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OF SILK, WOMEN, AND CAPITAL: Peasant Women's Labor in Chinese and Other Third World Capitalisms
In the early twentieth century, Chinese peasant women's work in sericulture fused with modern factory production of raw silk, generating a nonclassic form of Third World capitalism. In Wuxi County, near the modern treaty port city of Shanghai, women worked long hours raising silkworms for daily incomes far below those men earned in grain farming. Escalating demand for silkworm cocoons helped stimulate a gendered division of labor in all types of work peasant households performed, with men seeking an array of nonfarm jobs to supplement their work in grain farming, while women pursued sericulture. As a result, male peasants in Wuxi migrated more frequently to urban locales in search of work, and women and children who were left behind became the poorest people residing in Wuxi villages. These findings demonstrate the control exercised over peasant women's labor in divergent forms of Third World capitalisms, and an increasing potential in such situations for the feminization of rural poverty.
Sericulture--the cultivation of mulberry trees and raising of silkworms--has always been viewed as a quintessential form of Chinese women's work. Historical analyses have often portrayed sericulture as offering positive outcomes, pointing to cash incomes peasant women earned through the sale of silk products and also to women's opportunity to fulfill the essential Confucian moral dictum that "men plow and women weave." 1 The realities of cultivating mulberries and raising silkworms, however, could be far less pleasant than these images suggest. In the volatile arenas of twentieth-century capitalisms, when peasant women raised silkworms to serve local industry and the world market, there were implications for their working lives that have never been adequately recognized or fully studied. 2
In this article, I take up the issues of Chinese women's work in sericulture in the early twentieth century and provide a thorough economic and social analysis of its outcomes for women. While data for such an analysis are sparse, two relatively detailed surveys of the rural economy of Wuxi County in the 1920s and 1930s provide data for one of China's three principal export-oriented silk-producing centers. 3 By the time the surveys were conducted, the rural areas of Wuxi had undergone transformation into a major...