"Women hold up half the sky"
About this Quote
A slogan that sounds like tribute but functions as a directive. "Women hold up half the sky" wraps Mao-era gender policy in cosmic scale: not just rights, but necessity. The line flatters women with grandeur while recruiting them into a national project. It elevates labor into destiny, then quietly implies that any unused "half" is wasted capacity the revolution can no longer afford.
Its genius is its portability. The metaphor is simple enough to paint on a wall, broad enough to survive translation, and vague enough to dodge specifics. "Hold up" is doing a lot of work: it suggests strength and burden at once, honoring women while normalizing sacrifice. "Half the sky" implies parity, but not autonomy; the sky is still one structure, one horizon, held up for something larger than the individual.
The context is the Chinese Communist revolution's push to break feudal household arrangements and mobilize women into production, literacy campaigns, and collectivized life. Maoist policy did expand women's formal status in law and public work, but it often treated liberation as an output of state planning rather than a right with its own bottom line. The subtext is pragmatic: a modernizing state needs every available worker, every pair of hands, every mind.
That's why the phrase endures in feminist discourse while carrying a faint authoritarian aftertaste. It promises equality in the language of awe, yet keeps the story centered on the sky that must be held up - the state, the revolution, the collective - and asks women to prove their worth by bearing it.
Its genius is its portability. The metaphor is simple enough to paint on a wall, broad enough to survive translation, and vague enough to dodge specifics. "Hold up" is doing a lot of work: it suggests strength and burden at once, honoring women while normalizing sacrifice. "Half the sky" implies parity, but not autonomy; the sky is still one structure, one horizon, held up for something larger than the individual.
The context is the Chinese Communist revolution's push to break feudal household arrangements and mobilize women into production, literacy campaigns, and collectivized life. Maoist policy did expand women's formal status in law and public work, but it often treated liberation as an output of state planning rather than a right with its own bottom line. The subtext is pragmatic: a modernizing state needs every available worker, every pair of hands, every mind.
That's why the phrase endures in feminist discourse while carrying a faint authoritarian aftertaste. It promises equality in the language of awe, yet keeps the story centered on the sky that must be held up - the state, the revolution, the collective - and asks women to prove their worth by bearing it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|---|
| Source | Commonly attributed to Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung): English slogan "Women hold up half the sky" (Chinese: "婦女能頂半邊天"); widely cited in discussions of Mao-era gender policy. |
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