Abstract: In the years between 1958 and 1962, the Urban Commune movement was promoted as a radical effort to change the daily lives of city residents. By inserting women into the “productive” life of factory work, the movement also aimed at achieving a new form of everyday, based on a true equality of gender relationships, one achieved through the shared creativity of manual labor. 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.

Fabio Lanza (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) is professor of modern Chinese history in the Departments of History and East Asian Studies of the University of Arizona. He is the author of Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (Columbia University Press, 2010) and of The End of Concern: Maoist China, Activism, and Asian Studies (Duke University Press, 2017). He also co-edited (with Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney) De-Centering Cold War History Local and Global Change (Routledge, 2013).

Free and open to the public.

This event is part of the Thursday Series of the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies. It is made possible by a generous contribution from Kenneth and Frances Aftel Eisenberg.