Dancing with shackles:

China is traditionally a patriarchal society. Chinese women were traditionally regarded as docile obedient and submissive and have been marginalized and rendered silent and invisible in mainstream Chinese society for centuries. Women’s liberation movement began in the second half of the 19th century and was accelerated during the New Cultural Movement in the mid 1910s and 1920s. After the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949 Chairman Mao Zedong declared that “women can hold up half the sky” a metaphor derived from the ancient Chinese mythology about goddess Nüwa who was said to have propped up the sky in order to prevent it from falling. This ideology soon became the dominant discourse for the following decades and greatly transformed the Chinese society and institutions.