Cai Chang

Cai Chang was born in 1900 to a lower middle class family in Hunan, Qing China. Her mother left her husband, and enabled her children to attend school by selling her belongings. Cai believed strongly in women's education, and spurned the idea of marriage in favor of a vow of celibacy. Her mother aided her in this by avoiding an arranged marriage for Cai. Cai attended the Zhounan Girls' Middle School at Changsha until 1916. In the winter of 1917–1918, she became one of the first women to join the New People's Study Society, a work study program put in place by Mao Zedong and Cai's brother, Cai Hesen. This group advocated for women to create their own self-help groups and to become active in politics. Cai, her mother, Cai Hesen, and Cai Hesen's future wife Xiang Jingyu went to Europe, where Cai was a factory worker. She studied anarchism, Marxism, and Leninism alongside other Chinese socialist feminist scholars, including at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. In 1922, Cai married Li Fuchun, a prominent communist. == Career ==

In 1921, Cai returned to China, where she studied to become a physical education teacher. She taught for four years at the Zhounan Girls' School, which she had attended several years earlier. During this time, she joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). She also helped write the Provisional Constitution of 1931. From 1934 to 1935, she joined her husband Li Fuchun on the Long March. Cai was well known in China after 1949, where she led the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) under the People's Republic of China. Part of her work in the ACWF included creating a strategy to help privileged women take a leading role in scientific and cultural improvements. ==See also==