Contributing our strengths to carry out modernisation of agriculture

Artist: Peng Shaomin

Year: 1965

Publisher: Shanghai People's Fine Art Publishing House

Size (mm): 525x770

Condition: excellent

The equipment carried by the two women and power lines in the background suggest that their work and contribution to the modernisation of agriculture is the installation or repair of power lines in the countryside. The characters appear robust, healthy and happy with their work. In line with the gender equality asserted by the Chinese Communist Party, women were often portrayed carrying out tasks that usually would have been left to men. Women did undoubtedly carry out repairs to power lines - later on in the early 1970s a visiting foreign friendship association witnessed a group of women who had developed methods of allowing the current to pass harmlessly through their bodies while working on live lines, reportedly by observing the way birds land on power cables.