Iron Women and Foxy Ladies

These times, however, called for the depiction of peasant or working women taking obvious pride in their work, but whose faces and hands had been marked by unrelenting sunshine and hard labor। In the views of the laboring masses that the art critics allegedly had consulted, such images lacked verisimilitude: nobody in the villages or factories looked like these women. Moreover, no woman dressed in the latest fashions was able to take part in hard physical labor while still looking as spic and span as the poster models did.

When looking at the practice of depicting women for propaganda purposes, it is safe to say that the 'pretty girl' pictures continued to dominate the world of the propaganda poster, with the exception of the periods when high Maoism was the norm. Was this done in an attempt to make the latter's message more palatable to the population? Or was it simply because such representations could be read as a way of discounting women as revolutionary contenders, as expressions of the widely held belief that women were more interested in matters of clothing and physical appearance than men? Whatever the reason, attractive female forms were used for political propaganda purposes in a manner very similar to commercial advertising, a practice that also has been noted by Chinese writers.