Page 179 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

166 ANNE E.MCLAREN
village in Zhejiang who, although she owned a washing machine, still took her washing to
the village pond in order to ‘see what’s going on, who is walking past’.
There has been some speculation about the ritual and symbolic nature of women’s
work in the home but one finds only scattered mention in the scholarly literature. Here I
will explore women’s labour in the production of goods and services as interpreted
through the framework of women’s oral and ritual culture. My goal here is to better
understand ‘traditional’ perceptions of ‘women’s work’ in order to assess what women may
have lost when they underwent revolution and modernization.

Women’s ritual work in twentieth-century China

Daniel Kulp noted that ritual and religious duties were important duties of women he
observed in Phoenix Village, Guangdong, in the 1920. These ritual duties were intimately
allied with the prosperity and well-being of the family. He lists the following as part of the
training given to girls and young women:

How to worship, what shrines and for what purposes; kitchen gods for prosperity
in the home; the sky god for a good marriage; on the eighth month, the moon god;
Guan Yin, Goddess of Mercy, for those who are sick; visit the graves of the
ancestors at Tsing Ming [the Qingming Festival of the Dead], spring festival, and
worship with mother by shooting off fire crackers and burning yellow paper as
money for the spirits; burn silver money when the men are performing the
ceremonies of ancestral worship in the Ancestral Hall or Temple or in the home at
the following times; the fifth month, the middle of the seventh month, autumn
festival, and the eleventh month or winter festival.
(1925; repr. 1966:251)

He also notes with disapproval the constrictions placed on the behaviour of girls: ‘Girls
must learn that they cannot play, sit or eat with boys; that they cannot talk with strangers;
cannot worship ancestors themselves; must not disobey parents; must not quarrel; must
not walk on the street alone nor eat things on the street’ (Kulp 1925, 1966:254). He
concludes, Thus their entire education is for participation in familist activities in their
narrowest spheres’ (Kulp 1925, 1966: 254). His view was echoed by many other foreign
observers and became a central part of the condemnation of Chinese tradition by Chinese
intellectuals, both male and female, caught up in the May Fourth reformist movement
(1915–27). For Kulp, other foreign observers, and May Fourth intellectuals in general,
the confinement of women to domestic space and their training in purely ‘familist’
concerns demonstrate the ‘narrow’, confining nature of the treatment of women and
hence the urgent need to reform the traditional Chinese state. In this analysis, Kulp
ignores the function and importance of women’s ritual and religious roles in community
perceptions of the value of women’s labour.
The weak, uneducated Chinese woman, with her bound feet and sequestration within
the home, became a potent symbol of Chinese shame and backwardness in the twentieth
century. Successive decades of scholarship on Chinese modernity have accepted this