a revolution seems to involve turning youth against
its elders, rather than turning one class against another. Not all
societies have a class system so clear-cut that class antagonism is
effective. On the other hand, Chinese youth, in its opposition to the
"establishment," to conservatism, to traditional religion, to blind
emulation of Western customs and institutions, to the traditional family
structure and the position of women, had hopes that communism would
eradicate the specific "evil" which each individual wanted abolished.
Mao and his followers had once been such rebellious youths, but by the
1960's they were mostly old men and a new youth had appeared, a
generation of revolutionaries