Like many women, reflecting the new egalitarianism of her background, she was a true soldier, caring for the sick, hauling supplies, and providing vital services to the Red Army. Xianren undertook her mission with a clear sense of ideological motivation, but for many other women, their choice was less conscious. While it was true that the famine was epidemic in China at the time, given the gradual shift to commercialized agriculture that deprived so many peasants of their livelihood, there is little doubt that it was far more difficult for girls. Women such as Ma Yixiang led far bleaker lives. Yixiang came from abject poverty and was blamed for the death of her siblings by her superstitious mother. She was forced to work off her father's debt as a child (Young 83). Yixiang was 'sold' for a year and a half to another family and mistreated so badly she ran away home and begged to stay.

When the Red Army moved through her town and she was impressed by the soldier's kindness -- despite having no uniforms, they offered to pay her family for the firewood they used -- she begged to join (Young 92). She was refused several times because she looked so weak and malnourished, but eventually found work doing laundry, cleaning, and tending to the wounded. At first she was terrified of the sickness and death she encountered, but having little to turn back to, she persevered. "I just walked with the Red Army, simple-mindedly. We were revolutionaries. To be a revolutionary is to go and look for a good place" (Young 106)....

She also reminisced: "I felt more warmth from them than I had in my own family" (Young 243). However, despite her unceasing work for the Red Army she was falsely accused of being a landlord's daughter because of her fair skin and expelled at one point (Young 95).
The Red Army remained a male-dominated institution, but women who joined still transgressed conventional norms of what it meant to be feminine in a Chinese context. They willingly moved into public life outside of the traditional private sphere of women (Young 244). Through being "tough and hardy" soldiers they challenged the idea that tradition could not be broken (Young 244). This communicated a vitally important message to all Chinese. While the notion that Chinese women could work hard is far from surprising as chronicled in the biography of Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai, by highlighting female strength within a specific ideological context, the labor of women such as Zongying, Xianren, and Yixiang took on additional significance. Their resistance of feminine norms was not ignored, unlike the cases of many individual peasant women who struggled for survival in solitude. The revolutionary future of female soldiers in the Red Guard became symbolically linked with China's future.

Works Cited

Pruitt, Ida. A Daughter of Han: The Autobiography of a Chinese Working Woman.

Martino Fine Books, 2011.

Young, Helen Praeger. Choosing Revolution: Chinese Women Soldiers on the Long March

Urbana and Chicago:…