Transforming Patriarchy

Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century

Gonçalo Santos, Stevan Harrell, Goncalo Santos, Stevan Harrell

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295998985
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

Each successive wave of revolution to hit modern China—political, cultural, and economic—has radically reshaped Chinese society. Whereas patriarchy defined the familial social structure for thousands of years, changing realities in the last hundred years have altered and even reversed long-held expectations. Transforming Patriarchy explores the private and public dimensions of these changes in present-day China. Patriarchy is not dead, but it is no longer the default arrangement for Chinese families: Daughters-in-law openly berate their fathers-in-law. Companies sell filial-piety insurance. Many couples live together before marriage, and in some parts of rural China, almost all brides are pregnant. Drawing on a multitude of sources and perspectives, this volume turns to the intimate territory of the family to challenge prevailing scholarly assumptions about gender and generational hierarchies in Chinese society. Case studies examine factors such as social class, geography, and globalization as they relate to patriarchal practice and resistance to it. The contributors bring the concept of patriarchy back to the heart of China studies while rethinking its significance in dominant Western-centric theories of modernity.

PART ONE

RURAL RECONFIGURATIONS

CHAPTER ONE

DUTIFUL HELP

Masking Rural Women’s Economic Contributions

MELISSA J. BROWN

THE Chinese patriarchal family system—which institutionalizes female subordination and exploitation in whatever kin and social relations obtain at any given point in history¹—has been remarkably resilient from the late imperial period through the Maoist era to the global-capitalist present, although the institutional forms of that subordination that existed in practice have been very fluid.² The hegemonic idiom of “helping” has long elided rural women’s economic contributions to household and society, an undervaluation that made even senior women vulnerable to kin demands for more labor. Moreover, Party-state policies exacerbated those vulnerabilities, completely eliding rural senior women’s economic contributions, especially in clothing production, even as these policies created space for publicly crediting younger women’s agricultural field labor.

Today, the organization of global capitalism in China has inadvertently created new potential for women—and particularly unmarried women—to gain control of their labor and earnings. Rural women migrate to cities for work and open bank accounts in their own names. However, “helping” has been brought forward into the global-capitalist present as central to the practical and emotional power of kinship and thus to the continued undervaluing of women’s labor. Appeals for help are still used to encourage women’s dutiful contributions. Unmarried women appear better able than married women to resist those appeals, although distancing themselves from their natal families may not be independence but an unacknowledged transition to upcoming marital families instead. In short, through the many transformations in the form of patriarchal relations across the twentieth century, there are remarkable continuities in the notion of dutiful help as an indicator of the undervaluation of the economic contributions of unmarried daughters, young married women, and senior (married) women.³

THE HISTORICAL HEGEMONY OF HELPING

The idea that rural girls and women are capable only of “help” (bang or bangmang)—not of work, in the sense of providing economic contributions comparable to that of their male age-mates—serves to rationalize patriarchy.⁴ It portrays girls and women as (always) duty bound to provide whatever “help” is required by the patriline to which they are assigned and to gratefully accept whatever support is given them in return, implying that they do not contribute enough to cover the costs of supporting them.

Helping in Prerevolutionary Rural Families

The idiom of helping, used by both Chinese women and men, ideologically fueled the Chinese patriarchal system before 1949. It intersected with the ideology of “worthless daughters,” who drain their natal patrilines of resources (food, clothing, houseroom) and take skills learned in girlhood to serve another patriline upon marriage (M. Wolf 1972; Ebrey and Watson 1991). These ideologies were entangled with the neo-Confucian principle that women should obey first their fathers, second their husbands, and third their sons but contradicted the older Confucian admonition to sons that they must obey their parents. Even maternal authority over sons did not and does not preclude the undervaluation of women’s labor (the labor women actually perform). Since principles and cultural beliefs are not reliable predictors of customary practice, I view shared principles and beliefs as ideologies—some hegemonic, some resistant—whose relationship to practices must be explored.⁵

“Helping” is an indicator, linguistically marking the undervaluation of economic contributions by an individual or category of people. In the fluidity of social practice, use of the term help does not mean that girls or women never received any credit for their labor. Rather, “help” and “work” were credited distinctly, as if in separate cognitive accounting systems. In the early twentieth century, female labor was largely credited as “help”—provided to a man (e.g., father, husband) or a senior woman (e.g., mother, sister-in-law)—rather than “work.” Boys’ and men’s labor, too, could be credited as “help,” though women I have interviewed rarely spoke of male labor so. Ideologies associated with “helping” made it easy to undervalue or even dismiss labor contributions described with that language, particularly given many kinds of credit: time spent or earned (e.g., in agricultural labor exchanges) as well as meals, cash, or exchange-goods earned. Because the rural nonelite was cash poor, monetized value likely earned most credit. That textile labor was credited at the point of sale (Bray 1997) is further evidence that crucial labor—spinning—could be elided.

The belief that Chinese girls and women made little economic contribution was common, among Chinese women, their relatives, reformers, and scholars. Liang Qichao viewed footbound women as “parasites” (Ko 2005, 21). Mao Zedong himself in 1949 exhorted women to “unite and take part in production” (tuanjie qilai, canjia shengchan … huodong) as though rural women’s labor had never before produced anything significant.⁶ Scholarly analyses of the Chinese economy range from undervaluation of the contributions of daughters generally (e.g., Buck 1937, preface) to consideration of the economic value of the products of female labor (e.g., Bray 1997) while still undervaluing female labor inputs (e.g., Pomeranz 2000,101; 2003). Moreover, among those who consider female economic contributions important, only Hill Gates’s (1996, 2001) research on the intersection between kinship and capitalism and, to a lesser extent, Philip Huang’s (1990, 2002) research on mobilization of labor in the peasant family under involutionary conditions have previously considered kinship as integral to girls’ and women’s production. Gates (1996) argues that daughters who contributed economically to their families could expect to leave in “good” marriages, that is, marrying into marital families at or above the economic level of their natal families. This argument implies that female labor was accurately credited and, for an unmarried daughter in particular, created a social obligation on the family’s part to secure marital comfort. By contrast, my analyses suggest that rural Chinese girls and women themselves, as well as their families, frequently undervalued their economic contributions. Using the idiom of help—integral to Chinese kinship—to describe female labor contributed to the view that Chinese women did little work.

The historical evidence presented here on female labor and earnings during the early twentieth century comes from collaborative research using orally administered structured interviews with 2,737 Chinese women, mostly born between 1915 and 1942, residing in twenty-two rural Han counties in eleven Chinese provinces (Brown et al. 2012; Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips, 2016).⁷ Methodological challenges revealed the idiom of help in masking female economic contributions. Mentioning “work” (gongzuo, zuoshi, zuo laodong, ganhuo) often elicited some statement that a woman interviewee herself, or women in general, did not work, even from women who had done agricultural labor in the Maoist period. For example, Ms. Li said, “[Before 1949] males did agricultural field work; females didn’t go into the fields” (Dili de huo, nande zuo, nüde bu xia tian) (Hunan no. 2101146, b. 1935).⁸ Handicraft labor was often elided as “helping” mothers (e.g., Shanxi no. 2902025, b. 1931) or mothers-in-law, who were credited with the product. For example, asked who spun in her marital household, one woman said: “My mother-in-law. My sister-in-law helped her spin” (Popo, saozi gei bangmang fang) (Anhui no. 1101032, b. 1916). To discover what labor women actually performed, we asked about specific tasks. Ms. Li planted, harvested, and dried sweet potatoes and soybeans for her natal family; she also picked cotton—labor that required going into agricultural fields. Footbinding, common in many rural areas before 1949, contributed to the perception that women did not work (Brown et. al 2012): “Footbound girls couldn’t do any work; they could only spin and weave at home” (Baole jiao de nühai, zuobuliao shiqing, jiu zhineng zai jia fangsha, zhibu) (Jiangxi no. 2301118, b. 1932) (she was never footbound).⁹

The economic contributions of girls and women were significant to their households. Adele Fielde, a missionary in 1880s Fuzhou, calculated the value of assets held by her rural Christian converts and found the cloth, clothing, shoes, and bedding produced by female handwork equal in value to all the agricultural tools and draft animals used in farming combined, excluding land.¹⁰ These handicrafts were necessary to survival, even in Fujian, one of China’s warmer provinces. Contrary to expectations, footbinding could boost girls’ handicraft production—for example, in spinning cotton—to levels higher than coerced from enslaved African Americans in the antebellum American South (Brown and Satterthwaite-Phillips 2016). Handicrafts produced—including thread, cloth, clothing, shoes, bedding, rope, fishnets, hats, grain bags, baskets, mats, white wax, hand-sorted tea, and opium—procured salt, oil, sugar, rice and other foodstuffs, clothing, and other goods (either by exchange of goods or via cash from wages or sale of handicrafts). Before 1949, girls and women who were skilled handicraft workers fed themselves and often other family members as well,¹¹ even if some of them did not believe it possible.

CASE STUDY 1: Ms. Zhou’s (ID no. 2302127, b. 1926) natal family in central Jiangxi owned 1 mu (about 0.067 hectare) of paddy land and 9 mu of dry land (the average local holding was 7.7 mu). They owned a draft ox and shared a house with extended patrilineal kin. Zhou was never footbound, as the custom had stopped locally by the time she was small. Around 1934, Zhou’s family sold their paddy and some dry land to release her older brother from the Nationalist army, which had seized him for conscription. Later, the family had to rent land but still ate rice regularly (only 40 percent of local families ate rice as a staple). Zhou “helped” her father and grandfather farming rice, wheat, soybeans, sesame, and cotton. Her field labor included weeding, working a water pump, harvesting, hauling crops from the field, and drying the grain. When her father plowed dry land, she would follow behind and break up dirt clumps with her feet.

Zhou’s older brother ran a small workshop, pressing fried sesame for oil. The family’s sesame crop was not sufficient, so Zhou twisted hemp into rope to exchange for sesame: 1 jin (about 650 grams) of rope exchanged for 1 jin of sesame. She made 1 “big” ounce (liang) of rope per day, requiring sixteen days to earn a jin of sesame to press. Zhou, along with her younger brother, “helped” in the workshop itself (bangmang zha you). They used their feet to stamp down the press and squeeze out the oil, repeating the process twice for each batch of sesame. Her older brother sold both the oil (for cooking) and the chaff (for fertilizer and feed for pigs).

Zhou’s natal family owned a spinning wheel. Zhou initially said that her older brother’s wife was the only spinner in the household. However, she acknowledged that, from about age nine, she would “occasionally help” her sister-in-law spin (ou’er bang saozi de mang). Zhou did not consider the thread her product because she spun only when her sister-in-law was busy cooking or taking care of the children, but these must have been frequent diversions. Zhou did no child care or cooking, and there were no other adult women in the house by that time. They jointly produced 2 big ounces per day, all of which Zhou credited to her sister-in-law. Her sister-in-law exchanged the thread for clothing and raw cotton (to spin). Zhou did not know how much the thread earned, another indicator that neither she nor her sister-in-law considered this product hers, for women interviewed who had sold their handicrafts themselves generally remembered how much the goods earned.

Zhou was essentially sold into marriage by her older brother, who was then family head. At about fifteen, she was married to a man seven years older (an only son) for a brideprice (pinjin) equivalent to 2,000 jin of unhusked rice and 10 jin of meat, fish and chicken.¹² As dowry, she took slightly more clothing and shoes than the local average and borrowed a chest and bed to accompany the bridal procession, but her husband viewed these as no dowry at all. No spinning wheel—a potential source of income, and a common but not ubiquitous dowry item for spinners—was included. Zhou’s marital family was poorer than her natal family. They owned no land, renting all they worked. They owned a small house and shared a draft ox with another family, and their main staple was sweet potato, the staple of the poor. Zhou did not get along with her mother-in-law.

When first married, about 1942, Zhou worked with her mother-in-law to pickle beans for sale. Zhou also did almost every aspect of agricultural work necessary to grow rice, wheat, peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes, sesame, and some fruit (which they also sold): weeding, watering, fertilizing, harvesting, hauling the crop from the field, threshing, flailing, and drying.

After three years of marriage, Zhou bore her first child, a son. She had twelve children total and raised eight of them to adulthood (four died as newborns). With such a large family, handwork in her marital family consisted entirely of making shoes and clothing. Zhou also “helped” her husband with a sesame oil workshop but did not know how much the oil earned.

Zhou’s life circumstances suggest that her economic contributions—both substantial and not dissimilar from other women—were given little credit. When asked if a woman could earn enough to support herself before 1949, Zhou herself said: “We didn’t think so. Women gave all the money [they earned] to their parents, so they couldn’t support themselves” (yang-buliao). By the time she was of marriageable age, her younger brother and sisters could replace her doing handwork, working in the fields, and pressing oil. Her marriage did not repay Ms. Zhou for her past contributions, since it thrust her into a household with less financial security (contra Gates 1996; cf. Brown et al. 2012), but brought current profit to her natal household via the brideprice.

Most rural Chinese women married at or above their economic standing: 46.5 percent of 7,314 women who married between 1907 and 1949 “matched doors” (men dang hu dui), and 31.1 percent married up, but like Ms. Zhou, 22.3 percent—one woman in every four or five—married down (Brown et al. 2012). The substantial number of these women involved in premarital labor activities—89 percent in agricultural labor, 89 percent in handwork (67 percent produced textiles, with regional variation corresponding to the availability of raw cotton, and 77 percent produced other handicrafts)—suggests that, as with Ms. Zhou, families frequently overlooked daughters’ past economic contributions when arranging marriages in favor of expectations of current and/or future earnings (via brideprice or affinal connections).

Helping during the Maoist Period

The view of women’s labor as worth less than men’s and often as dutiful help (rather than work) continued under Maoism (cf. Stacey 1983). Promoting rural production as strictly agricultural, the Party-state allowed rural handicraft production to continue as “backward” sidelines but did not give work points for it (Eyferth 2009, 2012). In other words, the Party-state transformed how people credited rural labor, institutionalizing work points as the highest form of value. These policies wrenched apart the interwoven crediting systems of “work” and “help,” giving points only for “work” and erasing the value of labor described as “help.” There was no ideologically correct way to credit “help” to the household, yet women still had to do handwork, since clothing, shoes, and bedding were necessary for survival in China’s climate and most rural families could not procure or afford factory-made clothing or cloth (cf. Eyferth 2012). Rural young women, especially unmarried daughters, were publicly credited for agricultural labor—albeit earning work points at 70–80 percent of the men’s rate—and these points were valuable to families (Davis-Friedmann 1983). Party-state policy, however, failed to credit rural women—especially married women whose duty it was to clothe children and husbands—for necessary, daily labor considered “help.” It may have been this institutional masking of handwork contributions that prompted one Women’s Federation official (interviewed in Yunnan in 2009) to remark that village women lost status in the transition to Maoism.

Older women received no work points for handwork, which was dismissed as “domestic” production (for home consumption) and rationalized in terms of ideologies about women as belonging to the “inner” (nei) quarters (Ebrey and Watson 1991). At times during the Mao period, however, other production for home consumption was collectivized and earned work points in rural areas: cooking in the dining halls, even child care in collective nurseries, and much agriculture. Earning no work points for handwork meant that some married rural women had to do their full-time day work—often field labor or caring for livestock—and then spin or weave at night, for their own use or for black-market exchange (e.g., Hubei no. 2001017, b. 1926 [cf. Eyferth 2012]). Domestic work became a Maoist “virtue” by which women were judged (Hershatter 2011), leaving women, especially older women not doing agricultural labor, vulnerable to expectations of ongoing uncredited contributions.

These demands cannot be understood only as a Maoist legacy disenfranch...