Mapping State Feminism: The All-China Women’s Federation and the Geography of Care in Nanjing, 1949–64

This poster uses spatial history to examine how women's "liberation through labor" was implemented and constrained at the city level in early Communist China. After 1949, the Chinese state promoted women's participation in paid work, but childcare and other everyday services often remained scarce. Focusing on Nanjing from 1949 to 1964, the poster asks: How did the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) navigate the gap between demands for women's labor and the practical realities of care in a resource-constrained urban environment? I argue that care provision in early socialist Nanjing took an uneven, place-based form: welfare services clustered in areas closely tied to industrial production and work-unit (danwei) life, while other neighborhoods experienced limited coverage and continued reliance on family-based arrangements. This pattern suggests that state support for women's work depended on where women lived and worked, and on how local officials justified care as relevant to core political priorities such as productivity and social stability.

The poster will present findings visually through a sequence of maps and concise archival evidence. The visual core consists of: (1) an orienting map of Nanjing with administrative boundaries and major industrial areas; (2) GIS point maps plotting ACWF-linked services, such as nurseries and literacy classes, constructed from municipal archival lists and internal reports; and (3) simple spatial summaries (density surfaces and district-level counts) that highlight clustering and gaps in coverage. To connect spatial patterns to bureaucratic practice, each map panel will be paired with brief excerpts from internal ACWF work reports and meeting minutes that describe shortages, requests for space and funding, and the language cadres used to make care provision politically legible.

Intellectually, the poster contributes to scholarship on governance and everyday life by foregrounding welfare infrastructure, often treated as background to labor mobilization, as a key site where gender policy became practical, contested, and uneven. Methodologically, it demonstrates how GIS can complement close reading of archives: spatial visualization makes visible the boundaries of state provision, while documents clarify the administrative choices and constraints behind those boundaries. Together, the poster offers a concrete, city-level account of how the promise of women’s emancipation interacted with urban scarcity and the local politics of care.