Please forgive me for any typing errors; my laptop's hard drive died yesterday and I need to talk to my parents about helping me pay for a new hard drive. So instead you get to have me swiping this out on a mobile touch keyboard. Fun!

First of all, sources in advance. I'm citing from Personal Voices (I'll post an author later, see: mobile). It's primarily a book about the 1980s, but it does discuss women's rights during the Cultural Revolution in China. I wish I can also cite some JSTOR articles, but again, lost hard drive. So the book is my main source for the first part of your question.

During the Cultural Revolution, women were expected to be able to work just like men. Masculinity was good. Women were expected to work in heavy industry, could be as fervent as the men were, could be Red Guards and perpetuate class struggle, etc. You get the idea I think. One of the two most well known propaganda campaigns were the Iron Girl Brigades and a quote from Mao saying that "women hold up half the sky". The former were posters showing women dressed rather masculine (think overalls and short bobs) and working what was traditionally men's work, like electrical worker. The latter is basically what it says on the tin.

Now, women legally had equal rights to men, and have had such since the 1950s, after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power. But here, women were expected to do what men could do.

Of course, there were restrictions. Such emphasis on class struggle came with restrictions of freedom. Feminine beauty was demonized and shunned as bourgeois and capitalist. Rae Yang (spelling could be mistaken, and I apologize in advance) in her memoir Spider Eaters describes being terrified that her long braids were going to be cut off for being too bourgeois a style. She ended up cutting them off herself. She also looked at her fellow Red Guards with jealousy because they shaved their hair off completely. Make-up is bad, focusing on fashion was bad, sex was dirty and not talked about, women should put off marriage until later after class struggle. Women were judged by men's standards with no exception.

This was something that society post-economic-reforms pushed back against, with a new emphasis on femininity and of women acting like women and fulfilling her role as wife and mother and good daughters-in-house law. Women lost jobs in male-dominated fields, and many women faced discrimination in housing allocation and hiring and promotion and pay without redress.

I'll answer the second and third half of your question in another post, but I'm being forced to move really soon, and I don't have internet on the go.

Edit: added more information.