Page 26 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

INTRODUCTION 13
humble activities, such as the removal of human waste, were infused with ritual
significance in traditional village settings’.
These two examples offer insights into the very little studied world of women’s ‘ritual
work’ in pre-modern China. The next two case studies, however, provide dramatic
evidence of women expanding their ritual power to areas such as ancestral and community
rituals traditionally denied to them. In Jiayuan village, Guangdong, the reform era has
allowed affluent families compete to build lavish tombs and memorial stones for their
ancestors. Women preside over these rituals, in a dramatic turnaround of past practices,
which expressly prohibited women from taking part in the ancestral cult. The wives of
Communist Party cadres are heavily involved. The cadres turn a blind eye or even aid
their wives but find it impolitic to play a leading role. In Dazuo village in Fujian, women
play a leading role in religious activities at an individual, household, lineage and regional
level. Economic circumstances too have shaped this surprising emergence of the ritually
powerful woman. Women do most of the heavy work of the village, even heavy
construction work done elsewhere by men, while the men engage in the more lucrative
occupations of fishing and stone-carving. These occupations often take the men far away
from the village, thus leaving a communal space in which women have seized ritual control
over ancestral worship, propitiation of ghosts and the supernatural protection of
households. Women serve as spirit mediums and preside over the birthday celebrations of
the major village deities. One could conclude here that the strict gender divisions of labour
have ‘opened up a public and private ritual space in which women could find new forms
of agency’.
Overall, the chapters in this volume contribute to the impression of women’s
opportunity and agency in the reform period rather than to their disadvantage. However,
it is clear too that women at the lower levels of domestic service and the hierarchy of
prostitution are at risk of abuse. In this volume we have chosen to focus on ‘new’ and
emerging occupations for women rather than on the plight of the middle-aged woman
who has been stood down from her post in the state sector, or the rural girls removed
from schools to work in the fields, while their brothers are sent on to further education or
lucrative jobs in the townships. Nor have we dealt with the kinds of women who have
suffered victimisation as a result of rampant discrimination, such as the sad cases described
so eloquently in Xinran’s The Good Women of China (2002).
This snapshot of women in the reform era is obviously partial and incomplete.
Nonetheless, the women discussed here are representative of an important cross-section of
Chinese women, those whose life-styles, marriage patterns and careers are intextricably
shaped by the forces of globalisation and the internationalisation of definitions of labour.
The maid in the homes of affluent Beijingers is the object of the ‘civilising’ project of
‘modernity’ and is pulling her family and kin into broad circuits of labour migration and
exchange. The girl in the massage parlour or the karaoke bar may not be a legal ‘sex
worker’ from the point of view of the Chinese government, but she is a type of quasi-
legal ‘prostitute’ whom the Chinese state alternately nurtures and prohibits. The
demanding brides of Zhejiang Province are stimulating powerful currents of consumer
aspiration, internal labour migration and the transfer of property between generations.
The mansions they require are elaborations of suburban ‘utopias’ derived from Western