Militiawomen, Red Guards, and Images of Female Militancy in Maoist China

A poem by Mao Zedong, “Militia Women, Inscription on a Photograph—a jueju” (七绝·为女民兵题照 “Qijue: Wei nüminbing tizhao”) is to the present day the most frequently cited source to describe the Maoist ideal of femininity:

飒爽英姿五尺枪

曙光初照演兵场

中华儿女多奇志

不爱红装爱武装

How bright and brave they look, shouldering five-foot rifles

On the parade ground lit up by the first gleams of day

China’s daughters have high-aspiring minds,

They love their battle array, not silks and satins¹

The concluding line of the poem in particular has become a trope for a new concept of female dress and behavior. Bu ai hongzhuang ai wuzhuang (不爱红装爱武装) literally translates as “They don’t love red garments, but military uniforms,” and the shift from hong (红), the color red that denotes feminine beauty with erotic connotations but also marital happiness, to wu (武), meaning both weaponry and militancy, marks a shift from conventional and sexualized notions of female beauty (“red garments”/“silks and satins”) toward a militant interpretation of femininity.² The verse seemingly subsumes in one phrase what has been described as the “masculinization” or “defeminization” of the socialist woman through a discourse that linked femininity to feudalism and capitalism.³ The “androgyny of the Cultural Revolution,”⁴ when female (and male) Red Guards donned army uniforms, then appears to be the ultimate realization of this Maoist ideal.

Scholarship on women’s histories and gender in China has been revolving around the tension between the state-sponsored discourse of women’s liberation—encapsulated in the phrases “Women can uphold half of heaven” and “The times have changed, men and women are the same”—and the more than incomplete achievement of gender equality in the years between 1949 and 1976. Studies by Emily Honig, Tina Mai Chen, Suzy Kim, and others have served to demonstrate the complex uses of gendered representations, sartorial choices, and female agency.⁵ In discussions of the sartorial aspects of gender discourse, especially of the replacement of “silks and satins” with less heavily gendered garments, the question of how these are to be evaluated from a feminist point of view nonetheless takes center stage. Tina Mai Chen has succinctly phrased the dilemma: “When women wore [the People’s Liberation Army] uniform, did they extend the parameters of female fashion, undermine male dominance of the...