Chinese History in Economic Perspective "d0e34292"

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.

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TABLE 8.1 Farm Wages (yuan ) in Three Counties in Zhejiang Province, 1933
Wage Factors	Yin	Fenghua	Yuyao
Day
Male	0.35–1.00	0.50	0.60
Female	—^a	0.20	0.40
Month
Male	8.00^b	12.00	15.00
Female	—	3.50	8.00
Year
Male	20.00–100.00^c	100.00	120.00
Female	—	30.00	80.00
^a No data available; females appear not to have participated in farm work in Yin County.
^b Plus meals valued at 4 yuan per month.
^c Plus food and lodging valued at 10–50 yuan per year.

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.

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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.