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]