Page 189 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

176 ANNE E.MCLAREN
separation of the sexes. Domestic space was the essential female ritual domain in the same
way as clan temples and burial grounds were the typical male ritual domain. The sense
here is not so much of marginality and exclusion as of the complementarity of ritual roles.
From the evidence presented here, women were not simply marginal witnesses to
ancestral rituals based around the needs of the patriline but active participants in other
forms of ritual culture that both complemented male ancestral cults and validated
women’s governance of the domestic sphere. Women played an active role in initiating
and performing this ritual culture, which varied from region to region in line with
different social and economic conditions. That this female ritual power has been little
noticed in the past is due to the fact that it was transmitted orally by mainly illiterate women,
and only rarely recorded in China’s ‘scriptural’ culture.
The ‘coming out’ of women from the home into public space led inevitably to the
erosion of household rituals in which women were at the very centre. Once women
worked in factories and fields, they were not present in the home to tend to the household
gods, or at least not to the same extent. Tutelary gods did not preside over their factory
floors. Throughout most of China, as the household gods vanished into the recesses of the
collective memory of the elderly, so did memories of women’s past ritual authority. In
the palatial homes now found in coastal Zhejiang, few remnants of kinship rituals remain
in the open plan living rooms of the new commodity culture (see Sargeson, this volume).
Nonetheless, as Sargeson elegantly demonstrates, women’s agency in configuring the new
‘modern’ domestic space is everywhere apparent. While women’s rituals have seemingly
vanished in ‘modernizing’ China, the opposite process is happening in some regions. The
examples from Jiayuan and Dazuo discussed here are striking for the way they reveal
women’s determined reinvention of past rituals. These examples offer a surprising
demonstration of women’s agency in reshaping notions of the patriline in ways that accord
women significant power both within the family and the local community.
It has been assumed that women were marginalized within the ‘patriarchal’ system of
the imperial past and that the allocation of women to the ‘inner’ sphere meant their
necessary exclusion from domains of authority and power. The question of whether this
‘inner sphere’ had its own form of authority and power, and how women may have
exercised agency in that sphere, has been given much less attention. The examples
discussed here point to the importance of women’s ritual culture for enhancing bonds
within communities of women and infusing notions of ‘women’s work’, understood as
both physical and ritual labour, with rich symbolic meaning.
The general breakdown of women’s ritual culture that accompanied the revolution led
to a state of confusion as to what tasks should be considered male and which female.
However, the notion that labour was inherently gendered has rarely faltered. In the new
China, men and women have competed to attach particular symbolic values to their own
domains of work. As Lisa Rofel has noted, the weaving of silk, once performed only by
men, became a prized job for women after the founding of the People’s Republic.
However, in the 1980s the pendulum shifted once more. Silk weaving become a socially
devalued form of employment, much to the chagrin of older generations of women
weavers who had ‘liberated’ themselves from their homes. In the reform era, as men
leave the fields for lucrative jobs in township enterprises, agriculture, including heavy