1750-1900 Document 2

Womens Educational Opportunities in Qing China

Time Period: ca 1750-1911 C.E.
Source: Bulliet, Richard W., et al. The Earth and Its Peoples, A Global History. (Boston; Houghton
Mifflin, 1997), p. 639.
In late Ming and in Qing times, the education of women became a topic of debate among the
elite. One argument for this said educated women would value education, guide their infant sons through
their early lessons, and require continuing discipline in the preparations for the examinations. To a large
extent, however, elite women valued education for its own sake, for what it brought to their lives. Many
[women] encouraged or oversaw the education of their daughters without the permission or the help of the
men of the household. To the end of the Qing period, the education of women remained a frequently
debated subject among men, while a minority of women created educational and literary traditions that
were passed from generation to generation.
This written communication and exchange of literature among elite women was made possible by
the development of mercantile activity between 1500 and 1800. The women in merchant families often
were the real managers of the household and had relatively independent existence despite their bound feet
and the complete absence of property rights. Merchant families had the resources to extend education to
girls, and the movement of goods and communications on the merchant network allowed the exchange of
letters, poems, and essays among wealthy women. Literary pursuits by elite women were tolerated
because they were a product of leisure and thus a symbol of status.
For women of the laboring classes, neither education nor foot binding was a consideration. Like
their husbands and fathers, these women were workers and largely illiterate.
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Time Period: ca 1750-1911 C.E.

Source: Duiker, William J. and Jackson J. Spielvogel. World History. (California; Wadsworth Thomson
Learning, 2001.)
The status of women was also a transition. During the mid-Qing era, women were still expected
to remain in the home. Their status as useless sex objects was painfully symbolized by the practice of
foot binding, a custom that had probably originated among court entertainers in the Tang dynasty and
later spread to the common people. By the mid-nineteenth century, more than half of all adult women
probably had bound feet.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, signs of change began to appear. [Poor] women
began to seek employment in factories notably in cotton mills and in the silk industry, established in
Shanghai in the 1890s. Some women were active in dissident activities, such as the Taiping rebellion
(1850-1864) and the Boxer movement, and a few fought beside men in waging the 1911 revolution. Qiu
Jin, a well-known female revolutionary, wrote a manifesto calling for womens liberation and then
organized a revolt against the Manchu government, only to be captured and executed at the age of 32 in
1907.

By the end of the century, educational opportunities for women began to appear for the first time.
Christian missionaries began to open girls schools, mainly in the foreign concession [sphere of influence]
areas. Although only a relatively small number of women were educated in these schools, they had a
significant impact on Chinese society as progressive intellectuals began to argue that ignorant women
produced ignorant children. In 1905, the court announced its intention to open public schools for girls,
but few such schools ever materialized. Private schools for girls were established in some urban areas.
The government also began to take steps to discourage the practice of foot binding, although initially with
only minimal success.

Gender and Labor Roles in Chinese Silk Production

Time Period: ca 1750-1911 C.E.
Source: Abu-Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony, World Trade 1250-1350. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989.) pp. 329-330.
She (Abu-Lughod) quotes from another historian, Alvin So, who looked at silk production in the
19th century because, so far, there are no sources earlier than that. However, silk production has been
family based as well as an industrial activity of the imperial households.

The father and son in a peasant household would start planting seedlings on the polder as early as
January. In the following winter, they would cut the newly grown mulberry plant to about one
foot above the ground and cover(it) with fertile fishpond mud. In the meantime, the mother
and daughter would be busy buying silkworm egg sheets and watching the hatching of silkworms.
In the coming spring, the daughter would pick the fresh mulberry leaves and feed them to the
newly born silkworms. The worms would eat graciously, grow quickly, and demand more and
more mulberry leave on an increasing scale. The father and son meanwhile would clean the daily
silkworm refuse and prepare the worms for their sleeps. After five sleeps or rests, a full-grown
silkworm would have spun and covered itself with silk thread and formed a cocoon. The whole
family would then be busy with the silk-reeling process.

Then Abu-Lughod explains: (.) Once the cocoons are ready, they must be plunged into hot water, and
since the filament from a single cocoon is too thin to wind, the fibers have to pass through the guide
together, and then wound on to a lowly revolving wheel. () To obtain a continuous thread, one must
add new pieces to the reel accurately; great skill is required to produce thread of uniform width. Women
performed this taxing work and in general played a more prominent role in sericulture than their
counterparts in wool and cotton production.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Womens Labor Roles in Late 19th and Early 20th Century China
Time Period: ca 1880s-1930s C.E.
Source: Kazuko, Ono. Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution. (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1978.) pp. 113-116.

I Would Be Happy
Sister Qian, Mill Worker, China
Rapid industrialization in the early decades of the twentieth century transformed the conditions of life and
labor in Chinas largest coastal cities. One of the major changes was the entry of women into the
industrial labor force on a large scale. For women, the remarkable growth of both Chinese and foreignowned enterprises opened up an entirely new path of historical experience.
A woman called Sister Qian who had once been a worker in this position recalls what happened
when the man who became her boss showed up at her parents home:
At this time, Froggy Shou, who was a boss in Shanghai, came back to the village. He had been a smalltime hustler for a long time, and his persuasive style had enabled him to swindle many people. Seeing
that my family was in difficult circumstances, he spoke to my parents about taking me to a textile mill in
Shanghai. Once I got to Shanghai, he said, everything would work out fine. I would be happy, living in a
foreign-style house along the Wusong River, eating good food, and wearing stylish clothes. On top of
that, my parents would get three dan of rice after I had worked for three years.
A boss usually had 20 or 30 women workers in his employ, though some had well over 100. He
provided them with housing and food and in return put them to work. The housing was minimal. Ten to
twenty women would be crammed into one small rush-mat shed six by ten feet, furnished with a single
washbasin, a chamber pot, and a few ragged quilts. Food amounted to one meal a day of watery gruel.
They would rise at three or four o' clock in the morning and line up like convicts to walk in file to their
factory under the watchful eye of the boss. Day after day they set off in starlight and returned in the
evening by the light of the moon, never seeing the sun. The pay they earned was taken from them by the
boss. A 1938 investigation by the Industry Bureau of Shanghai shows that the bosses profited
enormously from this arrangement. A woman worker making 12 yuan a month would in theory earn 288
yuan over the period of a two-year contract, though with the reduced wage during the initial period of
apprenticeship when she was learning the trade, plus deductions for days off, the actual amount would be
265 yuan. She had to pay for, food which might cost 5 yuan a month, and for rent, water, and utilities at
0.4 yuan a month, amounting to 129.6 yuan over two years. When the contract fee is added on top of
these expenses, her total costs would come to 165 yuan at most. The difference of 100 yuan went to the
boss.
There were roughly 140,000 to 150,000 women working in cotton mills by the time of the May
Thirtieth Movement in 1925. There were in addition a large number of women working in other
industries. In Guangzhou and Shanghai alone, roughly 120,000 women were employed in silk filatures
(silk-reeling factories) 40,000 in match making factories, and 40,000 to 50,000 in the tobacco-processing
industry.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Gender Roles, Labor and Political Freedom in

Late 19th and Early 20th Century China
Time Period: ca 1880s-1930s C.E.
Source: Tilly, Louise A. Industrialization and Gender Inequality. (Washington D.C.: American
Historical Society, 1993.) p. 43.

How does gender, womens work, and the sex division of labor fit into this panoramic sweep of rebellion,
war, reaction, idealistic goals, and the mixed record of Communist revolution?
Some examples: the Taipings forbade foot binding and welcomed women members, establishing
single-sex communities in which women were freed from family control and did useful work for the
cause; they, as the Boxers later, organized women into fighting groups, but these were brutally repressed.
Reforms proposed in the 1890s included formal education for women and the abolition of foot binding,
while utopian theorists proposed new ways of raising children and forms of egalitarian social relations.
The Japanese schools for Chinese girls raised the revolutionary consciousness of future activists and gave
them the skills to act politically. Thus Ch'iu Chin became a teacher in a Chinese womens school and
plotted revolution with secret society members in the first decade of this century; the plan failed, and she
was executed in 1907. There were reports of women in military units in the 1911 revolution, and
womens suffrage groups emerged in the period of constitutional discussions in 1911-12. Several
suffrage groups published in 1912 a parliamentary program calling for equal rights for men and women,
education for women, improvement of their position in the family, monogamy free choice of marriage
partner, a ban on divorce without justification, an end to concubines and the sale of women, and reform of
the licensed prostitution system. The attempt to work within the parliamentary system failed.
The discussion of womens rights was not hushed, however. The May 4 protest again brought
women into popular politics and gender questions into the press. From Hunan, Mao Zedong wrote
several articles on female suicide in 1919 that condemned the conditions (often a forced marriage) that
drove women to suicide and urged them to struggle against the system instead of killing themselves in
protest. Women students and teachers joined street crowds, read the new journals, and agitated in their
own interests; they perceived womens rights as basic to a democratic society. In Hunan, a provincial
constitution in 1922 granted women the suffrage in provincial and local elections. There the movement
stopped, as warlordism and civil war engulfed the country.

My Family Was Poor

Japanese Workers Song, late 19th century
My family was poor,
At the tender age of twelve
I was sold to a factory....
I was carried away by sweet-sounding words.
My money was stolen and thrown away.
Unaware of the hardship of the future,
I was duckweed in the wind.
Excited I arrived at the gate, where I bowed to the doorman,
I was taken immediately to the dormitory,
Where I bowed to the room supervisor.
I was taken immediately to the infirmary,
Where I risked my life having a medical examination.
I was taken immediately to the cafeteria,

Where I asked what was for dinner.

I was told it was low-grade rice mixed with sand....
We friends are wretched,
Separated from our homes in a strange place,
Put in a miserable dormitory
Waken up at four-thirty in the morning,
Eating when five oclock sounds,
Dressing at the third bell,
Glared at by the manager and section head,
Used by the inspector.
How wretched we are!
Source: E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan.