China Off Center

GENDER AND WORK

GENDER AND WORK It is often believed that “traditional” societies have clear-cut, timeless divisions of labor along gender lines and that, with “modernity,” such roles are called into question. We caution readers to distinguish ideology from practice , ideals from behavior. In some conflated “traditional” China—far from unitary or homogeneous throughout time, in actuality—there were said to be proper roles for men and women. Men were to be like emperors in the home; women were to follow their fathers when they were children, their husbands when they were wives, and their sons when they were widows. Women were called neiren, “the people inside.” As Ida Pruitt shows so poignantly in A Daughter of Han (1945), only the most desperate of the poor permitted their wives or daughters to leave the home. Foot binding was the most visible symbol of this binding inside. Yet, throughout the centuries, there were millions of desperate poor. The rule—often violated—that widows must not remarry meant that widows were often on the verge of starvation. In The Death of Woman Wang (1978), Jonathan Spence describes the kinds of work that a respectable but destitute widow could undertake in seventeenth-century China: sewing, washing, and so forth. Such women worked, but they were modest and invisible. In traditional elite Chinese views, agriculture was the most venerated of domains and therefore off-limits to women. It was believed that a menstruating woman would pollute the fields and destroy the crops. Traditionally, agricultural work was shared among males related by blood and marriage. Families who could not manage their own land hired workers. People without their own land worked for others. In the founding years of the People’s Republic, gender equality was espoused. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, images of women driving tractors and working on high electrical wires were everywhere. One of the goals of the communes was to free women from the repetitive, reproductive domestic work of child care and cooking, in order to allow both men and women to work in productive labor. This backfired, as one might suspect; men did not want women to work with them, nor did they want women to earn as 247 many work points as they did. Still, the taboo against decent women working “outside” was broken. With the economic Reforms of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the types of work available to men and women have changed. To domestic and agricultural work has been added industrial work (often divided into “light” and “heavy”). In rural China, many men have left their farms to find more lucrative employment in factories in towns. This has left women doing most of the agricultural work. At the same time, young women have also sought employment in light industry, often textiles and manufacturing. The conditions for such workers have often been execrable—with no protection for their health or safety—since theirs is seen as a temporary situation that will end with marriage . The coastal cities, especially in the south, are a favorite destination for young women hoping to make huge amounts of money prior to marriage, but such women often find themselves exploited by greedy firms that forbid them to leave the dormitory or factory. A significant proportion find themselves working in the sex trades, essentially enslaved by an employer who promised them fortunes and lured them from their inland provinces. Men have often aspired to do industrial work since the Reforms began, ideally in heavy industry. Those employed by state-owned enterprises in cities or towns have a full range of benefits, but such enterprises are now decreasing . More and more men are roaming China in search of employment, leaving behind their families and banding together with other men in “villages” that attempt to provide a modicum of social order. At the highest levels of privilege, men and women are able to find employment in high-tech firms, in broadcasting, and so forth. Many firms prefer to hire men, and, in fact, many are subject to government limitations in that no more than one-tenth of their employees can be women. But one can see successful men and women in urban cafés, cell phones in hand, and the troubles of inland rural China seem—but are not—a thing of the past.—Eds. 248 ...