By toiling and sweating day after day in the terraced cornfields and doing the arduous farm work even men would find too harsh to bear, she became the head of Dazhai, a "pace-setter village" in China, which the late Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong called on the farmers across the nation to learn from the s to mid s, when she was only 16 years old, but at the cost of her femininities. Also changed is her title: now director of the board of the Dazhai Economic Development Corp.
For thousands of years, women in China were treated as inferior to men and had to count on men for a living. After the founding of new China in , Chairman Mao gave his famous assertion that "women hold up half of the skies", but things could not change overnight, especially in the vast countryside. Guo and her "team of sisters", a general reference to the girls of her age in the village, were among the first Chinese rural women whose feminist awareness was awakened by the late chairman's call.
There were more than 20 elderly women in the village who were born in the early years of the 20th century, when the last feudal dynasty of China, the Qing Dynasty , still reigned, recollected Guo. They all had the deformed "lotus feet" as a result of the barbaric ancient tradition of binding women's feet to meet the somewhat abnormal aesthetic taste of the men, and most of them didn't know what their husbands looked like until the wedding night.
But in China of the s, the only way that could help Guo and her sisters out was manual labor, and they still had to do it even better and harder than the men. As a highly-famed public figure, Guo drew much media coverage with lots of photo opportunities, but she could find no pleasure in it.
She would also like both of her daughters-in-law to often visit beauty salons to have their hairs curled up and keep up in fashion. Even as an "Iron Girl", she was unable to make a completely independent choice of her own for marriage. Shaking her head in disapproval, Guo said she believes that self-respect, self-reliance and self-independence are critical to women of any times.
