The Image of the New Woman: Propaganda Posters and the Making of the New Socialist Woman in Maoist China

The following analysis examines the representation of women in Maoist visual propaganda, with particular focus on the campaign surrounding the promulgation of the Marriage Law of 1950. Drawing on the central role of propaganda posters within the communicative apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the study investigates how female imagery was systematically employed to convey, prescribe, and legitimise the transformation of female subjectivity in service of the socialist political project. The research is structured in two stages. The first aims to develop a theoretical framework, integrating scholarship on mass psychology, visual political propaganda, and gender history in Maoist China. The second applies this framework to a purposively selected corpus of posters organised into five thematic categories and analysed across four interconnected levels: formal composition, semiotic interpretation, discursive propaganda techniques, and affective mobilisation. The aim of the study is to address a historiographical gap. While scholarship exists on both Maoist propaganda and the condition of women in revolutionary China, the visual construction of women as revolutionary subjects specific, the intersection between the two fields, remains unexplored.