Page 178 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

WOMEN’S WORK AND RITUAL SPACE IN CHINA 165
One important consequence of the revolutionary and socialist era was a devaluing of
‘inside’ work, which was now regarded as work for the family as opposed to work for the
collectivity (Jacka 1997:34). In the mid-1990s, rural Chinese considered unremunerated
household work as not falling into the category of ‘gongzuo’ or labour (Henderson et al.
2000:48). It was women who continued to carry out the greater part of domestic
housework and childcare. Married women in the socialist era who performed salaried
work in newly constituted work units (danwei) thus laboured under a cruel double burden
(Harrell 2000:74). Their traditional workload in the house remained much as before, at
the same time as there was unprecedented pressure on them to work outside the house.
For many women, the revolution, for all its agonies, brought with it a sort of liberation.
Nonetheless, there was a sense of loss as well. Lisa Rofel’s informants in Hangzhou textile
factories spoke to her of a sense of shame they felt when first forced to work ‘outside’ in
paid employment (1999:64, 70). It was not so much the notion of paid work that was the
problem as the sense of ‘exposure’ when they worked outside their homes. The location
of the work was of crucial importance. Rofel noted that a woman who managed a factory
before 1949 lived over the factory and hence did not feel that she was working ‘outside’
her home (Rofel 1999:73). Even in cases where women did work in part outside the
home, as in the case of the Shaanxi women interviewed by Gail Hershatter, the
convention that ‘virtuous’ women stayed at home led women to describe themselves as
living in seclusion even when this was not entirely the case (Hershatter 2000:81). In the
revolutionary period shy peasant women were patiently coached by the Women’s
Federation to perform ‘external’ roles such as public speaking (Hershatter 2000:86–7).
For these women, the revolution meant the shedding of one identity and the painful
acquisition of another one. 9
There were other losses. When women left homes for factories and collective
enterprises they left behind not just their households but also a whole community of
women with whom they had toiled and felt a sense of fellowship. Before the revolution,
senior women had largely governed the female domains of labour (Ko 1994:190–2; Bray
1997:128–50; Stockard 1989:31–47). In the new work units, men and women often
continued to work in segregated spheres of activity, but this time women were controlled
10
by cadres who were overwhelmingly male. Within the home, women gradually shed
their traditional ritual authority, including mediation between the household and
supernatural forces through their care of the household gods. Waves of government
campaigns against ‘superstition’ and ‘extravagance’ robbed them of traditional rites of
passage such as elaborate marriage and funeral ceremonies, the patronage of female
deities, the power to heal the household through charms, and to protect the
family through sorcery. Also gone were the once powerful ritual arenas for the expression
of women’s grievance, such as bridal laments (McLaren and Chen, 2000; McLaren 2000,
2003). In the Pearl River delta region, young unmarried women lost the companionship of
‘girls’ houses’, where they spent most of their teenage years (Stockard 1989; Watson
1994). As rural China modernized, women lost the community of women working and
chatting together, a fellowship of peers that would meet in upper chambers, in inner
courtyards, in the alleyways, by the banks of water channels, or at the street stalls in
nearby markets. In this volume, Sally Sargeson notes the case of a woman in an affluent