Delia Davin (1944–2016)

Outside Haworth Parsonage, early 2016. Photo: Mary Jacobus

Delia Davin will be remembered by scholars above all for the book she wrote in the 1970s on the changes wrought by the Communist Party on women's lives in the early years of People's Republic of China. Like many of the best scholarly works, this book was the expression of things that Davin cared about at a very deep level, in this case the position of women in society and the impact of socialism in China. Davin's appreciation of the tension between these two concerns grew out of a remarkable life story, which gave her work its great impact on subsequent scholarship and shaped her career as a scholar of Chinese society.

Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976) took as its focus the alliance between the women's movement in China and the Chinese Communist Party, 'its aims, its problems, and its achievements'. Starting from the early Communist base areas in the 1930s and 40s she described the development of Communist Party policy on women. From the start, she argued, the Party subordinated what it called woman-work (funu¨ gongzuo), that is to say work to change the position of women in society, to its goal of creating a communist state. Once that state was created and the Party had come to power women's work was again subordinated, this time to issues of economic development. The main body of the book discusses the impact of this subordination in three areas: the introduction of new patterns of family life through the 1950 Marriage Law, rural women's agricultural labour and especially the issue of equal pay, and urban women's participation in the labour force and political life. Davin's work covers the period up to to about 1960 and she argues that while there were undoubtedly considerable achievements that transformed women's lives in many ways there were also institutional barriers to women's progress within the Chinese Communist state.

The issues that framed Woman-Work were the result of Davin's political beliefs, while the distrust of grandiose Communist Party claims came out of her early experience living and working in China. She was born in Oxford to parents who had migrated from New Zealand. Her father Dan Davin was an editor for Oxford University Press and her childhood was a bohemian one lived among many of the literary figures of the day. She was also very conscious of the family's Irish heritage and learnt Gaelic as a teenager, spending two summers studying and helping with the farm work in County Donegal, experiences that would later shape her attitude to the work-study schemes she found when she travelled to China. Back in Oxford she became involved in the radical causes of the day, dropped out of school, though she continued to study for her examinations, and at the age of seventeen married Bill Jenner, then an Oxford undergraduate studying Chinese. Inspired by ideas of the revolution in China, they wrote to the Chinese embassy asking for the opportunity to work in China.

In 1963, in the aftermath of both the Sino-Soviet split and the Great Leap Forward, the young couple arrived in China where Bill Jenner took up a job as a translator at the Foreign Languages Press and Delia, who knew no Chinese at this stage, became an English teacher at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. Letters from Peking (1967) an edited version of her letters to her parents during this period paints an engaging picture of her youthful enthusiasm for the revolution, great commitment to her students, instinctive cynicism about some of the political rhetoric she was living with, and considerable naivety over the events of the previous few years. It also omits, in this case for very good reasons, the friendship she made at this time that was probably most influential in shaping her attitude to China. This was with Gladys Yang and Yang Xianyi, who were well known literary translators and Bill Jenner's colleagues at the Foreign Languages Press...