ABSTRACT
In the years between 1958 and 1962, the Urban Commune movement was understood as an original and radical effort to change the everyday lives or urban residents, including their relationship to work, eating, care of the self and of the family. But it was especially meant to completely alter the conditions of women (urban “housewives”): by freeing them from the drudgery of cooking, cleaning and childcare and inserting them into the productive life of factory work, the movement aimed to achieve a new form of everyday, based on a true equality of gender relationships, one achieved through the shared creativity of manual labor. But early reports of success and radical transformation (down to the elimination of gossip and renewed spousal bliss) eventually gave way to more grim assessments of continuing exploitation, factory alienation and persistent inequality. By looking at both the theoretical discussions and the experimental practices of collectivization in Beijing, this chapter shows that while the movement failed, it nonetheless brought to the fore some of the crucial tensions that marred the search for a socialist everyday: between participatory democracy and state hierarchy, between production and liberation and between labor and gender equality.
