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]