In the aftermath of the Chinese Revolution, the 1950 Marriage Law marked one of the first legislative moves by Mao Zedong’s government to reshape society. While the Communist Party’s support for gender equality has often been identified as one of its major achievements, LSE graduate Hitangshi Kothari argues that the real impact of the Marriage Law remained limited, particularly in the face of deep-seated cultural norms that resisted change.
Mao’s Marriage Law was designed to bring gender equality to Chinese society by outlawing arranged marriages, child marriages and concubinage, while granting women the right to divorce – a revolutionary concept in mid-twentieth century China.
Historians and scholars have long debated the law’s effectiveness. Although there is broad agreement on the visionary goals of the law, the extent to which it improved the lives of women, particularly in urban centres like Beijing, remains contested. The disparity between official policy and everyday life reveals a complex struggle between progressive legal reforms and stubborn societal traditions.
My research, drawing on the writings of journalist and political activist Nancie Berger, offers fresh insights into the obstacles faced by women in 1960s China. Berger chronicled the daily lives of Chinese women during her time in Beijing in the early 1960s. Her reports, which include rare first-hand observations of workplace dynamics, family life, and political engagement, present a nuanced picture of the era. While some legal reforms encouraged women to enter the workforce, societal and familial expectations of their traditional roles remained largely unchanged, reflecting the limited reach of state-sponsored policies into deeply embedded cultural practices.

For example, Berger noted the establishment of new nurseries and feeding rooms intended to support working women. Yet, alongside these advancements, she witnessed enduring attitudes that kept women tethered to household duties. In one striking account, Berger describes attending a divorce trial where a man sought to dissolve his marriage claiming his wife’s work outside the home had compromised her domestic responsibilities. Despite the wife’s plea to save the marriage, fearing the social stigma of divorce, her husband remained unmoved. This case underscores a broader societal reluctance to embrace legal reforms that fundamentally challenged traditional gender roles.
“He preferred to speak for himself … he did so for forty five minutes frankly and without fear … his case was that he no longer loved his wife … He means that she [his wife] spends too much time in the factory and not enough with her family by which he means his family … She has tried to improve matters by coming home early from the factory but he still insisted on a divorce ..
“The court then addressed the wife. They told her to rid yourself [herself] of the burden of this unccessful marriage and start again, [to which the] young woman felt that if she accepted a divorce her comrades would blame her and she would be looked down upon.”
(Excerpt taken from transcriptions of Nancie Berger’s eye-witness accounts.)
Despite these challenges, Berger’s documentation does reveal incremental progress. Women’s participation in politics, for instance, was on the rise. Statistical evidence from her journals points to a growing female presence in Beijing’s political sector, although such gains were largely confined to urban areas and far from widespread. Nonetheless, these steps toward increased political engagement highlight the complex interplay between policy and societal expectations, showing that change, however limited, was still unfolding.

Conclusion
The 1950 Marriage Law was a bold experiment in social engineering which ultimately fell short of its ambitious objectives. While it provided a legal framework that sought to elevate the status of women, the persistence of traditional values and the limited enforcement of governmental reforms meant that societal attitudes toward women remained largely unchanged. It was not until the introduction in 1980’s of Deng Xiaoping’s Second Marriage Law that more substantial progress was made. Even so, the legacy of the original law serves as a reminder of the profound challenges involved in transforming deeply entrenched cultural norms, and the long road to achieving true gender equality in post-revolutionary China.