Change in Labor of Division

Early Womanly Work Content

In early texts “weaving” was a synecdoche for the whole process of textile production; women were responsible for making cloth from start to finish. In the sense that we are what we do, womanhood in early imperial China was defined by the making of cloth. (Bray, p183)

Yet whatever women contributed to general agriculture, in the imagination of Chinese scholars women’s work largely lay elsewhere. Symbolically women were associated with cloth, and since ancient times the sexual division of labor had been epitomized by the saying that men plow and women weave. (Ebrey, p132)

Dual Economy Since the Song Period

The economic developments during the late T’ang and Sung were so dramatic that they have often been called revolutionary. The sexual division of labor could not have remained entirely unaltered in the circumstances. The expansion and commercialization of textile production made it easier for families hard-pressed for cash to turn to their wives and daughters for help in raising funds. At the same time, commercialization undermined the age-old principle of the sexual division of labor by fostering the appearance of male master weavers. (Ebrey, p145)

In the early Song dynasty, textile production was still considered an exclusively female
domain; by the late Ming or early Qing it had come under male control and was no longer automatically identified with women. (Bray, p183)

Women’s role in silk production, however, was a lowly one, confined mainly to the labor-intensive, low-paying, but respectable work of rearing silkworms, tending cocoons, and reeling silk thread. Account houses in Suzhou and other Lower Yangzi cities controlled as many as a hundred or more looms by subcontracting to “weaver households” (ji hu) where two, three, or more looms were operated by men. (Mann, p159)

The complex changes in the textile industry that took place between the Song and the Qing, however, by and large displaced women as weavers; women were deskilled, and their contribution to textile production was devalued, marginalized, or subsumed within male-headed household production. (Bray, p237)