Eight
Women's Work in the Ningbo Area, 1900–1936

Susan Mann

The economy of nineteenth-century Chinese farm households depended on the combined labor of men and women. How did the growth of foreign trade and the rise of industrialization affect women's work? This chapter argues that, in one coastal area, foreign trade and early industrialization increased the importance of women's work in the household economy. However, each woman's access to new sources of income was constrained by class, by locality, by household composition, and by her point in the life cycle.^[1]

In the late empire, agricultural treatises and local custom attest to a clear gender division of labor in Chinese peasant households: "men plow, women weave" (nan geng nü zhi ). This gender division of labor reflected beliefs about women's work that were widely shared in late imperial society. First, Chinese women were supposed to work inside the home; on the eve of industrialization, the bulk of farm labor in China was performed by men.^[2] Second,

[1] The author acknowledges with thanks critical comments from Jon Cohen, Emily Honig, Lillian M. Li, Thomas G. Rawski, G. William Skinner, Richard Sutch, and the anonymous readers. The original research for this chapter was supported by a faculty research grant from the Academic Senate, University of California, Santa Cruz. For invaluable new data collected during a research trip to China in 1988, I am grateful to the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China, which sponsored the research, and to members of my host institution, the Economics Institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, especially Yao Xinrong.

[2] Strong taboos on women's going "outside" implied that those who could be seen on the streets or in the fields—working or not—were of questionable reputation or at least of lower-class background. In most parts of China, public opinion held that except at the peak of the harvest season, it was proper for women to stay out of the fields. Extensive evidence is presented in John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China (Nanking, 1937; repr. New York, 1956), 1:240, 290–92, 307. In an article published in 1935, Luo Qiong quotes a couplet recited in double-crop rice areas: "Men look forward to gathering the grain; women look forward to transplanting the seedlings." She observes that for women in these areas, transplanting rice presented one of very few opportunities to venture outside the home. See Luo Qiong, "Zhongguo nongcunzhong de laodong funü," Funü shenghuo 1, no. 4 (October 1935): 21.

women's work "inside" and men's work "outside" were seen as complementary and mutually supportive, essential not only to the welfare of the household itself but to the economic health of the entire society as well.^[3]

Increased exposure to foreign markets and the advent of industrialization profoundly affected the normative division of labor in the Chinese peasant household, but did not diminish the household's dependence on the combined labor of women and men.^[4] In fact, the importance of women's work increased. New markets drew the products of some domestic cottage industry into foreign trade, raising the income women could expect to earn from, say, mat weaving or embroidery. Some women's handicraft industries (notably cotton spinning) did collapse, in some areas, in the face of competition with cheaper manufactured goods. But textile factories and other light industries also offered a new generation of women jobs outside the home.^[5]

Studies of early industrialization have drawn conflicting conclusions about its effects on women and their work. On the negative side, for instance, cottage industry may suffer when competing factories produce better quality goods at lower prices.^[6] The decline of protoindustry may also be harder on women than on men, because factory competition is keenest in light industries—spinning and weaving—where women make most of their in-

[3] See, for example, Yin Huiyi, "Jing chen nongsang siwu shu," in Wei Yuan, comp., Huangchao jingshi wenbian (Preface dated 1826/27, repr. Taibei, 1963), 36:15b.

[4] See Gary S. Becker, "A Theory of Marriage," Journal of Political Economy 81 (1973): 813–46; 82 (1974): 911–16; and Fredericka Pickford Santos, "The Economics of Marital Status," in Cynthia B. Lloyd, ed., Sex, Discrimination, and the Division of Labor (New York, 1975), pp. 244–68. Both stress the impact of changing work opportunities on the gender division of labor within the household.

[5] Albert Feuerwerker, "Economic Trends in the Late Ch'ing Empire, 1870–1911," in John K. Fairbank and Kwang-ching Liu, eds., The Cambridge History of China , vol. 11, pt 2 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 15–28. In this respect, China's economic development resembles patterns found in Europe on the eve of industrialization. However, the Chinese case examined here differs from the European case in two important respects: there was no pastoral economy along China's coast, and nuptiality was early and nearly universal for women. In China, as in Europe, access to new markets and the rising importance of putting-out systems played an important role in shifting patterns of women's work. See, e.g., Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York, 1978), and Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin, eds., Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England (London, 1985). Early industrialization in the Ningbo area is discussed in Yoshinobu Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), pp. 411–13; and Nyok-Ching Tsur, "Forms of Business in the City of Ningpo in China," trans. Peter Schran, Chinese Sociology and Anthropology 15, no. 4 (1983).

[6] See Hans Medick, "The Proto-Industrial Family Economy," in Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jurgen Schlumbohn, Industrialization before Industrialization , trans. Beate Schempp (London, 1981).

come. New factories may have other negative consequences for peasant women, as their menfolk depart for urban factory jobs, leaving women to assume the full burden of agricultural labor.^[7] Finally, even where women enter factories alongside men, they are still likely to be shunted into the lowest-paying, least-skilled jobs, cut off from avenues to upward mobility that new industry provides for men.^[8]

But there are ways in which women may benefit from early industrialization. Some studies show that new job opportunities outside the home enable young women to earn money that may contribute toward their dowries, enhance their economic value in the household, or even permit some independence from family authority.^[9] A recent analysis has argued, in this vein, that the growth of foreign trade associated with China's early industrialization benefited women by increasing their earning power and their economic value, leading to a rise in the bride-price families were willing to pay.^[10] Finally, there is evidence that even the lowest-paying, most arduous factory jobs were more appealing to many young women than the tedium and drudgery of farm work. Combined with the lure of "city lights," so this argument goes, a factory job that offered three meals a day, a bed of one's own, and freedom from parental supervision was better than anything down on the farm.^[11]

Clearly, there is no simple or single answer to questions about the impact of industrialization on women's work in the household economy. Nonetheless, this chapter draws some conclusions from data on Chinese women's work in one particular region, the Ningbo area of northeastern Zhejiang

[7] See Ester Boserup, Woman's Role in Economic Development (New York, 1970).

[8] For a critical discussion of these issues, see Nancy Folbre, "Cleaning House: New Perspectives on Households and Economic Development," Journal of Development Economics 22, no. 1 (1986): 5–40; Laurel Bossen, "Women in Modernizing Societies," American Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (1975): 587–601.

[9] See, e.g., Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family , pp. 94–95; Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (New York, 1979). Dublin argues that in Lowell, women workers enjoyed more autonomy from family authority than found in Europe by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott. In Lowell, he suggests, women workers did not have to send their money home, and mill work was not "simply an extension of the traditional family economy as work for women moved outside the home" (p. 40). The jury on this issue is still out. For a summary of the issues in debate, see Dublin, Women at Work , pp. 36–42.

[10] Marshall Johnson, William L. Parish, and Elizabeth Lin, "Chinese Women, Rural Society, and External Markets," Economic Development and Cultural Change 35, no. 2 (1987): 257–77.

[11] City lights and youthful autonomy are a powerful theme in many studies of early industrialization, including Alice Clark's work on England. See Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1919). Even without city lights, factory dormitories offered better accommodations for many young women than their own families could or would provide. See Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York, 1982), pp. 180–81. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, 1986), pp. 168–71, comments briefly on all these issues. See also Elisabeth Croll, Feminism and Socialism in China (New York, 1980), pp. 174–75.

Province. The Ningbo data show how Chinese households responded to changes introduced by foreign market exposure and industrialization and how these changes affected women's place in the household economy.

In Ningbo, with its long history of commercialization, the gender division of labor in the household was well developed around women's handicraft or domestic work long before industrialization. Moreover, the importance of women's work in Ningbo household economies increased during the early stages of industrialization. We see this not only in expanding overseas markets for traditional crafts but also in new factory jobs for women, and even in wages paid to women farm workers. In other words, it is certain that the earning power of many Ningbo women did improve as a direct or indirect result of commercialization and industrialization. At the same time, the Ningbo data underscore the importance of local custom in shaping women's work experience. For instance, Ningbo women claimed a reputation for fine domestic service and fine handwork that privileged them (by comparison with women from other localities) as they entered new job markets, particularly in Shanghai. Their entry into new job markets was eased by kin and native-place ties that created networks to help migrating workers. But the significance of reputation and networks varied by region and by class within the Ningbo area.

My analysis asks two intersecting questions to address these issues. First, how did community norms and local custom affect household responses to new female labor markets? Second, how were women of different classes affected by new economic opportunities? Answers to these questions shed light on other aspects of early industrialization and its effects on women. For example, how did female labor markets and household responses vary across regional space? How effectively did factory jobs compete with cottage industries for women's labor? Did new economic opportunities have an impact on women's status inside or outside the home?

In many ways, as we shall see, local custom lay at the heart of all of these problems in the Ningbo area. Women's work outside the home was considered a mark of low status by Ningbo people, and respectable families went to great lengths to sequester their women. As a result, few of the economic changes associated with industrialization in Ningbo improved the status of women relative to men. Upper-class families hired maids to give their womenfolk more leisure. Middle-class households reorganized to make money from home embroidery arts. Poor families relied increasingly on income from female labor to tide them over crises or to supplement the meager earnings of male workers. Only as a last resort did families send a mother or a daughter or a daughter-in-law out to work in a factory. The result was that whereas access to jobs, education, and training outside the home—in factories, banks, shops, on the docks—expanded continuously for Ningbo men during the period of this study, relatively few Ningbo women were able, or

willing, to move beyond the household. Instead, the preferred pattern among Ningbo families was for women to maintain the Ningbo home for sojourning male kinfolk.

Women from well-off households in Ningbo, especially those households at the peak of the domestic cycle with many adult women, managed to comply with local custom while earning income at home. They even had an advantage in the home handicraft market, because of economies of scale associated with housework and child care in the home.^[12] Within large joint families, young unmarried women and able-bodied widows also had special advantages: they could expect to earn more from handicrafts than new mothers and mid-life housewives, because their energies were not divided by the demands of in-laws, spouse, and children. And all women in upper-class and middle-class households had servants. Women in well-off families, in other words, could make choices about work, which set them apart from the women who went out as servants or as factory workers, taking on a double burden.

Class differences in women's work showed up in regional space as well. Families in the affluent suburbs of Ningbo cultivated the gentle art of embroidery; women in remote villages wove hats from razor-sharp grasses that lacerated fingers. Whatever their class and wherever they lived, however, Ningbo women experienced dramatic changes in the uses of female labor during the first decades of the early twentieth century.

The Ningbo Area, Northeastern Zhejiang

The city of Ningbo lies south of Shanghai and Hangzhou, near the coast, in the northeast corner of Zhejiang Province (see Map 8.1). It is part of the Lower Yangzi macroregion, the most highly urbanized and affluent section of the country on the eve of the twentieth century.^[13]

Ningbo was a historic seaport. A leading center of foreign and coastal

[12] The term "domestic cycle" refers to the expansion and contraction of the household unit resulting from births, adoptions, marriages, and deaths. Thus in a joint family system, the nadir of the domestic cycle may find a household reduced to a single married couple and their very young offspring. By contrast, at the peak of the domestic cycle this same household may expand to encompass three or more generations, including a senior married couple, several married sons and their wives, and the offspring of those marriages. Although most Chinese families aspired to the Confucian ideal of a joint family, in which parents shared a household with married sons and their offspring, in reality, both class and the domestic cycle modified household composition. For the classic discussion of the domestic cycle, see Maurice Freedman, "The Chinese Domestic Family: Models," in The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Stanford, 1979), pp. 235–39. Susan Greenhalgh develops an empirically based model of the economic advantages accruing to large households in her article "Is Inequality Demographically Induced? The Family Cycle and the Distribution of Income in Taiwan," American Anthropologist 87, no. 3 (1985).

[13] See G. William Skinner, "Regional Urbanization in Nineteenth-Century China," in G. William Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, 1977), pp. 211–49, esp. 236–43.

Map 8.1.
Ningbo and Its Hinterland, ca. 1930.

trade as early as the Tang dynasty (618–906), it prospered in the late eighteenth century as a port for the coastal trade in local fish, salt, and rice. A history of Yin County, of which Ningbo was the seat, says that Ningbo trade began a new phase of growth early in the nineteenth century, as merchants from Fujian, Guangdong, and the Lower Yangzi Delta "gathered there like the clouds," while Ningbo traders left home for Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Suzhou, Shanghai, Hankou, Niuzhuang, and cities along the southeast coast, sometimes sojourning for years at a time. They also took up residence in Japan, Luzon, Singapore, Sumatra, and what is now Sri Lanka, opening shops and intermarrying with local women.^[14] The Ningbo diaspora coincided with the growth of foreign trade along the China coast.^[15] By 1800, Ningbo traders had established a foothold in Shanghai, founding a well-endowed native-place association to look after the needs and interests of its sojourning population there.

During the late imperial period, the Ningbo region (including the counties of Fenghua and Yuyao) was the home of manufactured goods sold all over China, as well as in Southeast Asia. Ningbo furniture, Fenghua woodcarvings, and Yuyao iron pans took their place beside Hangzhou scissors and Shaoxing wine as the best of their kind in the interregional domestic market. These were artisanal crafts, produced by masters and their apprentices in homes and small shops. Some traced their origins to a famous founder (Yu Xiaoxia, the late Qing bamboo carver of Fenghua, for instance) or shop (the Renhe iron pan forgery in Yuyao, founded in 1662).^[16]

In late Qing times, Ningbo women's handwork was also famous throughout the country and in Southeast Asia. Ningbo women produced handwoven cloth, rush mats and matting, hats made of straw or bamboo splints, and the canopies of oiled-paper umbrellas. All were counted among the local specialities that made Ningbo famous. Women also staffed the elegant mansions of the famous Ningbo elite: the bankers, financiers, and shipping magnates whose life-style matched their money: "there were more maids in the homes of wealthy Ningbo families than anywhere else in the empire."^[17] In sum, a complex division of labor, balancing agriculture, industry, and service and

[14] See Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b. On the history of the port of Ningbo, see Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 391–439. On Ningbo's development since the mid-eighteenth century, see Susan Mann Jones, "Finance in Ningpo: The ch'ien-chuang , 1750–1880," in William E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, 1972), pp. 52–55, and literature cited therein.

[15] On the history of European trade at Ningbo before the nineteenth century, see H. B. Morse, The Trade and Administration of China (London, 1921), pp. 226, 271–72.

[16] See China Industrial Handbooks: Chekiang (hereafter CIH:C; Shanghai 1935, repr. Taibei, 1973), pp. 739, 680. A detailed account of local protoindustrial specialties appears in Shiba, "Ningbo and Its Hinterland," pp. 424–27.

[17] See Tang Kangxiong, "Ningbo de niumu," in Zhang Xingzhou, comp., Ningbo xisu congtan (Taibei, 1973), p. 255.

based on the complementary spheres of male and female production, supported a flourishing local economy in Ningbo and its hinterland.

After the treaty of 1842 that opened Chinese ports to European trade, Shanghai became the central port of foreign trade for the Lower Yangzi region. Ningbo lost its preeminence as a port of foreign trade and became part of Shanghai's greater metropolitan trading system. But by then the city already had a well-honed financial connection to Shanghai. Ningbo bankers and financiers in Shanghai helped their home region ride the coattails of Shanghai's success. In 1877 the same currency exchange rates linked the economies of the Lower Yangzi cities of Suzhou, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai.^[18] Until the end of the period of this study, Ningbo's economic fortunes rose and fell with Shanghai's.^[19]

Meanwhile, the local economy of the Ningbo region was also changing. By the early twentieth century, the region had become part of a commercial cotton belt stretching along the coastal edge of the province. Ningbo City, located at the mouth of the Yong River and (after 1914) at the terminus of the Shanghai-Hangzhou-Ningbo railway, grew into an important cotton center.^[20] Widespread conversion of paddy land to cotton cultivation turned six of Ningbo Prefecture's seven counties into net rice importers. Market dependency throughout the area increased because of specialization in commercial cotton growing.^[21] Additional commercial crops produced in the area included medicinal herbs, peaches and plums, salt (manufactured under government control), tong oil, silk, and tea, while fishing remained the mainstay of the southeastern portion of Yin County and coastal Zhenhai and Dinghai counties.^[22] Traditional crafts—metal and leather work, shipbuilding, woodcarving, furniture making, and mat and hat weaving in the city and its hinterland—also continued to draw members of peasant households into the commercial economy, either as male apprentices in artisans' shops or as home handicraft workers.

French, English, and American missionaries arrived, accompanied by merchant compatriots eager to export local crafts. Exposure to new international markets varied within the Ningbo region, depending upon local trans-

[18] Xinxiu Yin xianzhi (1877), 2:5b–6b.

[19] Yin xian tongzhi (1936), "Shihuo zhi," p. 277.

[20] The railroad, begun in 1909, was partially completed in 1914, except for a critical bridge link over the Cao'e River, which was not in place until after 1933. The city of Ningbo in 1933 was home to 20 cotton firms, each handling between $0.5 million and $1.5 million worth of cotton fiber yearly. See CIH:C , p. 218.

[21] CIH:C , p. 1943.

[22] See Himeda Mitsuyoshi, "Chugoku kindai gyogyoshi no hito koma—Kanpo hachi nen Kin ken no gyomin toso o megutte," in Toyo 8 (Tokyo, 1967): 66–67; on the commercial economy of Zhenhai, see Zhenhai xianzhi , suppl. Xinzhi beigao (Preface dated 1924, published 1931), 42:30a, 55–57; on Dinghai County, see Dinghai xianzhi , "Yuyan zhi" (Preface dated 1923, repr. Keelung, 1963).

port and location. For example, by the turn of the century the counties along the steamer route connecting Ningbo to Shanghai—Zhenhai and Dinghai—were drawn into migration and occupational networks flowing to Shanghai. Ningbo's inexpensive coastal access to Shanghai meant that local people of all classes could travel regularly to the economic center of the realm.^[23]

In Ningbo's interior, the impact of foreign trade spread more slowly, first into Yuyao County, to the west of Ningbo City, with the partial completion of a rail line through the county that linked Hangzhou to Ningbo City. By the 1920s Yuyao had become the central producer of cotton for new local industry. Fenghua County, by contrast, remained a relative backwater. Situated off to the southwest, at the head of a shallow network of waterways that drained into the Yong River Basin, the county drew scornful comments from visiting foreigners in 1918. They complained about its cobblestoned streets (hard even to walk on), its shallow waterways, and the high cost of overland transport (a macadam road linking Fenghua to Ningbo was completed only in 1929).^[24]

These differences in regional economic change show up sharply in survey data from the early 1930s. Consider, for instance, three of the counties just mentioned and compare the mix of agriculture and industry in each. In 1933 the county of Yin, where Ningbo was the county seat, ranked third in industrial development among administrative units in Zhejiang Province (after Hangzhou, the provincial capital, and the coastal county of Wenzhou to the south). Yin County was home to more than 20 kinds of local industry: cotton weaving (including towels), knitting, oil pressing, brewing (soy sauce and wine), cotton spinning, rice husking, tea firing, flour milling, food canning, printing, ice making, ironmongery and related industries, glass, soap, lacquer, matches, brass and tin wares, straw matting and hats, rattan and bamboo wares, wooden furniture and implements, umbrellas, electricity, dry-cell batteries, and tinfoil (used mostly for making what foreigners called joss paper to be burned in sacrifices and at funerals). Yuyao County, by contrast, listed only 12 specialties; and Fenghua, six.^[25] Three of Fenghua's six local

[23] On the efficient steamer launches connecting Yuyao, Ningbo, and Zhenhai with the Chusan Islands (Dinghai County) as early as 1904, see the North-China Herald , May 27, 1904: 1097. Steamer traffic between Shanghai and Ningbo was carried by a French line catering to "middle and upper class" Chinese travelers, causing the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company to upgrade its own facilities for Chinese travelers in order to compete (North-China Herald , March 15, 1907: 548–49). The triumphal entry of the first Ningbo-owned and Ningbo-operated steamer into Shanghai in 1909 is described in the North-China Herald , July 10, 1909: 123–24. The Ning-Shao Steamship Company's Shanghai-Ningbo route carried up to 3,000 passengers in steerage (North-China Herald , June 12, 1909: 609).

[24] On the road, see Yin xian tongzhi , "Yudi zhi," p. 719; on earlier conditions, see Shina shobetsu zenshi (hereafter SSZ ), vol. 13, Zhejiang Province (Tokyo, 1919), pp. 100–101.

[25] See Zhongguo Shiyebu, Guoji Maoyiju, Zhongguo shiye zhi: Zhejiang sheng (hereafter ZSZZ ; Chinese industrial handbook: Zhejiang province; Shanghai, 1933), section geng : 6–10; CIH:C , p. 477.

industries—tea firing, handmade paper making, and bamboo and stone carving—were cottage industries catering to a domestic market. A small power plant and a factory for canning bamboo shoots (opened after 1920 and closed in 1931, in a pattern characteristic of the early local industries during this period) were the lone outposts of industrialization in Fenghua. In 1933 Fenghua was still exporting 65 percent of its rice to other areas, while Yuyao, the most important cotton-producing county in the region, imported 95 percent of its rice in the same year.^[26]

In this commercialized part of Zhejiang Province, then, after the impact of foreign trade and early industrialization, three types of local economy coexisted, dominated respectively by an urban industrial and commercial labor market (Yin), a mixed economy of commercial agriculture and cottage industry (Yuyao), and a preindustrial economy based on rice agriculture and traditional crafts (Fenghua).

Female Farm Labor

Opportunities for women's work were affected by the same patterns of local variation. Take farm labor as an example. The Chinese Industrial Handbook for Zhejiang Province , published in 1933, supplies farm wage data for both male and female workers in the counties of Yin, Yuyao, and Fenghua. Table 8.1, where the data are displayed,^[27] dramatizes gender differences in the farm labor market. Wage rates for males were relatively integrated across county boundaries; wage rates for females were not. The highest farm wages for men were reported in Yin County, the most urbanized county, where seasonal variation was also sharpest; farm wages for women were highest in Yuyao, the county where commercial cotton was king. What accounts for these differences?

The lack of integration in female wage labor markets was partly due to local variation in the norms forbidding female farm labor. In urbanized Yin County, the home of Ningbo City, women never took jobs as farm workers—

[26] CIH:C , p. 193.

[27] Data from ZSZZ 1933, section yi , pp. 42–45. Though it is not relevant to this table, readers should take note that men and women received different kinds and amounts of food when they performed agricultural labor on the gong shan system that included board and sometimes room (see Luo Qiong, p. 21). Also, wage rates presented in Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao (Materials on the Chinese rural economy; Shanghai, 1933), 2:746–47 for all long-term farm workers in the three counties show Yin County wages ranging from 41 to 90 yuan per year; from 35 to 61 in Fenghua; from 30 to 72 in Yuyao; all figures are based on a system where meals were supplied in addition to a cash wage. The Feng Hefa figures cast some doubt on the veracity of the relatively high wage rate shown for female workers in Yuyao. The figures for Yin County presented in ZSZZ may also be misleading because they present a low and high range, while the other numbers probably represent means. Notes appended to the table state that the top figure of 1 yuan for day labor was paid at peak season only.

at least so noted the statisticians who reported wages in the Chinese Industrial Handbook for Zhejiang Province . Moreover, women did not travel far from home to work in the fields; otherwise female wage rates would have been comparable across counties. With urban jobs competing for long-term male workers, and with families reluctant to send women out to do hard labor in the fields,^[28] it appears that Yuyao farmers were forced to offer higher wages to attract female workers. They were needed: cotton, Yuyao's major commercial crop, was a labor-intensive crop that consumed more labor days per year than any other commercial crop grown in the area.^[29]

Differences in wage rates for male and female farm workers in Fenghua and Yuyao dramatize the limited mobility of female farm workers. Wages for male farm workers in Fenghua ranged from 80 percent to 83 percent of wages in Yuyao. But female farm workers in Fenghua could expect to earn only half as much as their Yuyao counterparts for day labor. In Fenghua, a female farm worker paid by the month made only 44 percent of what local women

[28] On the generally high wages for farm labor in this competitive labor market, see Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo nongcun jingji ziliao (Shanghai, 1933), 2:741, 753. Historically, the growth of the home weaving industry has been shown to draw female labor away from agriculture. See Evelyn Sakakida Rawski, Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), pp. 46–47, 54–55.

[29] John Lossing Buck, Land Utilization in China: Statistical Volume (Nanking, 1937), pp. 314–19, reports that cotton cultivation consumed 225 labor days; only garlic consumed more labor per crop hectare in Yuyao, and garlic occupied less than 1 percent of seasonal crop area, as against more than 90 percent for cotton (pp. 193–99). The next contender for crop acreage in Yuyao, broad beans (occupying more than 66 percent of seasonal crop area), consumed only 102 days of labor a year. Most of the work in cotton cultivation went to harrowing and cultivating (43 percent) and harvesting (38 percent). See p. 320.

earned in Yuyao; and for Fenghua women who contracted their labor by the year, wages were scarcely more than a third of comparable rates in Yuyao. If women had moved out of Fenghua to Yuyao for farm work, these wage differentials would have disappeared. At the other end of the spectrum, in Yin County, where city influence on village custom was greatest, and where commercial cropping took second place to fishing and handicrafts (especially furniture making, woodworking, and straw mat and hat making), "virtually no women hired out for farm labor."^[30]

In short, a young woman's prospects in the labor market were constrained not only by class but also by the location of her town or village in the spatial economy of the region. Whether these different labor markets were due to taboos on women's travel and farm labor or to a lack of information about the job market, or to a combination of these, is not clear from wage data alone. But examining other sectors of the female labor market shows that taboos were important.

Other Female Labor Markets

Given the absence of women from the agricultural wage labor force in Yin County, and the high wages required to lure women into field labor in Yuyao, we would expect to find a thriving market for female labor outside agriculture in the Ningbo region. Prostitution, domestic service, and home handicrafts all were options open to women in the preindustrial economy, depending on the needs and the sensibilities of their families. Prostitution was not respectable, though it could be lucrative. By contrast, respectable women of many skills and backgrounds worked part-time or full-time as Ningbo maids. And at the pinnacle of the female employment structure stood home handicrafts, crowned by that prestigious craft that was really an art, embroidery.^[31] We shall examine each in turn.

Prostitution and Domestic Service

Prostitution supported untold numbers of women in Ningbo, but information on the conditions of their work, employment, and recruitment is scanty in sources that were written primarily to celebrate the virtues of local residents. The 1877 Yin County gazetteer does include a description of prosperous brothels, under the heading "Odious Customs."^[32] A former resident of Ding-

[30] ZSZZ, yi , p. 44. A survey conducted in the 1930s notes: "As for long-term labor in eastern Zhejiang, few women do it, because the women are not good at working in the fields [bushan yu congshi tianjian laodong ]. Children commonly do field labor, their jobs being limited to tending cattle and feeding pigs, chickens, and ducks." See Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo , 2:739.

[31] On the prestige of embroidery work, see comments in Feng Hefa, ed., Zhongguo , 1:243, 301–2, citing a report dated 1930.

[32] Xinxiu Yin xianzhi , 1877, 2:9a.

hai County reported disapprovingly in his memoirs that prostitutes (not local women) descended on his native place three times a year during the peak fishing season.^[33] A government tax survey conducted in Yin County in 1939 listed three classes of prostitutes in Ningbo: "first-class" prostitutes paid the state 12 yuan a month in taxes, and third-class prostitutes were assessed from 4 to 6 yuan .^[34] First-class prostitutes' taxes alone may have matched the total monthly earnings of a male farm laborer.

Respectable women scorned prostitution even in the face of dire poverty.^[35] But domestic work as a cook, servant, or nursemaid was acceptable for both married and unmarried women. The memoirs of a long-time resident of Ningbo fondly recall eight famous types of "Ningbo maids," ranging from scullery maids, who did the cooking, washing, and cleaning, to the more genteel household helpers, who catered to the intimate personal needs of their employers. Those who labored as scullery maids came from poor families, performing heavy work for low wages, but other servants were drawn from across the spectrum of working-class households. For many, domestic service did not involve onerous physical labor. It doubtless had hidden costs: upper-class women were notorious for abusing their female servants, and male employers often expected free sexual access to the household help. Still, job descriptions for some of these maids (even allowing for the undeniable bias of the informant, who clearly felt they were paid too much for doing too little) suggest that theirs was mainly a seller's market.^[36] Competing opportunities for women in other sectors of the economy may actually have improved the wages of Ningbo maids in their local area as the industrial and commercial economy expanded.^[37]

At the same time, the range of female domestic work in Ningbo hints at the immense gaps that separated rich and poor women. The servant who ground rice, hauled water, and spent mealtimes hunched over charcoal burners lived a world apart from her mistress and even from the body servant who attended her employer. At marriage a leisured young lady was accompanied to her spouse's residence by a "dowry maid," specially chosen by her

[33] See Jin Limen, "Lüetan Zhoushan de hunjia fengsu," in Zhang Xingzhou, ed., Ningbo xisu congtan , p. 222.

[34] See Yinxian yiban xingzheng gaikuang , cited in Nimpo chiku jittai chosasho (1941).

[35] Ning Lao T'ai T'ai, the subject of Ida Pruitt's Daughter of Han (New Haven, 1945), became a beggar and finally a domestic servant when she went out to work for the first time (p. 73) to keep her family from starving. She never considered prostitution. But see Gail Hershatter, "Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai," in Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society , ed. Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991), p. 18, on defining respectability and its problems. As she points out, we still know very little about how prostitution was viewed by peasant families.

[36] The account that follows is based on Tang Kangxiong, "Ningbo de niumu," pp. 256–57.

[37] The Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, remarks that by the early 1920s, textile factory jobs were becoming more important than domestic service to emigrating female workers.

parents from their own household servants. Such a servant had to be both young and very capable, for she might serve her young mistress for life. Her position was like that of a sister or confidante: "these maids were exactly like the body servants found in official families in the old days." At holiday time, or during funerals or weddings, household servants, including the dowry maids, got help from "temporaries"—women recruited from poor families where small children and domestic chores prevented them from taking full-time jobs. After working two or three days, a temporary maid took home a daily wage and usually a generous bonus. In the words of one observer (evidently a former employer of temporary help): "Although they do not work so many days, their income does not necessarily reflect this."

As for status, a body servant enjoyed leisure and even luxury, though at the price of servitude. Her economic status may have been higher than that of the temporary help, but her formal social status was beneath that of married women from commoner households who worked as temporary maids or nursemaids. Maid service gave the well-to-do leisure; it gave poor women jobs that were less arduous and better paying than farm work; it offered alternatives to prostitution; and it provided long-term security in a market where most farm and factory jobs were both seasonal and unstable. Working as a maid could be a respectable prelude to marriage in Ningbo. And maid takers were in some cases also maid givers; for instance, nursemaids who attended Ningbo mothers after childbirth hired their own nursemaids during confinement. All these factors make it difficult to generalize about the impact of domestic service on women's status. In any case, maid service remained both a secure and a widely accepted form of respectable work for commoner women—a clear step above prostitution, a cut below the most respectable form of women's work, home handicrafts.

Home Handicrafts

Women's work in family enterprises crossed class lines in Ningbo. Descriptions of "middle-class" households^[38] demonstrate the crucial role of women's work in the preindustrial household and also underscore the advantages enjoyed by households commanding a large female labor force. A survey of Ningbo industry conducted in 1907 by Nyok-Ching Tsur, a Ningbo native, identified a distinctive mode of production unique to Ningbo's middle-class families. During the period of his study, home production supplied each family's needs for preserved foods, cotton cloth, and yarn, with some to spare for the market. At the turn of the century, in fact, well-off households in

[38] See Tsur, "Forms of Business." During this period, references to the Ningbo "middle class" were common in the press. For instance, in 1907 a new French steamer line became a financial success by catering to the needs of middle- and upper-class travelers between Ningbo and Shanghai, according to the North-China Herald , March 15, 1907: 548–49.

Ningbo were growing, storing, and processing their own rice, either for cakes or for rice flour. It was common for such families to process their own cotton. Tsur estimated that 40 percent of households that supplied their own cloth even grew their own raw cotton: men did the cleaning and drying, women the spinning and weaving.^[39]

Women spun together in an enclosed courtyard, working late into the night unless they had to stop to put young children to bed. The division of labor among them was elaborate: "almost every woman spins a special quality yarn for a particular cloth." Weavers used several different kinds of loom, one type requiring the labor of three or four women working with both hands and feet; the simplest loom, a hand loom, calling for only one pair of hands. In one apparently lineage-scale enterprise, 60 to 70 women were producing 40 different kinds of cloth. Individuals within the household also specialized in the products they made: scarves and shawls using coarse cotton were the preserve of the nearsighted or the novice; young girls whose eyesight was still sharp worked on the fine multicolored embroidery.^[40]

Women's work brought income to these households, and it had sentimental value as well—at least to the men. The elaborate division of labor was an emblem of the organic unity—Tsur called it the "harmonic congeniality"—of the grand Chinese family. "While the girls and women sit working diligently, the men read aloud some amusing poem or tell the news from the city, so that the evening passes in a hurry."^[41] The gender division of labor in these exemplary Chinese families represented a perfect synthesis of Confucian family values and profit-making enterprise. Hierarchies of gender, age, and skill were reproduced and displayed every day in the work performed by women.

But during the early twentieth century, household economies were changing in response to new markets. Though the majority of families continued producing goods for their own use, saving extra income for the dowries of their daughters,^[42] some households were attracted to more entrepreneurial ventures. In cotton-growing areas, weaving households could engage in barter, with two families exchanging their own products (towels for clothing, for instance) through a female broker well known to both parties. Family production systems also lost ground to imported factory goods. Cloth woven at home, for instance, was threatened by the import of British, American, and Japanese textiles.^[43] Increasingly, the test of survival for any home industry appeared to be its ability to compete in international markets. Consequently,

[39] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 45–46.

[40] Ibid., p. 46.

[41] Ibid., p. 47.

[42] Large farm families preserved great quantities of meat and vegetables—especially salted pork and fish and pickled cabbages—selling what they could not use. Ibid., p. 49.

[43] Ibid., p. 99.

even those households already producing for local or regional markets were forced to adopt new approaches to marketing.

Brokers employed by foreign companies and by new Chinese firms moved quickly to meet the needs of households trying to tap the commercial market; they also solicited and even trained contract workers in the home.^[44] In many handicraft industries, contractors hired brokers to go house to house, linking individual household enterprises with the shifting domestic and international demand for their products. Brokers collected finished and semifinished goods manufactured in the home, under contract or on commission: paper umbrellas, straw hats, mats made from the local esparto grass (hundreds of mu of these rushes were planted in fields outside the city), and embroidery. Women were the mainstay of all these home industries.^[45]

Under these new market conditions, demand stayed high for bamboo umbrella frames made at home by men and women (women sorting the pieces, men building the frames).^[46] Female mat weavers, using rushes grown only in China, also kept their customers both at home and abroad. But something had changed. Mat weavers now began working to order, following the exact specifications of a contractor: "now every women knows at once how long, how thick, and how smooth the individual threads of bast must be to correspond with the contractor's wishes."^[47]

Embroidery arts entered the market for the first time as a result of foreign demand. Silk embroidery—the emblem of refined womanhood—was discovered by foreign missionaries during the 1860s, and by the end of the century, contractors were purchasing huge quantities for customers at home and in Europe. Embroiderers bought their own supplies and worked their own designs, while 16 "embroidery collectors" vied for their output. The new commercial market for fine embroidery in Ningbo "found welcome support among the women and girls of the middle class. Whereas women formerly had embroidered just to pass the time, they now were offered a rewarding side occupation by the embroidery collectors."^[48]

[44] On brokers and their role in the economy of this period, see Susan Mann, "Brokers as Entrepreneurs in Presocialist China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26, no. 4 (1984): 614–36.

[45] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 23, 25, 29.

[46] Ibid., pp. 96–97.

[47] Ibid., p. 100.

[48] Ibid., p. 101. Jane Schneider has shown that in nineteenth-century Sicily, the commercial availability of manufactured cloth freed women of nonelite families to pursue the noble art of embroidery for the first time. Obviously Tsur drew a different conclusion about the relationship between class and embroidery in Ningbo, and his data do not permit me to press Schneider's questions. The case of the lace makers, discussed below, demonstrates that at least some women began doing commercial needlework for the first time during Ningbo's early industrialization. In China, as in Sicily, embroidery was both a status symbol and an emblem of female seclusion, but I have seen no evidence that lace making conferred similar prestige. The bride's trousseau in accounts I have read did not include handmade lacework. See Jane Schneider, "Trousseau as Treasure: Some Contradictions of Late Nineteenth-Century Change in Sicily," Women and History , 1985, no. 10:81–119. A detailed description of trousseaux in Ningbo appears in Tang Kangxiong, "Peijia zhuanglian," in Zhang Xingzhou, ed., Ningbo xisu congtan (Taibei, 1973), pp. 212–14.

Sometime after the turn of the century, a new group of middlemen entered this market as well. Professional contractors began supplying the embroiderers with silk, designs, and embroidery frames, paying piece rates for finished work. Commissioned pieces invited yet a new division of labor, as households began to specialize in different designs (animals, figures, flowers). Within the household, each female embroiderer cultivated her own specialty, so that work on an individual piece might be divided up among members. In this market, the families who divided their skills most efficiently produced the best work and made the most money. "The more clever the distribution [of labor], the more beautiful the work, and the higher also the wage paid by the contractor."^[49]

Women in the embroidery business divided their labor according to age, skill, and leisure. In the largest family enterprises, the most productive workers were widows under 60 and girls under 20—that is, unmarried or unattached women who could devote most of their time to their work. Some of their income was set aside for their own use. Young girls did embroidery and made silk shoes to earn money for their dowries; widows used their income to supplement the allowance they received from lineage trusts before they became eligible for full support. Married women with husband and family to attend, by contrast, were able to work only part-time at handicraft enterprises, and the disposition of their income is less clear.^[50]

Household production on this scale required managerial as well as manual skills. Small embroidery projects, for instance, took 15 days; a wall hanging or curtain required up to three months. The mother or the senior female in the household negotiated contracts for daughters, daughters-in-law, and other workers (who might include concubines, adopted girls, and live-in servants).^[51] She also supervised the labor and took responsibility for meeting deadlines and other specifications. She negotiated terms with the embroidery contractors, who employed collection agents to check on work, deliver raw materials and orders, and collect and pay for orders. The marketing center for this home-based embroidery business was likely to be a wholesale outlet located in a large city, with branches elsewhere for retail sales. Traveling salesmen sold the embroidery in towns where there were no permanent

[49] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 103.

[50] Ibid., p. 121.

[51] See Ibid., pp. 33–36, for a description of the "service-children" purchased by "mandarins and rich merchants" from families unable to support them.

stores. Women's embroidery, the hallmark of late Qing domesticity, had entered the world market.

Lace making, unlike embroidery, was a new women's handicraft industry, introduced during the mid-nineteenth century when Roman Catholic sisters began teaching it to Chinese peasant girls. Lace making eventually employed 1,000 women making handkerchiefs, cushion covers, and other items for export. Though the French managers of the fledgling lace industry conducted their affairs "with some secrecy," Chinese women in neighboring villages soon took up the art and local businessmen got wind of it. By 1936 more than 2,000 Ningbo lace makers were at work supplying over 30 contractors, with perhaps another 1,000 women making lace in the neighboring counties of Zhenhai and Ciqi. Piece rates in 1936 ranged from 0.30 yuan to 4 yuan for each article; monthly earnings averaged over 10 yuan per person, placing lace making well within the range of male farm wages and far above even the best-paid female farm jobs.^[52]

Straw hat weaving was one of the Ningbo area's oldest home crafts. Before the opening of foreign trade, the Ningbo region was known for a special grass known as "mat grass," which is still grown in the Ningbo area as a third crop and is exported to Japan for tatami. This grass could also be woven into sturdy, weather-resistant, broad-brimmed hats for farm work. Easily made (one weaver could make up to five in a day), these hats were a major sideline in farm households.^[53]

Unfortunately, the only detailed data on the production of straw hats dates from the early twentieth century, well after new marketing systems and raw materials had created a European market for Ningbo hats. The first major change came in the 1880s, when a market for Ningbo-made farmers' hats first developed in London and Paris; it developed somewhat later in New York. In 1908 Ningbo women were already producing 6 million straw and woven bamboo hats for export abroad and shipping an equal number inland to Chinese customers in the interior. Locally grown straw was picked and cleaned by workers employed by a contractor, then delivered to home weavers in huge bundles, along with samples to copy. The largest market for these hats was in farm villages in present-day Vietnam.^[54]

[52] Yinxian tongzhi , 1936, "Shihuo zhi," pp. 57a–b. This commission work, in which the contractor supplied the design (drawn by male designers), produced hundreds of thousands of pieces for export each year. Exposure to this market meant risk: the local lace-making industry went on to peak between 1923–27; thereafter, a slide in production brought prices and volume down from 80 cents a meter in 1923 to 22 cents a meter in 1933. See CIH:C , pp. 539–40.

[53] Unless otherwise specified, the information on hat weaving that follows is drawn from a preprint of a volume in a new series on Chinese domestic industry and commerce currently in preparation at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. The volume I cite is titled Shanghai Huashang guoji maoyi ye , first draft, fourth section, third volume (chugao, disi zhang, sanci ) in the series Zhongguo ziben zhuyi gongshangye shiliao congkan.

[54] Tsur, "Forms of Business," pp. 104–5.

Major changes in the hat industry followed during World War I, when a French company based in Shanghai introduced two grasses—a type of ramie (macao ) and a fine pale grass called "gold thread" (jinsi )—from the Philippines. To train women to weave with these imported materials, the French company sent a delegation of women workers to Manila in 1914 to observe Filipina workers.^[55] Between 1914 and 1923, Shanghai exports of Ningbo hats made from ramie and gold thread increased tenfold. To popularize the new materials and new weaving techniques, the company, Yongxing (Eternally Flourishing), set up weaver-training centers in Roman Catholic churches. Successful education of local weavers made it possible for Yongxing to develop a putting-out system in which (male) company agents distributed raw materials and samples to women workers at their homes. Two or three women workers at the company's Ningbo branch worked at a shop in the city, stamping the shape of the hats with a machine and finishing off the edges and trimming.

These new materials and new markets brought home weavers higher prices for hats. But the new hats were harder to fashion. Whereas ordinary straw hats could be made in a few hours, a gold-thread hat took up to a week to finish. The new grasses were razor-sharp, and they easily cut fingers. Japanese women weavers, according to some sources, refused to use them, and even in the Ningbo area, gold-thread hat weaving moved quickly from the protoindustrial center "Outside West Gate," where most of the weaving was concentrated, to counties where poverty made women willing to tolerate the pain. Within a few years, Yuyao County, together with Huangyan County to the south of the Ningbo area—considered peripheral counties by Ningbo cityfolk—became the major production center for gold-thread hats.^[56]

The production side of this hat market, which was at its peak in 1927 and declined steadily during the 1930s, looked something like this. Hat companies (one in Ningbo, which monopolized the local sale of raw materials and the purchase of finished hats; five or more in Shanghai, which sold raw materials or purchased finished hats direct from brokers operating in the countryside) relied on a brokered putting-out system. Each company supervised up to 20 brokers, the broker himself being a skilled hat weaver. The broker supplied women with straw and collected hats on a piece-rate basis from about 50 households with which he was well acquainted. An experienced worker earned between 1.50 and 2.00 yuan for every hat she could make. Since one hat took the best workers about five days, hat weaving was more profitable than farm labor for women, except in Yuyao.^[57] A weaver

[55] Shanghai Huashang guoji maoyi ye , p. 6.

[56] Ibid., pp. 13, 16.

[57] Output for less experienced workers was about three hats a month. CIH:C , p. 687. See SSZ , 13:657–58, which reports ordinary straw hats that could be made in half a day or less, selling for between two and four American copper coins each.

could expect up to 20 yuan a month when business was good; 10 yuan per month was the average.^[58] Though in Yuyao female farm workers could earn more than hat weavers, the stigma attached to women's farm work compromised the value of the income.^[59] Hat weaving was easier than farm work; it could be done year-round; and it kept women indoors (a prestige factor as well as a practical advantage, because it allowed women at home to manage household chores, child care, and other tasks at the same time). The advantages of hat weaving even without wage incentives are obvious.

Raw materials and orders for hats came through brokers, but training was generally in-house, supplied by female family members. Mothers, or mothers-in-law, purchased straw and grasses and collected payments. Hat-weaving women had only limited access to information, and of course they had no mobility in the market. They never left home; they believed that going out was immoral, improper, and impermissible.^[60]

Hat weaving was peasant work. Training was short ("An ordinary person can learn to make hats in two weeks," commented one observer). Children could do it: young girls started weaving at the age of 8 sui , that is, between six and seven years old. And the work was rough: hat weavers developed thick calluses to protect their fingers against the sharp grass. By contrast, home embroidery was elite women's work, more art than craft. Training was long, requiring years of leisure: young girls began practicing at the age of 10 so they could turn out elegant pillowcases by the age of 16. The tiny needles and delicate fabrics demanded small, fine hands and smooth fingers—hands only a woman free from hard labor could aspire to. Embroidery thus marked a distinctive class line in home craft production, a line underscored by a close look at the work of hat weavers.

Whether they were embroiderers or hat weavers, however, women with access to the handicraft market subscribed to the same values: they were working respectably at home. Nyok-Ching Tsur opined, in fact, that one of the main reasons for the rise of contracting in the Ningbo area was its popularity among women who preferred to work at home rather than accept jobs outside.

[58] Yinxian tongzhi (1936), "Shihuozhi," p. 58a. In interviews with eight retired hat weavers in Ciqi County, November 1988, I heard complaints about the effect of the war on their business. One woman told us that in the 1940s, when hat prices fell by more than half, she measured her income in bowls of rice: one hat bought three bowls.

[59] See the figures in ZSZZ, yi , pp. 43–48.

[60] During interviews with eight retired hat weavers in Ciqi County in November 1988, I asked about going out. "Did you go to plays?" "Never." "Did you ever go to Shanghai?" "Shanghai?! We never heard of going to Shanghai!" These women obtained materials from and sold their products to a broker from the same company every week or month, at rates set by the standards of the company. So removed were they from the city at the center of the prefecture where they lived that when asked what the special traits of Ningbo women were, they replied, "We don't know: we aren't from Ningbo."

A special characteristic of Chinese women and girls is their great shyness. They are not fond of serving in strange, distinguished houses, the more so since the earnings there are small. They prefer to remain at home, where they can find better-paying work without being deprived of their family life. Naturally, there are also women and girls in China who are employed in factories or who earn their livelihood as wage workers; but these are exceptional cases.^[61]

Even the famous "Ningbo maids," by remaining in the confines of the domestic realm, escaped some of the stigma attached to "going out." Work in the home was a mark of female respectability in Ningbo, and it was a mark recognized by women of all classes.^[62]

In sum, the early twentieth century saw a commercial revolution in women's home industries in the Ningbo area, a commercial revolution based on contracting to household workers. Contemporary observers criticized contractors for driving independent artisans out of business.^[63] But contracting, it appears, actually expanded economic opportunities for a wide range of female home workers, precisely because local custom confined them to the household, where they had no mobility and limited access to materials and information.^[64]

Factory Jobs

Ningbo belonged to a region in China where women entered the factory work force in large numbers during the early twentieth century.^[65] Within the Ningbo area itself, taboos on women's work outside the home were strong,

[61] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 92.

[62] Other ethnographers have noted the relationship between women's home handicraft industry and middle class status. See, for example, Fei Hsiao-tung and Chang Chih-i, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (Chicago, 1945), p. 240.

[63] See Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 93. Independent craftworkers could no longer survive, because of the need for capital to purchase raw materials in bulk to meet market demand and because of the problem of acquiring information about rapidly changing market conditions. Overall, Tsur complains (p. 91), the image of China as a land of domestic workers and independent artisans was—in his area, at that time—a figment of the uninformed observer's imagination. Most of those seemingly independent workers, he stresses, were actually employed by contractors.

[64] Women, of course, paid the price of dependency in other ways. For example, my informants complained bitterly that during the war, after Japan occupied the Philippines, imports of gold-thread grass were cut off, and they had to find some other source of income.

[65] The region referred to here is the Lower Yangzi macroregion, including the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou, and Ningbo (see n. 13 above). Most of the workers in Shanghai's cotton mills in the early twentieth century were women, and women workers were hired by the thousands as new factories opened elsewhere in the region. By contrast, in North China, female factory workers made up only a negligible part of the urban work force until much later. On north-south differences and temporal change in patterns of female factory work, see Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, 1986), esp. pp. 54–57. On women cotton mill workers in Shanghai, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers .

and only the poorest households sent women to factories. Yet even where women remained at home, new factories altered the household division of labor.

In the first place, the increasing availability of factory-made goods meant that in 1908 "items which the women in Ningpo produced themselves as recently as thirty years ago, e.g., shoes, finer fabrics, and bags, are in most cases bought in shops today."^[66] Added this contemporary observer, "Only one generation ago, the women made shoes, hats, shirts, and other apparel for their husbands and for themselves. It caused much attention in Ningpo at that time when a young woman bought from a merchant something that she could have manufactured herself through the diligence of her hands. Today this has become very different."^[67] Because factory products made some forms of housework obsolete, in short, factories brought well-to-do women more leisure. Factory-made products for the home also freed women to devote more energy to home handicraft production for the market.

For the poorest households, on the other hand, factories offered new jobs. By 1919 the city of Ningbo boasted four factories large enough to command the attention of Japanese investigators surveying the local economy: two cotton-spinning mills, an electric power plant, and an oil-pressing plant.^[68] Tongjiuyuan, a Chinese-owned cotton mill and the first of its kind in the province, was founded in 1895 as a patriotic enterprise by two prominent local businessmen, after China's defeat in the war with Japan. It opened as a cotton-ginning plant and gradually expanded into spinning after 1900.^[69] Tongjiuyuan employed 1,300 workers, 1,000 of them women. The 300 male employees received monthly wages of 4–10 American dollars in 1919; women were paid by the day, from 8 to 20 cents in American copper pennies.^[70] The coarse yarn the plant produced, used only in local cloth manufacture, was sold mostly within Zhejiang Province. The other cotton mill, Hefeng, was founded in 1905 as a Sino-Japanese joint venture, originally organized along Japanese lines under the protection of the Japanese consulate. The company opened with 23,000 American-made spindles in 1907, spinning raw cotton grown in Yuyao and Shaoxing counties to the west. Seventy percent of its 2,600 workers were women, paid by the day or on a piece-rate basis. The company supplied temporary housing in a dormitory for all workers.

Women factory workers in Ningbo suffered the stigma attached to women who went out to work in a public place. Moreover, their wages were relatively

[66] Tsur, "Forms of Business," p. 33.

[67] Ibid., p. 61.

[68] SSZ , 13:45.

[69] For a time the company also tried weaving cloth, but in 1919, in the wake of a fire and a takeover by a rival company, textile production in the plant was abandoned.

[70] SSZ , 13:636–42; CIH:C , p. 482. The Tongjiuyuan and Hefeng mills both paid wages in American currency, for reasons I have not yet been able to determine.

low. Although pay rates in the Ningbo mills were said to be "about the same" as those in Shanghai, an experienced female worker could earn only between 20 and 25 cents (American copper coins) a day twisting thread or carding cotton. Reelers were paid about 8 cents a day. Floor supervisors fared better, earning monthly wages of 32 yuan .^[71] In other words, at Hefeng and at Tongjiuyuan, local factory wages and terms (with the exception of the privileged job of supervisor) paid no more than home handicrafts for many workers. And by removing women from the home, factory jobs exacted a premium that discounted the real value of their wages. Sending a woman "out" not only compromised a family's status but also forced it to forgo her domestic services or replace them with the labor of someone else.^[72]

Irregular hours and plant closings were as common as low wages in Ningbo's factories. The cottonseed oil–pressing plant with financial ties to the Tongjiuyuan cotton mill catered to a limited provincial market, and shut its doors during the first four months of every year to await the new cotton harvest. Workers in the mill, when it was open, earned about 10 yuan a month, working 12-hour shifts.^[73] A small match factory, a candle factory, a shop that made towels, and a feeble electric plant (closed more often than not) also kept erratic schedules. The Zhengdaxin Match Factory, established in 1912 (some sources say 1909) by a French missionary and subsequently taken over by Chinese managers, employed about 70 male workers at 30 cents a day, along with 150 female workers who packaged the matches on a piece-rate basis. Women workers earned 1 cent for 100 boxes, with efficient workers turning out 2,400–2,500 boxes a day. Making boxes smeared with phosphorous paste for striking matches paid 2 cents for 60 but took longer, so that daily earnings peaked at about 20 cents. Here again contractors opened doors by helping women respond to erratic factory schedules: efficient women workers could earn daily wages comparable to those of relatively skilled mill workers by making match boxes at home under contract to the match factory.^[74]

[71] See SSZ , 13:47. Again, it is not clear why floor supervisors were paid in Chinese currency while line workers were paid in American money.

[72] Stephen Hymer and Stephen Resnick, "A Model of an Agrarian Economy with Nonagricultural Activities," American Economic Review 59, no. 4, pt. 1 (1969): 493–506, present an economist's model of these domestic services, which they call Z goods. Z goods are "nonagricultural nonleisure activities" designed to meet the household's needs for food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, and ceremony. Although Hymer and Resnick's analysis makes no specific reference to gender roles, their description of Z goods makes it clear that women's work accounts for the bulk of these activities.

[73] SSZ , 13:47–48. The sex of these workers is not specified in the source, but if female workers were included, this would have been noted. I have yet to identify a source specifying monthly wages for female factory workers in Ningbo. Females, with the exception of supervisors, appear to have received exclusively day rates.

[74] Ibid., 13:653–54.

No wonder that even as these new factories came into being, women's home handicraft industries remained vigorous. Work at home offered numerous advantages for women, and the demand for home-manufactured goods remained strong. At the close of World War I, the market for traditional handicrafts still flourished, with some commodities even expanding their foreign or domestic markets. Home-woven textiles, for instance, succumbed to competition from factory-made goods, as "local cloth" (Yong bu ), once widely sold in North China, was displaced by Japanese imports. However, home weavers turned to new types of cloth, which they marketed successfully up the Yangzi for a wider clientele. Straw hats and mats remained at the top of the list of local specialties, along with embroidery, fishnets, and joss paper.^[75]

In sum, as long as factories did not offer competitive wages or steady employment, and as long as female seclusion remained a mark of status, Ningbo women who had a choice would have seen no reason to abandon home handicrafts for jobs outside the home.^[76] Home handicrafts made on contract continued to flourish on a large scale alongside Ningbo's small but growing industrial sector. Local factories could not compete for workers against domestic employment for many reasons. They employed mostly day labor and closed periodically. They required women to work outside the home among strangers. They demanded new skills. Home handicraft industries, by contrast, did not take women away from their homes or from their customary work there—cooking, cleaning, caring for the sick, bearing children, babysitting, mending and making clothes, and keeping their menfolk company. Nyok-Ching Tsur's ideal of "harmonic congeniality" in the household economy survived for both practical and sentimental reasons.

Which Ningbo women did take factory jobs? Not middle-class women, who remained respectably at home. The few thousand women who entered local factories in Ningbo came from poor households strategizing to keep their menfolk afloat. Part-time women workers from such households, recruited locally—usually through female relatives—made up the female labor force that staffed Ningbo's earliest factories.^[77] They were paid by the day.

[75] According to the Yinxian tongzhi ("Shihuozhi," pp. 57–58), the volume of exports of straw hats fell from nearly 5 million units in 1927 to about 1.5 million in 1930 and 1931; it was still falling in 1932.

[76] Writing in 1908, after one factory had already been operating for a decade, Nyok-Ching Tsur ("Forms of Business," p. 111) saw no threat to the household enterprises and their contractors, though he praised the patriotism of factory founders.

[77] See CIH:C , pp. 490, 495. In interviews with eight retired women workers from the Hefeng mill, conducted in Ningbo in November 1988, informants commonly named a mother or a mother-in-law as the person who got them their jobs. Some worked to put brothers through school, others to support male kin who were apparently unemployed.

Their output served mainly the domestic market.^[78] They remained under the close supervision of their families, a world apart from the women who migrated to Shanghai to labor in the mills. Moreover, since they worked close to home, workers in Ningbo factories were always at the beck and call of the family if their labor was needed urgently at home. High absentee rates meant they were readily fired. And they carried the classic double burden, arriving home after a 12-hour day to find menfolk hungry for a meal and complaining about the late hour.^[79]

Migration and the Female Labor Force

Only the poorest Ningbo families seem to have sent women to work in local factories. But women workers in Ningbo factories seem to have had no access to the Shanghai factory labor market.^[80] Though it remains unclear which families sent women to Shanghai to work and what their status was, the gazetteer for Dinghai County, an island, claims that thousands of its own men and women migrated to Shanghai to work during the early twentieth century. And it is possible that jobs outside the home in Shanghai carried less of a stigma among Ningbo women who migrated there to work far from the prying eyes of local gossips.^[81]

The reasons for Shanghai's appeal are not difficult to find. Shanghai factories—regardless of Ningbo factory owners' claims—paid better wages than the Ningbo mills. According to a 1930s survey, female textile workers in Shanghai could expect to earn an average of slightly over 12 yuan per month; in Ningbo, as we have seen, monthly factory jobs for women during that time

[78] The Hefeng Cotton Spinning Mill, for instance, paid most of its workers—1,343 of 1,785 employees—by the day, only 20 by the month, and none by the year. CIH:C , p. 483. Yarn from the mill continued to supply local home weavers; it was too coarse to compete in the international market. Yarn from the Hefeng mill was sold in Guangxi, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Tianjin, as well as within Zhejiang Province (p. 485). Perhaps thousands more women were also employed by the factories to do piecework at home under contract, using raw materials supplied by their employers (p. 532).

[79] Comments by retired Hefeng mill workers, Ningbo, November 1988.

[80] Retired Hefeng mill workers told me that they were aware at the time that many Ningbo women went to Shanghai to work, but they had no way to get there themselves: "You had to have a relative, someone you knew, a connection, a route [yao you luzi ]."

[81] Abundant evidence for the presence of Ningbo women and men in the Shanghai work force suggests that the taboo on women going out to work may have been honored in the breach, at least by many women. See, for example, Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, which mentions thousands of men and women from Dinghai County working in Shanghai and in Hankou. On Ningbo workers in Shanghai, see also references in Yuen Sang Leung, "Regional Rivalry in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shanghai: Cantonese vs. Ningpo Men," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 4, no. 8 (1982): 40; and Emily Honig, "The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican-Era Shanghai," Modern China 15, no. 3 (1989): 250–51.

were available only to supervisors.^[82] Moreover, many Ningbo workers had easy access to the Shanghai job market, following networks of kinship and friendship long since established by sojourning Ningbo entrepreneurs. In Shanghai, Ningbo's reputation for fostering discipline, hard work, and local pride made Ningbo workers desirable.^[83] As male Ningbo workers joined Ningbo's merchant elite abroad,^[84] their wives, daughters, sisters, and friends-of-friends followed. It was well known in Shanghai factories that Ningbo women did not have to find jobs through demeaning negotiations with labor contractors.^[85] One source suggests that Ningbo workers were placed through workers' associations (gonghui ), which guaranteed good service to the employer and screened working conditions for the employee.^[86] Ningbo maids and Ningbo factory workers benefited from the reputation of their native place throughout Shanghai.^[87] Women factory workers in the Shanghai cotton mills all understood that Ningbo recruits would be given the finer, higher-paying women's jobs.^[88] And Ningbo prostitutes in Shanghai

[82] Mukoyama Hiro, "Kyu Chugoku ni okeru rodo joken," Ajia kenkyu 8, no. 4 (1961): 42. Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 175, reports wages ranging from 14 yuan to 27 yuan per month for the top jobs in the Shanghai mills. The 1923 gazetteer for Dinghai County reported maids' monthly wages in Shanghai at 3–4 yuan , implying that already the mills were luring women out of domestic work and into the factories. See Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a. Note that real wage rates may have been less important than the promise of stable employment. Ningbo's factories were not a source of steady income.

[83] Honig, "Politics of Prejudice," pp. 258–59, argues persuasively that reputation was less important than personal connections and access to jobs in various levels of the Shanghai economy.

[84] On the rise of occupational associations composed of semiskilled workers in Shanghai, see the North-China Herald , July 18, 1910, p. 74. On the growth of the Ningbo working class in Shanghai, see also Susan Mann Jones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford, 1974), pp. 86–88. Ningbo women working for Westerners in private homes earned 3 to 4 taels a month. Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a.

[85] See Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 97.

[86] Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, mentions recruitment through gonghui but does not explain exactly how it worked.

[87] On regional stereotypes of factory workers in the Shanghai textile mills, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 57–58 et passim; and Chu-fang Chang, "Chinese Cotton Mills in Shanghai," Chinese Economic Journal and Bulletin 3, no. 5 (1928): 907–8. Chang observes, "Most of the skilled hands employed in the engine rooms are Shanghai and Ningpo natives. Ningpo woman hands are more skilled than their sisters from other provinces."

[88] For more on the prestige of Ningbo women workers, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 71, 75, 181. In interviews conducted in Shanghai in October 1988, some middle-class Ningbo women told me that most Ningbo women working in the factories at that time were there because of connections to the Green Gang. These informants insisted that factory work for women was not considered respectable by most Ningbo people. This may explain why the main gazetteer account of female factory workers in Shanghai comes from a peripheral Ningbo county, Dinghai.

served an exclusive clientele of merchants and officials from their native place, working in hotels instead of brothels.^[89]

Like the Subei region described by Emily Honig elsewhere in this volume, the Ningbo area produced its own distinctive labor market signs and linkages, channeling women workers out of the locality to jobs elsewhere. But unlike Subei people, who were consigned to the lowest-paying, most demeaning jobs, Ningbo people in Shanghai were distinguished by their ties to Shanghai's new bourgeoisie. Perhaps for that reason, it is extremely difficult to obtain precise information about the number and class background of Ningbo women factory workers. The respectable Ningbo woman was to stay at home while her menfolk went out to work to support her. Her presence in a factory was an embarrassment to her native place.

Conclusion

An economist called upon to "tell a story" explaining the fate of Ningbo women in the early twentieth-century household economy would have to take account not only of expanding access to international and domestic markets for the products of women's labor. The story would also have to point to region, class, and values as critical determinants of which women went out to work and where they went. While Ningbo women in better-off families clearly stood to benefit from the economic transformations of the early twentieth century, wives and daughters in poor households assumed a new double burden.^[90]

This chapter has not considered how the economic changes I have described may have undermined time-honored assumptions about women's place in the home in Ningbo.^[91] An untold part of my story therefore raises

[89] Hershatter, "Prostitution," discusses the Shanghai market for female prostitutes during this period. Ningbo prostitutes in Shanghai, privileged by the native-place ties discussed in this chapter, limited their sexual services to clients from their own native place: away from home, at least, they were elite members of a marginal social category.

[90] Of course a household that counted productive women among its members could not be considered the poorest of the poor, even in Ningbo. The very survival of females to maturity—the very existence of a female labor force within the domestic group—was a measure of a household's wherewithal. The poorest Ningbo families, forced to reduce expenditures, adjust family size to resources, and make plans for survival, put up their daughters for adoption as tongyangxi ("little daughters-in-law") and lost their labor before it became profitable. Even where the labor of mature females promised increasing income, therefore, the poorest households could not invest enough to rear daughters to maturity; among the poor, in the worst of times, even wives and mothers were expendable. During the depression years, "wife renting" was widely reported in the Ningbo area (Luo Qiong, "Zhongguo nongcunzhong," p. 22).

[91] Janet Salaff's and Susan Greenhalgh's research in Hong Kong and Taiwan, respectively, suggests that changing patterns of women's work barely impinge upon persistent beliefs in patriarchal authority and the primacy of males in the Chinese family. Honig, on the other hand, points to significant changes in the consciousness of women workers between the 1920s and 1940s, though she does not ask whether changing consciousness in the workplace led to changing domestic relations in the home. See Janet Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong (New York, 1981); Susan Greenhalgh, "Sexual Stratification: The Other Side of 'Growth with Equity' in East Asia," Population and Development Review 11, no. 2 (1985): 265–314; and Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 202–43.

another question: what were the effects of economic change on women's lives in other spheres? For example, the expansion of women's educational opportunities in the Ningbo area opened doors to some women whose place in the household and the economy was changing rapidly.^[92] A few Ningbo women, we know, became politically active; some embarked on new careers in the professions.^[93] But the vast majority of Ningbo women remained at the center of the household economy where, more than ever before, the nature of women's work marked the difference between economic failure and success.

[92] See, for example, a report in the North-China Herald , Aug. 2, 1907:249, detailing local movements for women's education in Ningbo. The report mentions a women's club presided over by the wife of the local daotai (circuit intendant) and observes that unbound feet were becoming "quite common" among ladies from official and gentry families. In a survey of women's education in China, Ida Belle Lewis notes that the first missionary school for girls in China was opened at Ningbo in 1844 (p. 18). Her map of the distribution of Protestant mission schools in 1918 shows more than 40 day schools in Ningbo and adjacent Shaoxing Prefectures. She has no data on private and public Chinese girls' schools for the same period in the Ningbo region, but given their rapid expansion during the period of her study, we can expect there were several. See Ida Belle Lewis, The Education of Girls in China (New York, 1919). Shina kaikojoshi (Tokyo 1922), 1:173–74, lists only two missionary schools for girls in Ningbo.

[93] In 1907, the young woman revolutionary Qiu Jin was executed in adjacent Shaoxing Prefecture. See the North-China Herald , Aug. 2, 1907: 249–50; for a fuller discussion, see Mary Backus Rankin, "The Emergence of Women at the End of the Ch'ing: The Case of Ch'iu Chin," in Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Standford, 1975), pp. 39–66. On women's activism inspired by Qiu Jin, see R. Keith Schoppa, Chinese Elites and Political Change: Zhejiang Province in the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 76. Research by Elizabeth Perry may show whether Ningbo women workers in Shanghai abandoned the traditional roles of their home area and threw themselves into radical political activity. Bryna Goodman's research in Shanghai has shown that professional Ningbo women's names appear in membership lists of the Ningbo guild activities in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Personal conversations with Perry, Oct. 8, 1987; with Goodman, Oct. 6, 1987. See Bryna Goodman, "The Native Place and the City: Immigrant Consciousness and Organization in Shanghai, 1853–1927" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1990).