No Title
Tara Ali Baig
WOMAN WORK by Delia Davin Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1977, 176 pp., 5.95
Jan-Feb 1977, volume 2, No 1/2

Delia Davin’s study of the rise of the working woman in China is a sober, factual, historical account giving insights of special interest to us in India of an almost identical system of social cons­traints upon women, but in a wholly different social setting. We never had bound feet to cripple a woman’s useful­ness and productivity, but India and China have had the same attitudes of service and subservience in marriage, preparation of the daughter-in-law to become a new and obedient work-unit in the home under the supervision of the mother-in-law; and from the time of the revolutionary woman theorist of the Communist Party, Xiang Jingyu, who was executed in 1928, the struggle of working women intellectuals against the stranglehold of women behind the bars of domesticity, was not won wholly till 1966 after the Cultural Revolution.

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