Sinossi
In this analysis of three generations of women in a Chinese silk factory, Lisa Rofel brilliantly interweaves the intimate details of her observations with a broad-ranging critique of the meaning of modernity in a postmodern age.
The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares the lives of three generations of women workers: those who entered the factory right around the Communist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era. Exploring attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture, she convincingly connects the changing meanings of the modern in official discourse to the stories women tell about themselves and what they make of their lives.
One of the first studies to take up theoretically sophisticated issues about gender, modernity, and power based on a solid ethnographic ground, this much-needed cross-generational study will be a model for future anthropological work around the world.
The author based her study at a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou in eastern China. She compares the lives of three generations of women workers: those who entered the factory right around the Communist revolution in 1949, those who were youths during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, and those who have come of age in the Deng era. Exploring attitudes toward work, marriage, society, and culture, she convincingly connects the changing meanings of the modern in official discourse to the stories women tell about themselves and what they make of their lives.
One of the first studies to take up theoretically sophisticated issues about gender, modernity, and power based on a solid ethnographic ground, this much-needed cross-generational study will be a model for future anthropological work around the world.
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Informazioni sull?autore
Lisa Rofel is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Dalla quarta di copertina
"Cogent, evocative, and theoretically rigorous. I know of no one else who has so artfully delineated the complex, heterogeneous effects of political mobilization on the formation of collective and individual subjectivities."—Dorinne Kondo, author of Crafting Selves
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Other Modernities
Gendered Yearnings in ChinaBy Lisa RofelUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1999 Lisa RofelAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520210790
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Liberation Stories
We were enjoying the midday break for cadres. Yu Shifu, Tang Shan, and I had gathered in our customary spot, Zhenfu's cramped reception office. Though I spent the bulk of my days in the workshops with women workers, the cadres responsible for me at Zhenfu urged me to lunch with them during their hour in the dining hall rather than in the earlier rushed and noisy half hour when workers hurriedly gulped down their food. My lunches were, relative to workers', luxurious stretches of quiet time.
With economic reform in full swing, Zhenfu's reception office had the air of a train station, what with factory staff running in to use one of the few available phones, or with visiting engineers and cadres, at Zhenfu for collaborative meetings, coming in to grab teacups and thermoses of boiled water. But at this moment, when most cadres were resting after lunch, the office was unusually still.
Tang Shan was then an earnest twenty-seven-year-old who had been a former worker and had the unusual fortune to be promoted to cadre. She had been assigned to take care of my needs. Yu Shifu, then in her late forties, was also a former prep worker as well as weaver. She had been in the factory much longer, indeed since before the socialist revolution, for she had entered Zhenfu as a child laborer. Some ten years earlier she had managed to secure the much less onerous position of factory receptionist. Yu Shifu averred that the factory leadership had "looked after" her because she had become tired and weak. Others confided that Yu Shifu had previously had a position in the weaving shopnext to the woman who was the current party secretary. During the Cultural Revolution, Yu Shifu had sided with her when the radical faction had attacked; the receptionist's job was her reward.
Many at Zhenfu gave Yu Shifu the unofficial title of "backbone cadre" in recognition of her long years of devotion to the party. Some said it with admiration and others with a barely perceptible sardonic tone. Yu Shifu, like Tang Shan, was one of the few who stood by the party. In the mid-1980s, Yu Shifu persisted in invoking the socialist guiding phrase "Serve the people," and she dressed in the simple, unadorned blue jacket and pants that signified an earlier era of class politics. No one could have leveled against her the increasingly common accusation about party cadres: corruption of politics for personal gain. On her own initiative, Yu Shifu had assumed toward me the position of surrogate mother and ideological guide. When I arrived at the factory in the morning, she offered me tea to ward off the winter chill; during the day she kept a check on my movements and contacts within Zhenfu; and, occasionally, she sang the praises of the party to me.
Over the weeks, I realized that Yu Shifu was exerting great effort to do "thought work" (sixiang gongzuo ) with me, to educate and convince me, the outsider, about all the positive transformations in China since Liberation. One point on which she held especially strong views was the liberation of women in China. "Women and men are equal now in China," she would insist to me over lunch, during walks, while we sipped our tea. "Women can go out and work, just like men." "Women have been liberated," she would continue in a slightly anxious and overly eager tone.
I silently disagreed with Yu Shifu, but I always politely nodded my head. I took her comments with an equal measure of respectful interest and political frustration. Anthropologists have laid to rest the myth of the classic participant-observer who merely listens and records. Through numerous self-reflexive descriptions, we have acknowledged that the anthropologist's presence is inevitably a complicated matter of involvement.1 Yet much experimental ethnography portrays the anthropological encounter as a dialogue that ultimately culminates in a relation of equitable and harmonious exchange. Challenging Yu Shifu, I knew, couldbe a much more acrimonious affair. I was well aware of how closely the question of women's liberation in China was tied to a defense of the nation. Any challenge to her would operate through a long history of asymmetrical engagements between China and the West.
But that day in the office the strain of anthropological and political disinterest had become too great. I decided to engage her. I was moved to do so, in part, because of the pervasive controversies I was hearing in the silk factories about the effects of the new modernization policies?debates in which women's voices were vociferous. In addition, just the previous day I had been a bemused bystander to a playful argument between Yu Shifu and one of the inspection shop's rakish young men over whether women or men had a more burdensome life. Yu Shifu claimed that women were more burdened, what with shopping at the crack of dawn, cooking time-consuming meals, washing everyone's clothes by hand, and then having to go to work besides. Her interlocutor, in the midst of languidly cleaning his bicycle, pointed at his vehicle, arguing that men had to shoulder all the dirty work women couldn't handle. (Cleaning bicycles, not unlike waxing cars in the United States, is considered "men's work.")
Yu Shifu's convictions about women seemed to me starkly contradictory. I decided to be direct. "If women and men are equal," I challenged, "how is it that there are so many competent women in this factory who don't get promoted to be managers?" My question took her by surprise, less because of its content than its tone. We had negotiated a careful but nonetheless warm relationship over the weeks. My directness suddenly intruded, threatening to break the tentative threads of cautious friendship. The atmosphere in the office changed from one of placid sociability to tense wariness. "Men and women are equal," Yu Shifu replied. "But they are different. Men are more suited to managerial work." I pressed the point, asking bluntly what those different qualities were. My bluntness, I could see, further chilled the air. "Men are stronger than women," Yu Shifu slowly answered, obviously trying to weigh where I was taking the conversation. Assuming she referred to biological traits, I countered that "strength does not lead to intelligence." Shifting the framework of discussion, I pointed out that "since the Cultural Revolution, everyonehas gone to great pains to emphasize the difference between physical and intellectual talents." (This was part of a wider repudiation of class labels and class struggle, together with support for the ascension of intellectuals.) Yu Shifu appeared to be without a response. Or perhaps she thought the situation had skidded dangerously close to a breach of the relatively unconstrained relationship we had built. Whatever the reason, she broke off the discussion. Tang Shan, who had stood watching silently from the sidelines, looked both amused at my comments and slightly appalled at my brazen challenge, which might easily have caused Yu Shifu to lose face.
The issue of women's liberation provided one of the most critical terrains on which China endeavored to construct its modernity. At a certain moment, Chinese women's liberation also figured centrally within western feminism as a means for structuring its own forms of knowledge and politics. This chapter explores the multiple deployments of meaning and power constituting "women's liberation" as it reconsiders the heterogeneous processes through which a small group of women felt galvanized to adopt the kinds of revolutionary subject-positions that the socialist regime provided for them. I focus on the oldest cohort of women workers, who came of age with the 1950s nationalization of urban industries, for they were the ones who experienced this radical transition. In Hangzhou's silk factories, a particular fraction of this oldest cohort repeated to me, with much insistence, that the revolution had liberated them. Their commentary is situated within the intersections of a number of discourses: changing cultural logics of gender and work, official socialist narratives, local cultural politics of the silk industry in Hangzhou, nationalism, and, finally, a cross-cultural dialogue with western feminists. In light of the latter, my consideration of the various contestations and investments in the meaning of women's liberation entails simultaneous attention to the politics of feminist ethnography.
For the Chinese state, especially during the Maoist era (that is, from the 1949 revolution to the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976), woman was a sign of the nation and its possibilities for reaching modernity. By officially interpreting women's liberation as an already-achieved stage in China's history, the state in effect provides a story about the success of the socialist regime in casting off semicolonialism as well as the "feudalism" of Confucian culture that?from their different positions?western colonizers and orientalist scholars, Chinese intellectuals and activists alike invented and debated as they tried to define the essential cause of China's subordination to the West. Projects of modernity during the Maoist era thus revolved centrally around instituting women's liberation.
As the new socialist regime rearranged local economies and social relations in its search for modernity, it crafted the means for sedimenting powerful representations that nonetheless periodically unleashed a vociferous politics about how to interpret and represent the "socialist real." Hangzhou, far from serving as a center of revolutionary fervor, had a reputation, as residents still told me, of harboring the Guomindang opposition. Chiang Kai-shek's native place, people whispered, was not far from Hangzhou.2 Like most other coastal cities, Hangzhou witnessed the arrival of the revolution after the fact?that is, after the Chinese Communist Party had won the war in the countryside and taken formal hold of the central place of government in Beijing. Cadres representing the new government quickly descended on Hangzhou from Shanghai, a center of revolutionary activity. Older workers remembered a few "underground revolutionaries" in Hangzhou coming forth to lead the new regime, but most learned about the revolution from their Shanghainese visitors and from the northern cadres of peasant background who formed the backbone of the revolution.
The process of learning how to reconceptualize and therefore rework the meaning of experience in every aspect of their lives remains vivid in the memories of older residents. The new regime effectively saturated social life with overlapping political networks. Cadres quickly assembled branches of the Women's Federation, the party, and the youth league within the municipal government, the few factories in existence, and every neighborhood. These committees taught the populace how to conceive of their new lives, emphasizing in particular the joining together of two aspects of socialist modernity as interpreted by the newregime: first, that people now had a future, and that future would become infinitely better; second, that this progress into the future depended on instituting social equality. Cadres thus initiated a rearrangement of social relations that would have unexpected and explosive consequences in the future, as they assigned a class label to every single person. For the urban areas, these included the labels of worker, petty bourgeoisie, national bourgeoisie, and bureaucratic bourgeoisie. Once differentiated, those with the same label were placed together in political meetings, discussion groups, literacy classes, and entertainment activities to learn how to speak and think as socialist subjects. No one remained unaffected. Over the decades, citizens became political adepts at reading the ciphers of socialist power.
The all-too-real fantasies of modernity combined the production of these new identities with economic production. Rapid industrial expansion took center stage in projects of socialist modernity. Having just thrown out the western imperialist powers, China turned to its socialist neighbor, the Soviet Union, for aid and guidance. Massive factories, mighty housing projects, and monumental state-run markets mimicked Soviet development. They transfigured urban landscapes, as at the same time revolutionary operas and heroic films of the peasant and working classes filled the space of public representation. The Hangzhou municipal government followed central government directives in nationalizing all economic activity by the mid-1950s. Tiny "factories," like Zhenfu, of no more than twenty people, were pushed together with the other few silk "factories" to replicate the Soviet larger-than-life socialist realist vision. Owners of silk shops became employees of state-run distribution centers, while capitalist managers became socialist managers. Appearances as much as supposed economies of scale were crucial to the dream of reaching modernity. But Hangzhou retained its reputation as a center of handicraft production, remaining a place where the beauty of its classical landscape lured new political elites rather than tourists, even as a belching steel mill grew on its outskirts. The silk industry, dependent on exports, had a steady if uncertain existence in the ensuing years as it fed mainly Russian tastes before China and the Soviet Union broke off relations in 1962; it also surreptitiously?with a wink and nod of theCentral Textile Bureau?funneled products through Hong Kong (and thus ultimately to the western imperialists).
"Women's liberation" fed on these socialist projects of modernity. In the first years after the socialist revolution, few women thought of their lives in terms of the socialist discourse of women's liberation. Yet there existed a small group of women workers who immediately embraced the new revolutionary categories and became representatives of the party in speaking for women. They joined the party and also took up the political work of the Women's Federation. They made the links, when necessary, with the neighborhood committees that organized women to "labor" for the new state. But their situated interpretations of women's liberation diverged in unanticipated ways from those of both the state and western feminism. The heroism still reflected in their tales was not exactly on the state's terms. The specific gender divisions within Hangzhou's local silk industry also lent an unexpected twist to the way these women became heroic socialist subjects.
At various moments, Chinese women have had as central a place within western feminism as within China. Representations of Chinese women by U.S. feminists have served to counter imperialism, hegemonic notions about socialism's possibilities among the Left, right-wing politics about abortion and reproduction, and the western solipsism of feminist theory, even as they did not operate wholly outside of these frameworks. Yet Chinese women have also served as our radical third world others. At times they appeared in typical, abstract terms. Eventually, western feminists critical of the Chinese party-state definitively concluded that Chinese women were not liberated by socialism. My long engagement with this activist scholarship, with its formative knowledge about Chinese women and its power to authorize feminism, informed my explosive dispute with Yu Shifu and was partially responsible for my strong retorts. After the argument, however, I continued to be troubled by our encounter. I had to confront its ethnographic challenge: how was I to take seriously the words of Yu Shifu?
I could not dismiss her convictions. But what was I to make of our differences? Dominant representations by both the Chinese state and western feminists, despite their radically opposed perspectives, share thetendency to overlook the heterogeneity among Chinese women produced by the revolution. Both sets of interpretations tend to confer on the matter of women's liberation an ontological status; it implicitly depends on a modernist story of linear progress that paradoxically creates a singular, ahistorical theory of both gender identities and feminism. But the troubling nature of my ethnographic encounter, taken together with postcolonial critiques in anthropology and feminism, eventually led me to a different appreciation of Yu Shifu's position and, by extension, to a new set of questions about cross-cultural gender differentiation and feminism.
Understanding why these women enthusiastically took up the language of liberation to organize their lives requires a genealogy of the meanings through which "women's liberation" gained its representational force. Crucially, the party imposed a modern functional discourse of gender subordination, one that revolved around a dichotomy of family and work, on an already existing cultural system of gender that depended on an entirely different cultural dichotomy, a sociospatial logic of inside/outside. The women like Yu Shifu who appropriated the socialist discourse of liberation did so as a way to challenge this gendered culture of space that had earlier constituted appropriate and inappropriate femininity.
To explore the cultural practices that imaginatively constituted women's liberation in China is to address the question of agency and its relationship to the discursive production of social identities. The manner in which these women workers came to conceive of themselves as revolutionary women speaks to the heart of concerns that have preoccupied both recent cultural theory and new social movements. What are the relations among knowledge, power, and action? How do people come to speak as subjects with radical political convictions? What manner of subjectivity supports political change? What is the relationship between theories about subalterns and the practice of subaltern politics?
In theorizing about these multiple concerns, I write fragmented stories in this chapter to highlight the contingency of ethnographic truths and the importance nonetheless of constructing them. Stories of modernity are consequential: not merely transparent windows on otherwise "objective," "material" reality, they?together with other practices?form that which people come to comprehend at a given historical moment as their reality. But the closure imposed on narratives in the name of modernity must be challenged. The fragmentation of the stories reflects one way in which people in China expressed their own shifting locations within postsocialist contentions about modernity. These women confounded, even as they also upheld, the hegemony of the desire for modernity in China. They made room for subtle ruptures in the state's official allegory of liberation. Their stories?and mine?simultaneously decenter ethnographic authority and deconstruct powerful narratives about socialist state power, modernity, and the figure of "woman" who represents them. If, as feminists have recently theorized, gender identity is never fixed but is rather contingent on practice, performance, and context, then the stories that follow mimic in their form how women in China enacted their radically transformed identities. In presenting fragments, I draw out what is implicit in women workers' descriptions of work. Their commentary was at times indirect; the meaning came through in the way they approached their daily engagement with work. My analysis of the meanings of liberation emerges in the juxtaposition of commentary and practice.
Decentering the Interlocutor
My encounter with Yu Shifu disturbed me on several levels. I thought at the time that an anthropologist was not supposed to argue with her informants and that therefore I had blundered. With few exceptions (Briggs 1970; Visweswaran 1994), anthropologists have rarely portrayed interactions that end in acrimony. Romantic allegories of affinity and acceptance are more often deployed. Culturally, I had stepped beyond the bounds of caring about another person's "face," which I should have placed above the desire to win an argument no matter the social relation. Moreover, I knew that in speaking out about the issue of feminism in China I was treading on nationalist sentiments born out of a colonialhistory. I felt caught and found myself stumbling into representing a West critical of China.
My heated engagement with Yu Shifu was far from being an act by a neutral observer with a disinterested curiosity about women workers in post-Mao China. The subject of women's liberation in China has perhaps been one of the most vexed questions for Euro-American feminists such as myself who write about the lives of women in third world countries. When the discussions about this particular question were most intense, I had not yet begun to write about Chinese women. Nonetheless, I was actively involved in public feminist debates about socialism and feminism that used Chinese women as our "case." I thus share the history I trace below.
It has become a commonplace that third world women have served as the site of colonial knowledge about the inexorability of "tradition" that marks the third world difference from the West. This insight lies at the heart of critiques of orientalism. Chinese women, however, played an indispensable role in debates among western socialists about the progress of revolutionary world history: U.S. feminists wrote about Chinese women as part of a counterdiscourse to the masculinist heroics of socialism. In fighting against a total erasure of women's subjectivities, they recognized a form of agency in Chinese women that inspired white, Asian American, and other feminists of color. Perhaps justly, some people have criticized these interventions into socialist politics for sharing its colonizing gestures, but feminists did not reproduce the same universalizing rhetorical strategies or homogenizing effects of a uniform world history as did socialist critiques that ignored gender.3
Representations of Chinese women divide into two periods. From the late 1960s to the mid-1970s, the Chinese woman held a special place in anglophone feminist writings. Western feminists, like male socialists, looked to China as the utopian answer to our political dilemmas. Chinese women became our heroes. Within a broader feminist framework that shifted theories of modernization to discussions of women's oppression, European and American feminists argued that Chinese women had battled the oppression of traditional Chinese patriarchy; in the vanguard of the revolution, they had fought to abolish footbinding, insisted on "free"
marriages and "free" divorces, and claimed the right to something called "work."4
This earlier romantic period gave way, under the weight of western feminists' disillusionment with the Left, to an increasing critique of women as caught in the structures of a patriarchal socialist state. Gone were the larger-than-life portraits of iron women who held up half the sky. Chastened by stories that filtered out about the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, feminists situated in the West began another revision of Chinese women's story: women continued to be subordinated by a communist state that had used ideological rhetoric to mislead them. In this version, Chinese women were still oppressed, though now by a new form of socialistic patriarchal family; socialist working conditions, far from having liberated women, doubly burdened them.5 Those women who proclaimed themselves liberated by the Chinese Communist Party were perhaps the unfortunate objects of the power of ideology. The idea that women in China had been liberated was treated not merely as the socialist state's instrumental use of women but as the state's ideological investment in woman as sign of socialist modernity. Given that the role and position of women had been of central concern to the architects of the Maoist polity, Euro-American feminists felt cruelly betrayed.
These feminist recuperations of Chinese women were essential in breaking new political ground in an international discourse on national liberation movements that had either ignored questions of gender or had implicitly addressed the colonial gaze by invigorating a masculine politics of nationalism.6 But in the latter accounts of objectification, Chinese women never rose above the generalizations about them to become subjects of a counterhistory. The problem here was not orientalist portrayals of people living in a timeless culture. To the contrary, we were concerned with the progressive movement of Chinese women in history. Rather, the problem with these representations lay in the binary divisions we utilized to forge a singular feminism: socialism versus capitalism, Chinese traditions versus Chinese socialism, and Chinese feminism versus western feminism. We made "socialism" operate as an overarching category of oppression in the same way that religion, family, or the veilhave been invoked by those speaking of women in the Middle East (Mohanty 1991).
This long history of representations informed my edgy encounter with Yu Shifu that day in Zhenfu's office. Her insistence in her analysis?shared by many other women of her cohort?that Chinese women had experienced liberation and my initial refusal of her judgment forced open a gap in these cross-cultural feminist dialogues. To disentangle the possibilities in that gap it is necessary to replace liberation's ontology with its historicity. Yu Shifu had, inadvertently, started the process of my own "liberation" from a field of Eurocentric hegemonies.7
To move in a different direction requires pulling apart the singularity of the Chinese woman and then holding that multiplicity in tension with a refusal to establish a unitary referent for what constitutes feminism. I thus turn to the cohort of older women workers as feminist analysts of the initial socialist imaginary of modernity in China. I begin with a description of the gender relations and cultural geography of silk production to establish the local meanings of femininity and labor that these women would be moved to contest.
Household Workshops
A genealogy of the multiple meanings of "women's liberation" for silk workers must begin with women's relationship to the local silk industry at the time of the revolution. Hangzhou has long been one of China's centers for producing silk. When I first arrived, I assumed that the silk industry there would resemble what I had read about Shanghai?it would be an old industry that experienced early industrialization, since the 1930s it would have been thoroughly imbricated in a global political economy, and women would have filled the factories. I believed that the gendered divisions of labor in the silk industry would be obvious. The university scholars in China who had kindly agreed to supervise my research did nothing to contradict my initial assumptions. When I expressed interest in gender and the cultural divisions of labor, they repeated a popular aphorism: "Men plow, women weave." They presented it as a natural fact of life and as a long feudal tradition. This assumption has also found its way into feminist writings in China. Unlike my university mentors, however, scholars such as Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua analyze the division as the social basis of women's subordination:
Throughout its long history, China has been an autarkic agricultural society. This form of agricultural life, with food as its basis, meant that the sexual difference in the social division of labor?that men plow and women weave?carried a certain significance of dominance and subordination. It suggested the dominant position men occupied in social production and the dependent or supplementary role of women. . . . It became one of the most basic elements of patriarchal rule. (1990:5)
The stories told me by older workers still working in Hangzhou's silk factories, both men and women, were therefore quite unexpected. They spoke of a world before the revolution and until the mid-1950s nationalization of industries in which silk weaving was the most highly coveted skill in Hangzhou and was entirely dominated by men. Indeed, silk weaving was considered exclusively "men's work" until well after the Great Leap Forward (1958?60), when women in Hangzhou were first encouraged to enter the industry in large numbers. Men dominated silk weaving, moreover, in the context of household workshops that produced the vast majority of the silk in Hangzhou. As everyone readily told me, there were only five "large" factories in existence in 1949, each with a mere thirty to one hundred workers. The elaborate Suzhou brocades, crepes de chine, and Paris brocades for which Hangzhou had gained such renown depended on the painstaking, highly skilled craft of families who generally owned one, hand-operated loom?at most, two. They organized their laboring through their family relations. These household workshops?over several thousand, some estimated?were densely clustered in the working-class districts on the east side and what is now the downtown area. Many of the older workers, both men and women, whom I met in the 1980s traced their genealogies to these family workshops. Their parents, the workshops' last owners before nationalization, had almost all passed away, but these older workers had vividmemories of learning the skills of silk production as children within their households.
Ding Zhuren, for example, the head of the Number 3 weaving shop at Zhenfu, recalls a long lineage in silk weaving from grandfather to father to son: "My father learned from his father. I am the third generation. My grandfather had the hand-operated loom. It didn't use electricity. My father's had electricity. My father was an only son. He didn't even graduate from elementary school. I have six brothers and sisters. I was the oldest. We had only one loom, but we had ten people in the family, so it was hard. My father didn't have any education. You needed that to be a real boss."
His is a tale of patriarchal descent and inheritance, and Ding Zhuren does not wonder about or reflect on this arrangement. To him, even reminiscing from the vantage point of the 1980s, patriarchal power appears natural. What strikes him now, after the repudiation of Maoism, as most unnatural is the loss of that petty capital to the state?that is, his loss, as the oldest son. Ding Zhuren was sixteen when he entered Zhenfu in 1956. Had it not been for nationalization before he had the chance to take over the family loom, he would undoubtedly have become what was later given the class label of xiao yezhu , or petty bourgeoisie.
Though only a few years from retirement when I met him, Ding Zhuren was restless. He was known throughout the factory as someone who was quick to exploit the new reforms and who chafed under continued restraints. Once, when Ding Zhuren spoke with me of his disquiet and discontent, he mentioned wistfully that had things been different, he could have been a capitalist by now. In the context of economic reform, positive talk about past bourgeois genealogies is part of the repudiation of Maoism, as the desire to be a capitalist has become a sign of daring, the site of risk, glory, individual achievement, and masculine strength. Ding Zhuren implied that Maoism had forsaken his?and by extension the nation's?latent potentialities, which one inherits through the male line.
There were others scattered throughout the silk industry who traced silk lineages similar to that of Ding Zhuren. Tao Changzhang, directorof Chunguang Silk Weaving Factory, attributes his successful rise to his silk heritage passed down from his father. Chen Shifu, whose story I tell at length below, grew up a daughter in a silk-producing household. These personal histories cast a distinctive light on the party's interpretation of gender and liberation. The cultural imbrication of family relations and work relations in a male-dominated craft?virtually the only major craft in Hangzhou?provides one of the meaningful contexts for understanding how certain women in the oldest cohort became inspired to take up a socialist discourse that provided women with a quite different gender identity.
For these household workshops produced not only silk but unequal gender relations within the family. Gender conceptions framed the contours of the household economy even as the workshop relations of production in turn gendered family members and generated positioned interests. Although men and women worked together as family, they were differentially positioned by cultural conceptions embedded in a labor process that doubled as family life.
It was the custom in Hangzhou, I was often told, to think that only men were capable of doing the weaving. The word "custom" carried shades of a normalizing practice through which specific and arbitrary arrangements of gender and labor were made to appear natural. As men's work, silk weaving was a highly sought after skill. Men who migrated from the countryside felt fortunate if they could learn the craft, for male weavers cautiously guarded their knowledge. They generally passed it on only to close relatives or those who hailed from the same native place. Jin Zhuren, head of Zhenfu's inspection shop, arrived in Hangzhou from the rural surrounds of Shaoxing (just south of Hangzhou) on the eve of the revolution, when he was fourteen. He was intent on learning a "skill," for the countryside was poor. Jin Zhuren had a connection through a neighbor in his village who, in turn, had a connection with a weaver in Hangzhou who was from the same village. Only in this way could Jin Zhuren enter the world of silk.
The "mastery" of silk weaving, according to older workers, involved not only skill but "autonomy" for men who could establish family workshops. They were simultaneously skilled artisans, petty proprietors, andheads of households. Each role reinforced the other. The possibility of autonomy rested on the ability of the male head of household to oversee the "outside" realm of the family business; that is, to interact with non-kin in the various realms of commerce in silk. These workshops commonly worked on consignment for silk stores, which provided them with the raw materials and sold the finished silk cloth to colonial importers. Given the uncertainty of the economic situation in China during the wars of the 1940s and the vagaries of the world market in silk, the male head of a silk household needed to be agile in negotiating relations of commerce. If he failed, he might be forced to enter one of the factories, bringing his loom with him. He thus represented the labor of "his" household to those in the outside world as if it were coextensive with his own person. Men in this way not only achieved a skill and a business but, through that business, they also achieved the project of manhood.
The Communist Party would develop an official discourse on women's liberation that interpreted women's lives in functional terms of subordination in a "domestic" sphere of nonlabor. This discourse would radically recast the meanings of women's place in silk-producing households. It would erase any recognition that women in these households had engaged in "laboring" activities. Older workers readily acknowledge, however, that their mothers worked in their family workshops. They did the "women's work" of preparing the silk yarn for their husbands to weave, and occasionally they even did the weaving. Ding Zhuren recalled that "my mother learned before 1956 [when families moved into the factories with nationalization]. Because she was at home. Father had to go out to sell goods. So she would turn on and operate the loom. A lot of women knew how to do this. They didn't know how to repair them."
For Ding Zhuren, as for others, the laboring activity of their mothers was not a cause for shame or awkwardness. It did not lower the social standing of their families, for their mothers engaged in silk production inside the home. Women's subordination in this cultural system was not due, as the party would later reinterpret it, to "material" divisions of labor between the "private" sphere of family and the "public" sphere of work. Instead, women's subordination on the eve of the socialist revolution was organized through a cultural topography that shaped spatial relations in terms of sexual difference. Divisions of labor were not the causal foundations so much as exemplifications of a larger cultural construction of gender.
Before turning to a discussion of that spatial topography, however, I offer Chen Shifu's story of growing up in a silk-producing household. Chen Shifu, a much admired senior silk weaver at Zhenfu, was one of the first women to enter the male domain of silk weaving in the 1950s. Her narrative highlights the different gender positionings within the cultural economy of silk production. The women and men in these household workshops did not always share a unified cultural perspective. Nor did the cultural logics of this economy always go unchallenged. Though often taken for granted, they could also be the site of conflict and gendered insubordination. Household workshops, as a node of social life and a field of power, reproduced sociospatial representations of femininity and masculinity characteristic of urban Chinese culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This specificity produced its own set of critical gendered commentary. Chen Shifu's story provides one such commentary.
A Daughter, Not a Son
Chen Shifu's is a tale about the downfall of a household workshop, and it is not in any sense typical. The tenuous circumstances of her early life thwarted the hegemony of gender differentiation in silk households. It is through just such gaps that alternative visions can slip, as other discursive practices lodge there. In Chen Shifu's story, then, we begin to discern the way in which the socialist state's production of knowledge about women's liberation was able to take such powerful hold in the imaginations of particular women.
I first met Chen Shifu on a late autumn day at Zhenfu when a rare moment of respite had quieted the looms. The lack of sufficient electrical power in the city meant that each district was required to follow a rotating schedule of halting electrical use for several hours every week.
The city government tried to spare industrial work units, but it was Zhenfu's turn, and so the usual hum and racket of the looms and spindles briefly died away. Several workers, especially the older ones, discreetly tried to appear busy, as not being occupied could be interpreted as a political stance, echoing Cultural Revolution work morality. Others were less concerned; young men dragged on their cigarettes while young women chatted among themselves. Workshop cadres tried to prove their "efficiency" by calling production meetings. I took advantage of the calm to tell Tang Shan that I wished to speak with an older weaver, as most of my more intimate contacts had been with young women in the prep shop. She promptly brought Chen Shifu over from one of the weaving shops to meet with me in the small, spare office off the elaborately stuffed reception room in what workers colloquially called the "higher ups'" building: that is, where the administration lodged itself. Workers rarely entered it; they would tell me they didn't have the qualifications to do so. When one or the other of the women from the prep shop would, on occasion, wander over to look for me, they peered awkwardly into the entrance, unsure how to conduct themselves in this unknown place. They knew no one there; to them, the higher ups, the cadres in charge of the factory, were strangers.
But Chen Shifu had none of these qualities. She entered the room with a firm gait, as if the trappings of power in the place where cadres resided contained little that could shake her. Unlike some others, she was not shy or hesitant with the foreigner. In her mid-forties, Chen Shifu was, as the phrase went, "willing to talk." Since the Cultural Revolution was still fresh in people's minds, a "willingness to talk" indicated a lack of fear of political retribution. When used to refer to women, such ability to speak up also meant resemblance to a man, for women were supposed to be inarticulate and timid with strangers. Yang Zhuren proudly introduced Chen Shifu as one of the factory's two "model workers" chosen by the city's silk bureau for the last several years because of her high productivity.8 Her "modelness" may have designated her as a person who could speak and whose speech had value, but it did not entirely determine the content of her speech. Her critique of economic reform was sharp and pointed, as was her dismissal of the qualities of cadres. They all got there through connections, she once said.
Chen Shifu and I had several lengthy conversations, as well as more informal contact thereafter. Our interactions were made possible in a multilayered network of geopolitics. Yet our conversations did not simply reflect this geopolitical territory, for we both maneuvered at unpredictable counterangles to the forces that had brought us together.
Chen Shifu identified herself strongly as a skilled master of her trade, in part because she could call upon a long history with silk. Chen Shifu, like Ding Zhuren, grew up surrounded by silk production in a household workshop and from there entered Zhenfu in 1956, at the age of fourteen. But unlike Ding Zhuren, as a young girl Chen Shifu could never expect to inherit and run the family loom. Her position as a girl but also the oldest child in the family workshop, coupled with the unexpected trajectory of her household fortunes, made it possible for Chen Shifu to rebel against the cultural economy of gendered silk work.
I asked Chen Shifu to tell me the history of her involvement in the silk industry. We sat one across from the other, at one of the cadres' desks. Her story emerged gradually. "My circumstances were rather special. I was a 'family laborer' (jiating gong ). But my pa died when I was seven. My ma was not very capable. My pa was a weaver; my ma did all the yarn preparation (fansi ) and everything. I had a younger brother; it was just the two of us. He later became a carpenter." Chen Shifu's initial comments were cursory and to the point. Containing none of the embellishments and indirection of educated elite speech, they placed people and their activities. Yet I was struck by the brief moment in which she figured her mother with ambiguous hints of criticism, for it was rare to hear someone criticize her or his parents. Our conversation meandered to the increased work pressures these days and to the unfairness of her situation: "My wages have always been a little strange. I was so young as an apprentice. I didn't even get the usual 'clothing expense.' So there's always been a big difference between my wages and others. I was an apprentice for three years. They didn't really have apprentices. I was in the household. My mother and I entered the factory. I was a household laborer, but because I was so young they treated me like an apprentice even though they didn't have any. So every time they raised wages I went up with the young workers because my wages were always lower. We didn't know before about the government documentsthat talked about raising wages, about who should get raises. So I really lost out. But I don't want to haggle over it. It's more important to do good work."
But stronger emotions emerged inadvertently, when I asked about her education. Chen Shifu self-consciously explained, "I didn't have a chance to study. In 1956, when I entered the factory, I was a little illiterate person. I went to night school then. I studied for a couple of years and can recognize a few characters. But we didn't have as good conditions then. And women were not as important then." That "women were not as important then" was said casually; the socialist historiography embedded in the comment is noticeable only in its taken-for-granted quality.
Chen Shifu's tone grew harder, though, in what she told me next. The visceral emotion in her voice as she related the losses she experienced marks the substantive weight she continues to place on these events in explaining her sense of what it means to be a woman weaver. There were undoubtedly complex reasons for the demise of her family's silk workshop. It is therefore important to listen closely to the manner in which Chen Shifu's unequivocal memories of her experience tell a story that highlights the ability of men to betray women who are ill-equipped to confront the world of outside social relations.
She continued, "My father definitely would have let me study. 'My money is enough for her to study at the university.' Those were his words when he was dying; he said it to my ma. But my ma couldn't even write her own name. She didn't know how to do things. So she was cheated out of the money by others, because she couldn't read." Chen Shifu paused, and I hesitantly pushed her to tell me the story. "Friends, who were like brothers," she said with strong feeling, but also as if the events stood on a distant horizon. "They were not my own family. They said they would take the silk cloth and sell it and give her the money. But they didn't give her the money." "Did you ever see them again?" I asked. "We still had contact with them after that. But when I was thirteen and could understand things, then we didn't have any dealings with them anymore."
Chen Shifu herself, she implied, took control at a young age and beganto order the household economy. What might have otherwise been a seamless cultural economy of gender operating through her family's workshop fissured as a result of her father's death. In the gap that opened, Chen Shifu began to glimpse the arbitrariness of gender relations that left women at such a critical disadvantage.
In her narrative, Chen Shifu casts herself as the wise and tough daughter who could have saved the household workshop had she been raised as a son or had she not been constricted by conventional femininity. Chen Shifu's tale creates a young girl with implicit desires?and the ability?to transgress gender boundaries. This young girl strains against the conventions of femininity and masculinity that keep her on the "inside" of the business and arbitrarily place men in a position of dominance. That Chen Shifu attributes these insights to herself as a young girl reveals as much about the possibilities she later found in the socialist state's discourse on women to cast off "traditional" femininity as about the circumstances that produced her desire to embrace it.
But the story of her troubles did not end here. One afternoon I asked if we could speak more about the 1950s. Chen Shifu said she was hoping to hang out her laundry to dry, since the weather was clear and she was on the evening shift. Perhaps out of politeness to the foreigner, though, she acceded to my request. Before I could ask any questions, she launched in: "It was a set rule [when they nationalized the industry] that for each loom you brought in, you could bring in two and a half people. One person who did the light, cleanup work, sweeping, pouring water, that person counted as half a person. Ma came in and did the fansi . We didn't have a main worker in our family. Ma and I were not. I counted as a child laborer. There wasn't any eldest brother and my younger brother was too young. Ma counted as a regular worker, so we made up one and a half people." The last time we talked, Chen Shifu had mentioned the presence of an older cousin in her family's workshop. Confused, I asked what happened to him. "Yeah, my older cousin counted as a worker. He was the main labor power." An oldhr cousin working in the household workshop would, under most circumstances, have been considered a member of the family. I was struck by Chen Shifu's initial deliberate exclusion of her cousin from counting toward the two and ahalf people who could be nationalized. Why had he not been part of the family history? I delicately wondered aloud if her cousin knew how to weave when he came to work in her family. Chen Shifu's story about her cousin poured out:
"My cousin couldn't do anything when he first came. He was from the countryside. Pa had called him in. He was pa's older brother's son. We were too young to help. My cousin was fourteen. It was after pa had returned from Shanghai, then he taught him. Pa was a worker in a factory in Shanghai. A big factory there. We weren't born yet. It was around Liberation. They closed the factory and gave him money. Pa rented a house in Hangzhou and bought a loom.
"He and ma married late. After he returned from Shanghai. Ma was from the countryside. They married just at Liberation. I didn't grow up in Hangzhou. Pa worked in Hangzhou by himself. After a couple of years, he brought in my cousin and ma to live there. We two kids stayed in the countryside. We lived in a small temple that we fixed up. We built three rooms and lived there.
"But after I was six, I came to Hangzhou. Labor power was tense. Pa was sick, but he was still working. I was small, but I still had to do the work. I cooked and I studied fansi, juansi (reeling and twisting the yarn). Ma had no time to do this work. Ma's mind wasn't quick. So by the time I was seven, I learned these skills. Things were tense and I was the biggest child. There was no time to study. If I had an older brother or an older sister, I coulda gone to study. Then after three years, we formed the cooperative. That was 1956.
"We weren't doing good business. It shoulda been good. We coulda done well. My cousin, we were like brother and sister. He shoulda helped us. But his conscience (liangxin ) was no good. There was planned production by then. Each month we got fifteen bolts of silk yarn. We were supposed to weave them. But you got fined if you didn't finish the work you got from them. My cousin, he wasn't willing to do the work. His skill wasn't any good besides. So we had defective cloth. If you made defective cloth, then you lost even your money to cover the costs. And the next time they gave you less to work on. So our family, slowly we had less wages. He didn't have his heart in succeeding. So cousin feltlike, let's just go into the cooperative and be done with it. Ma, she didn't have any learning to run a business. We shoulda done well. Some families did well."
As an afterthought, she added, "My cousin had a bad temper. So they sent him to another factory back in 1959. A cotton textile factory [where labor was much less highly skilled]. Now he just sweeps the floor. We don't have much contact with him."
In this narrative about her family's silk workshop, Chen Shifu crafts a story of her past in which an older male cousin, who should have acted like the oldest son, allows the family workshop instead to sink into ruin. She casts her mother as a symbol of the incompetencies of traditional womanhood. She plays the part of the wise daughter who, if she had been the oldest son, could have saved her family. In the background lie larger socioeconomic forces?in particular, the new regime's gradual centralization of production, which meant both economic stability and increasing constraints on the petty entrepreneurs who led silk households. While Chen Shifu recognizes their structural importance, socioeconomic forces are not deterministic; indeed, within their frame, the cultural politics of gender loom much larger. Chen Shifu's narrative challenges essentialist notions of homogeneous gender identities, portraying instead telling moments when desires contrary to dominant, seemingly taken-for-granted practices might arise. That the language of gender politics captures such moments has everything to do with the party's representations of women, which began to reach Chen Shifu just at the time of her story, in the mid-1950s. That discourse sparked her imagination to envision a different female subjectivity, one that came to view the gender differentiation in her household as a contingent cultural form rather than a natural artifact of fate. The socialist state's representations of women enabled, even as it obscured, what might otherwise have been a more muted and inchoate contestation to the cultural hegemony of her early life.
We might further note that male weavers?cum?household heads in the Hangzhou silk industry did not find much liberation in Liberation. For them, it was a process of proletarianization of skilled artisans. Oneformer manager who was around at that time spoke of these men as "unruly and undisciplined." With nationalization, the state deliberately redistributed their looms for others to use, trying to break their identification with private property. The older male weavers insisted on constantly checking their own looms, refusing to accept the state's erasure of the link between loom, property, and manhood. Most retired early; a few stayed; a few became managers, as the relational boundary between "women's work" and "men's work" shifted; and a few of the younger ones joined the radical faction in the Cultural Revolution, still protesting their lost manhood.
Inside / Outside
Chen Shifu contested the boundaries of female respectability that constrained her "inside" her family's workshop.9 Yu Shifu, in contrast, never found herself presented with the chance to achieve respectable femininity. Yu Shifu and other poverty-stricken women were forced to work "outside" in Hangzhou's few factories. On the outside, they found themselves on the other side of the border of respectability. The shame of their activity lay not in the labor itself but in its location. Only gradually did I come to realize how a cultural topography based on a dichotomy of inside and outside critically informed the meaning of liberation for women already located in factories. Their shame, or lack of social virtue, served as another central site for inducing ardent political convictions about socialist liberation, though not entirely in the state's terms.10 Shame is not easy to recall or embellish on. It surfaced only indirectly and in brief moments in women's narratives about life prior to the revolution. To grasp the import of what are necessarily fragments of stories that evoke shame, it is necessary to consider the cultural meanings of inside / outside that produced a loss of social virtue.
Inside / outside is a pervasive cultural construction of space embedded in implicit social knowledge. It is a doxa, or cultural schema (Bourdieu 1977), whose simplicity lends itself to multiple renderings. This cultural binary is not unique to silk-producing households or to Hangzhou. Itapplies more generally to relations between those within and those outside of kinship networks, as well as to relations between villages, nationalities, people of different native places, and even, since 1949, between work units. I came across this doxa in almost every aspect of life. People would say of those not from Hangzhou that they were "outsiders." Government organs, such as the police, refer to their organization as "inside," in relation to the public outside. The "foreign affairs office" of the local university?most work units also had one?is literally the "outside affairs office." It deals not only with foreigners from abroad but with anyone who is outside of, or does not belong to, the university. Internal or "inside" documents (neibu ) are documents that anyone not of the government organ that issued them or at a certain level of party hierarchy is forbidden to read. Those who are skilled in a particular craft or excel at a certain type of commerce or are up on the latest fashions are known as "insiders" (neihang ), while those who don't have the same knowledge are "outsiders" (waihang ). And, of course, when cadres would not allow me to do something or go somewhere, they would say, "You know, there's always a line between insiders and outsiders."
Strikingly, by the 1980s this cultural dichotomy of inside / outside did not map onto gender. Only once did I hear a very senior professor introduce his wife as "my inside person" (neiren ). Yet, prior to 1949, this spatial distinction was gendered in its conception and application.11 Conversely, gender categories were spatialized. Such gendering of space was, in turn, given cultural weighting through class hierarchies. These mutual imbrications suggest the cultural force of inside / outside distinctions prior to the revolution in differentiating the boundaries of social respectability.12 "Respectable" women of the gentry and urban upper classes had the means to remain inside the bounds of kinship relations. Working-class women and poor peasant women were more vulnerable. Yet they too struggled to remain inside, for such a location defined female subjectivity. Transgressing the historically variable border of inside / outside, then, meant the loss of full female personhood within one's kinship world, which is to say within one's social world. As Margery Wolf aptly puts it: "Only women who had gone out of the family and were therefore outside the rules of respectability appeared openly in thestreets. These were the beggar women, the slave girls, the prostitutes, the vendors, the servants. Few women, no matter how close to starvation, made the decision to go out easily, for there was no going back" (1985:12). In turning to the fragmentary stories that follow, we need only add to Wolf's list women factory workers before the revolution.
Yu Shifu would, on occasion, walk me back to my place in the weft preparation shop after lunch, with a combination of care and gentle surveillance. Ten years had passed since Yu Shifu had left this space of production activity that is gendered female. In a gesture half playful, half serious, Yu Shifu once took up a place on the line, her old place. This is how we used to do it, she instructed. Then she deftly bit off the ends of a broken silk yarn and retied it all in one motion, working so quickly I barely caught the act with my eye. She became absorbed in her task, demonstrating how it was done all by hand and teeth in those days, not with the pair of wide scissors that young men nowadays hang from their ear and women more discreetly place in their work bibs. One of the young women standing alongside of me murmured, "That's why they say we silk workers 'eat' silk food." Yu Shifu's performance, her show for us, evoked a sense of the long distance from the recent past, of memories at once nostalgic and alive, of the inseparability of the heroics of labor and its bitterness in the early 1950s, when the meaning of one's position as a woman worker underwent a revolution?a liberation for some, like Yu Shifu. Her actions hinted that the signification of her labor power lay not just in the task but in its creation of her as a particular gendered subject.
We are strolling in the Hangzhou Botanical Gardens, Yu Shifu and I. The end of winter is near, but the air is still brisk and the famed flowers and blossoming trees that once drew Song dynasty painters to this spot and currently draw hordes of tourists have yet to appear. That morning, Yu Shifu had invited me to her home for lunch. As Yu Shifu's husband is an army X-ray technician, they had recently gained the privilege of living in the army compound, in the wooded hills on the west side of West Lake, not far from the famous Buddhist temple, Linyin. Yu Shifu was proud of how far she had risen; she wanted to show off her newhome to me. She had not realized that foreigners were forbidden from entering army areas.
When I arrive, she hurriedly meets me at the gate to explain, with much embarrassment. We eat at the temple and then spend a desultory afternoon in the gardens, located just beyond the army compound on the other side from the temple. Yu Shifu is chatting volubly about her daughter's recent wedding. Her daughter is one of the assistant accountants at Zhenfu. Yu Shifu is especially pleased with the enormous amount she has been able to give her daughter as wedding money to buy furniture for their new home and to go on a honeymoon. She then waxes eloquent about her comfortable home, with its trees all around and the nearly free hot water; the high wages that she and her husband together bring home; and the latest soap opera she and I are in the midst of following. Her relative rise in status and success still strike her with wonder, and she draws me in to share her pleasure.
I press her to go back and remember for me the beginnings of her life in the silk factory. Yu Shifu's tone and mood change perceptibly. She becomes more reticent. There is nothing to be proud of here, at least not in the early years. Later, I will take her reticence itself to be significant, because I will have seen it in others who spoke to me about pre-Liberation times. It reveals how the party's official stories of liberation effaced particular kinds of shame attached to women, but in such a way that the memory of that shame could never turn into the heroic tales of class suffering that workers would learn to tell. Yu Shifu passes on a quick sketch, lacking the embellishment she has just given to her family's current glories.
"I began [working in a silk factory] when I was ten years old. Before that, I had grown up in the countryside. Then, because Japan had invaded China, everybody was fleeing from them. We fled to the city. To Hangzhou. But it was hard to find work, so we fled again to the countryside. My father died when I was only six. My mother had to go out to work then; she became a maidservant and took care of someone else's children. Then she met my stepfather and married him. Then we moved to Hangzhou. Of course, a stepfather is never the same as a father. So I decided it was best to go out and find work.
"I found a job through friends. In those days, it was like that. A friendof yours worked in a factory?they were all small factories in those days, with only a few people. We had to light candles and bow to our boss. That's all.
"We were all silk reelers. It was all by hand then. We put the silk thread on the wide frame and turned it and then the silk thread turned onto the shuttle. It was very bitter, then. You couldn't produce much, in one day, maybe only a few ounces. Now you can produce several hundred. Then they began, after Liberation, they began to have the machines and the work was partly by hand, partly by machine. You pull the thread out of the cocoon, that's by hand, but then you connect it to the machine.
"My mother didn't work in the silk industry; she stayed at home, looking after my younger brother?the child she had with my stepfather."
Yu Shifu was forced, by the winds of history blowing her family back and forth, to go out to work as a child. She must go out, even as her mother has found the means to come back in. Though she quickly turns the conversation to the challenges of the technology, one can discern in her narrative the tacit allusions to the enormity of her movement to the outside and of her mother's movement first outside and then back inside. Only severe disasters?a large-scale war over empire, the death of a father?could have compelled her to take this step. Such a journey marks not merely functional movement through space but an enormous cultural transgression that brings dishonor and devaluation. The degradation of having done so exists at several registers in the narrative?as implicit social knowledge so obvious it needs no further elaboration, as submerged fragments in her party-inspired political convictions that offered a divergent interpretation of the originary causes of women's oppression, and as a still dynamic sentiment of discomfort with the implications of the shame.
We are walking down the alleyway leading off from the front gate of Zhenfu. Yu Shifu, Tang Shan, and the young assistant to the factory's party secretary are accompanying me in search of new shoes. We are laughing about the large size of my feet compared to those of Chinese people; they warn that I might not find anything that fits. They are right.
This begins a discussion of Chinese women's feet. "In the past," Yu Shifu intones, "women bound their feet because it was thought to be beautiful." "Was it really thought to be beautiful?" I inquire. The young man avows that it was. Yu Shifu turns the conversation into another lesson about liberation. "Also, they did it to keep women in place so they couldn't run away." The others erupt into laughter at her exegesis, but Yu Shifu becomes earnest. "It's true. Women weren't supposed to go out; this way they couldn't rebel. Now women are liberated, they can do what they want. Women go out to work."13
Here, in a more humorous mood, she was willing to talk about the issue of women going out of the appropriate social sphere.
I am conducting a formal interview with two older women workers at Zhenfu: Yang Wanfen, head of the trade union, and Si Zhaoding, head of security. Si Zhaoding's name means "beckoning certainty," an optimistic name for someone born amid the chaos of the Anti-Japanese War. Si Zhaoding is a short, tough, wiry woman with a smoker's cough and black shadow under one eye that made her look like a boxer who didn't shy away from a fight. It was unusual for a woman to be head of security. Si Zhaoding had a local reputation. Just the year before, a young man from Zhenfu threatened to kill his girlfriend for having rejected him. He wrapped a bomb around his body and planned to throw himself on her. Si Zhaoding went to his home and talked to him through the entire night until she had talked him out of it. This event became a story of heroism in the local news. Si Zhaoding traces the "bravery" and "frankness" that she says make her suitable for security work back to the 1950s. Yang Wanfen is taller, rounder, and softer than Si. They both appear more versed and less hesitant in telling their stories of suffering before Liberation than Yu Shifu. Both had come from Zhuji county to work as child laborers at Zhenfu before Liberation. They entered the factory together in 1947, at the age of thirteen: "That was old for child labor." Most of the workers were child laborers then, they explain, "because capitalists wanted to make more money." They came from the countryside: "Country people know how to 'eat bitterness' and work hard; that work was a real hardship." Most of the work was reeling, and so almost all theworkers were women. Yang Wanfen did reeling, but Si Zhaoding, because she was so short, was assigned straightening-up work. Each had family already working at Zhenfu, who served as their guarantors?Yang's mother and Si's father's sister.
They stress the exploitation: the virtual lack of wages for children, who received only small material goods; the unconscionably long work hours?"The roosters called us out of the house and the ghosts sent us back in"; the literal pain of the work?"The water was so hot in the reeling that the skin on your hands softened and then fell off in pieces"; and the constant surveillance of their activities?"We couldn't go out of the factory. If a relative came to visit, we talked to each other through the window."
Yet they also emphasize the specific hierarchies by gender. Everything, it seemed, was distinguished by male and female. Wages were set by gender, no matter which tasks women and men performed. The four-level scale of wages established the relevant categories: skilled, male, female, child. "Even men who swept the floor received higher wages than women reelers." The food at the factory also distinguished among levels. "The women's rice and vegetables were the most inferior." They recalled that the male workers had four dishes and a soup; the women only a few dishes of old vegetables. The skilled personnel ate from ten dishes while the high-level management had dishes they could order prepared especially for them. For year-end bonuses, male workers received two month's wages while women workers received objects, such as rings.
Only at the very end did they touch on the shame of women going out to work, and only in answer to my direct question. Here, I found the same reticence as Yu Shifu had shown: a brief answer, no elaboration. "If the family had means, of course they didn't let women go out to work. Only if they were very poor." The emphasis was on the word "out" rather than "work."
Men with authoritative voices are more willing to elucidate the source of this shame. A retired teacher from the Zhejiang Silk Institute has kindly agreed to speak with me. Zhao Junshan, a rotund, ebullient manin his late seventies, speaks without fear of castigation for giving information to the foreigner, though he was formerly labeled a small capitalist. But his experiential knowledge of silk from before the socialist revolution has become a desired object in the post-Mao state. He has been resurrected to save the industry from its Maoist excesses. Zhao's class label has been transformed into new symbolic capital.
He enjoys reminiscing, and I warm to him. His life is filled with the adventures of the silk business both before and after the revolution. In his narrative each of his experiences is iconographic, as he sweeps their import into historical forces larger than himself. His early beginnings in the business were in a silk store in 1925 at the age of thirteen, in his hometown of Shaoxing.14 Silk handicrafts formed the backbone of the local economy of this area from Shanghai south of the Yangze River along the coast. Except for Shanghai, the rest of the area depended on small workshops and stores and peasant families that grew silkworms in the surrounding lush countryside rather than on any large-scale industrialization.
These beginnings become lessons in the class innocence of youth, before the revolution. "I was young. But I had an idea. When I first entered the store, I bowed to the god of wealth and then to the boss, saying 'Master' (Xiansheng ). I then had an idea. Even though I didn't know how I was to make money, I thought the master was extraordinary. I wanted to be a great master. A manager. I envied them. I wanted to be well disciplined, honest, have means and a skill. I didn't know at that time that if you open a store you exploit people, I didn't know about this Marxism."
Zhao eventually opened his own silk store, in Hangzhou, after the Anti-Japanese War (1937?45). It was a risky time to open a store, as Hangzhou was in the midst of recovering from wartime chaos. Inflation and instability threatened the silk industry, which was highly dependent on exports. Attached to Zhao's store was a small factory, with twenty workers. I ask if there were any women workers in the factory. "No, no women workers. Preparation work was done at home. No women came out to go to work. If a woman went out to work, nobody wanted her." When I press for an explanation, he offers an aphorism: "Women fallinto the factory like a horse falls on the battlefield." I press for more, getting closer to the source of the shame. "If a woman fell into the factory, it was the same as an injured horse. Nobody wanted her."
What Zhao means is that nobody wanted these women as a respectable marriage partner. They were damaged goods, no longer sexually virtuous, because they had transgressed the appropriate sexual boundaries for where women should work. Again, it was not the fact of their labor but its location. These women were vulnerable to the gaze of male strangers, which was enough to sully any claims to being virtuous women. Women who worked outside in factories were placed in the same category as other "fallen" women. They were, as one person said, just like "broken shoes," a slang term for prostitutes. Their shame was sexual. After all, Zhao said, this was not the "sin city" of Shanghai, where anything went, where women could work in factories because all manner of "sin" was going on anyway.
Another authoritative man confirms this view. Professor Wu of the history department at the local university reels off a brief history of Hangzhou's silk industry for me. Then he comments about conditions before the revolution: "Workers' lives were very bitter, especially women workers. They did reeling in a big factory, where it was extremely hot from the water they soaked the cocoons in. They did everything by hand; there was no machinery. Their work was arduous. They wore undershirts and shorts. When I went to look inside the factories in the early 1950s, we didn't dare enter because we were too embarrassed to see these women."
It was that male gaze that shamed these women.
Inside/outside as implicit social knowledge of space is not homologous with dichotomies that oppose "family" or "domestic life" to "work" or "public" life. Women's inside activities were not construed primarily in relation to motherhood or to "housework." In contrast to an American middle-class cultural dichotomy of domestic versus public, inside/outside was not based on a misrecognition of activities within the household as nonlabor, or as arising from women's psychological propensities to nurture. None of those involved in either household workshops or inthe factories spoke of their relationships with their mothers in terms of the quality of emotional caretaking or the amount of attention they received. Some of the women who had been child laborers freely admitted being sent to the countryside to live with other relatives without portraying it as a time of lost mothering, or alternatively as a lost childhood.
While women's activities inside family workshops were not construed in terms of American white, middle-class notions of domesticity, neither were they cast in opposition to a category labeled "work." Ding Zhuren and others readily acknowledged that their mothers labored in preparing the silk yarn or operating the loom; the femininity and honor of these women and their families were not challenged by such activity.
Lou Shengzhi confirms this interpretation. Lou Shengzhi is known locally as "the woman capitalist," for she is the only woman to have owned and managed one of Hangzhou's silk factories prior to the revolution. She is a slight woman in her sixties, with vital, expressive eyes. The first time I speak with Lou Shengzhi, I express my curiosity about how a woman in the 1940s came to run a silk factory. Lou Shengzhi responds that her "old man" (i.e., her husband), then a wealthy silk entrepreneur, gave her the means to do so. But what, I want to know, did people think of her as a woman running a factory. There was no problem, she quickly asserted, because in managing the factory she was inside her home. Lou Shengzhi and her family lived inside the factory, in rooms located above the shop floor.
Unlike the gender segregation described for women elsewhere (Abu-Lughod 1993; Boddy 1989), the inside space of the family, at least for urban entrepreneurial families, was not demarcated into separate sexual spaces. It was a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with men connected to them through familial ties, thus making such social interactions appropriate. It was heterosexual rather than feminine. Social space outside of the family, by contrast, was marked masculine. The resulting opposition was one of heterosexual versus masculine rather than feminine versus masculine.15
The cultural construction of appropriate femininity and masculinitythus framed activities of labor, but not in the manner that the state's discourse on women's liberation would later pose. Work outside in the few factories that existed in Hangzhou before the revolution was fraught with shame and dishonor for the women forced to engage in it. These women workers' continuing need to cast narratives of their past in terms of force?that only historical, familial, economic, or other powers beyond a self-respecting woman's control would induce her to enter a factory?underscores the extent of the shame. The source of that disrepute, however, lay not in the work itself, either the general activity of labor or the particular tasks?in this case reeling and preparation of the thread?to which women were assigned. That is, it was not the idea that they were women who worked that marked them as "fallen horses" or "broken shoes." Rather the disgrace lay in its social location; the factories pulled women outside the social spheres where proper women maintained their femininity. The social location of work shifted the terms of their femininity. Being outside, in factories, turned them into women whose sex was a matter of humiliation. This shame, as evidenced in the men's comments as well as in the women's continued reticence, operated through the way that men such as these, who had no familial connection to the factory women, could nonetheless gaze upon them.16
Even as gender became normalized through this configuration of space, space was naturalized in terms of gender. This cultural schema of inside/outside did not merely describe social space but made it meaningful. Gendered subjects were constituted as they moved through spaces marked as appropriate or inappropriate. Inside/outside was not a template imposed on already sexed bodies but created the sexual markings of those bodies. Women and men achieved their gender identities as they moved in this cultural schema. But once women lost their virtue by stepping into a factory, there was, as Wolf remarked, no turning back.
From "Broken Shoe" To Liberated Revolutionary
1948: The Anti-Japanese War has drawn to a close and the People's Liberation Army is fighting the Guomindang regime, backed by the UnitedStates. Liberation, it will turn out, is only a year away. The Chinese Communist Party is preparing for its entrance into the cities from its bases in the countryside as a prelude to establishing a new state. Central to this preparation is the creation of a socialist imaginary that would legitimate this new state. Crafting such a visionary politics depends on an interpretation of women as active subjects freeing themselves from history:
Women, who form half the population, have played a big role and have become an indispensable force for defeating the enemy and building a new China. . . . The central task in woman-work is to organize women to take an active part in production. . . . [I]n some districts conscientious care has not been given to eliminating the survivals of feudalism which hold women back. . . . The attitude of valuing men and despising women handed down from the old society, all kinds of constraining feudal customs, especially the economic dependence of women on men and the handicaps of not excelling at all sorts of labour and even despising it, have obstructed the rapid realization by women of the rights already granted to them in law. . . . [A]bove all they must be made to understand fully the importance of labour and must look on it as glorious [emphasis added].17
Labor. Production. The new China. The old feudal customs. These elements coalesce in the document quoted, one among many on this topic, all designed to bring into existence the new revolutionary woman. The concrete, pragmatic tone of these powerful pronouncements evokes an epistemology of scientific realism that almost allows us to forget that this was a specific?and revolutionary?mode of representation, one that made socialist sense out of the oppression in women's lives. The revolution was made out of the barrel of a gun, but it was also made through socialist realist metaphor: a functional metaphor that made "productive labor" the definitive mark of a fully social being and the standard for measuring human worth. This socialist production of subjectivity only partially replaced the previous system's evaluation of humanness according to kinship relations. If, until recently, this logic of a political economy of labor has appeared translucent and rather acultural, it is only because we have forgotten the sense in which Marx's critiquewas also testimonial to a revolution and therefore was a form of cultural praxis.
In Chinese Marxist discourse, "work" (laodong ) was constructed as a new cultural category: it became equated with "productive" activity, which in turn was defined as activity that produced surplus value for the state, acknowledged with a wage. Certain activities and not others became valued as work. Activities confined inside the family became either signs of the feudal constraints that held women back from liberation or petty-bourgeois (i.e., nonproductive) labor, privatized and therefore opposed to the interests of the state. This functional metaphor of production versus home created a radically different cultural framework for evaluating Chinese womanhood. It led to a certain interested "forgetting" of the sociospatial metaphor of inside/outside that had so recently produced appropriate and inappropriate femininity.
In this revolutionary discourse, the new Chinese woman, along with the new China, was constituted as a subject who, through production, freed herself from the "tradition" of feudalism and stood against imperialism. The party thus told a new story of women's lives, one that made some truths transparent and erased others. It did not speak of the shame of sex in laboring inappropriately. It invented a tradition of feudalism that was ahistorical and erased women's agency in the past, as well as any sense that they had labored previously. Yet it also enabled Yu Shifu and many other women already laboring in factories to speak what had previously been unspeakable, in the sense that they had had no words to speak it: the bitterness of being female in a world where the spatial location of their labor led to shame. The socialist realist version of women's lives enabled a pervasive critique of what had so recently appeared an inevitable aspect of social life, an analytical skill that the oldest cohort of women workers would never lose. The promise of the revolutionary dream that would free women from the oppressiveness of gender itself?this promise is what Yu Shifu's and other older women's memories of their liberation captured for me.
The socialist discourse on women's liberation would soon become the official and dominant one, institutionalized through numerous active methods. Ongoing cultural work to make this discourse appear to be atransparent description of gender rather than a normative representation included "thought work" (sixiang gongzuo ) to encourage women to speak this narrative themselves. Older women workers recall that shortly after the new state was established, activist party members came to their factories to explain what "women's liberation" was all about. They learned to speak it in their literacy classes and in the political study sessions that were frequently held in the evenings after work. They saw it in popular theater productions and movies and heard it on the radio. They heard it, too, from the neighborhood committees formed to establish socialist order in the cities. The state Women's Federation also organized numerous activities that addressed women and told them how their liberation was a formative aspect of the new nation. Women were not merely the grounds of this project, the means through which a new China was to be born: they may have been the objects of this discourse on liberation, but women needed to become active subjects speaking this discourse for it to constitute a new social reality. Through narrative performances of women's liberation, a small group of women workers first came to participate in this particular mode of knowing reality. In narrating their newly acquired political convictions, they reshaped the meaning of their past as part of a collective reordering of memories.
The fundamental irony lies in the way that this new political construction?and regulation?of appropriate and inappropriate female agency in terms of "freedom to labor" felt most liberating to those already laboring in factories. Yu Shifu and the other women shamed in the factories were the most enthusiastic "voices" of this new discourse. Yu Shifu was liberated not to labor but to reposition herself as a woman worker. These new social categories of class provided a small group of women workers with the agency to shift the terms of pride and shame, to invert the social bottom and top, and to transform the foundational assumptions of gender that had established the meaning of their positioning "outside" in a silk factory. Their gender identities transfigured from "broken shoes" who had transgressed the appropriate cultural borders of gender to revolutionary, liberated women?indeed, they could become political models. They were no longer fallen women unfit for respectable marriage but working-class exemplars, heroic in their labor.
Their very gender transgressions marked them as courageous women. They were an active sign of the utopian socialist imaginary. Yu Shifu, Si Zhaoding, Yang Wanfen, and other women workers quickly joined the party. They became ardent participants in producing a discourse of women's liberation through labor that, in turn, produced them as new kinds of women. Within this metaphysics of labor, they could nearly forget their shame.
The party's cultural and political reconstitution of femaleness was also liberating to a few young women, like Chen Shifu, who chafed under the hegemony of gender differentiation within household workshops. It allowed her as well to take up a subject-position that could challenge the male domination of silk production. Chen Shifu and all those who labored in household workshops were eventually organized by the Central Silk Bureau, first into cooperatives and then into the factories. By 1956, she found herself laboring alongside Yu Shifu and the other women already in the factories, though a different class trajectory had brought her there. These women not only embraced official state feminism but were galvanized by it to exceed the initial terms of its discourse even as they spoke and acted through its categories. They began to challenge the gender differentiations of labor in which men had claimed weaving as their domain. Women like Chen Shifu crossed this border to become weavers, but not at the behest of party cadres. She described this process as a battle, a struggle involving great determination on her part. The battle was not against state power, which was on her side in this one. The fight, Chen Shifu said, was against the "conservative consciousness" of the male weavers, who refused to pass on the secrets of their knowledge and skill to women. To describe the male weavers as having "conservative consciousness" was, of course, to use the new language of liberation. She remembered, "Even my cousin was not willing to teach me. I had to study myself, and to 'beg' the men, but I had to show that I had some ability."
Chen Shifu's story traces the contours of a heroism in which she and the other women who joined her, including Yu Shifu, went to great lengths to engage in the most strenuous, most exhausting, yet most "skilled" work in the factory. Recall that silk weaving was thought tobe highly skilled, and not simply in relation to the other tasks of silk production. In Hangzhou in the early 1950s, silk was the only industry around?and thus virtually by definition it was the most "advanced." Their entry was a conscious transgression of gender boundaries, a heady moment of challenge to a male dominance that they now had a language not only to describe but to expose as contingent and crafted rather than transcendent and immutable. The customs of silk weaving that had so pervasively fashioned Hangzhou's social world and had made the replication of past gender relations seem natural and seamless were suddenly placed in a novel temporal framework. The new language of liberation led these women to interrogate the hegemony of customary ways of living and to "sentence" those customs to a temporality in which the past would now be superseded by a teleology of the future.
The transgressions that enabled them to inhabit liberated identities taught them, moreover, that becoming one of the new revolutionary women was a matter of activity, not of social location. Judith Butler (1993) has argued that the materialization of sex emerges in a matrix of differentiating relations in which gendered subjects are produced by way of performative reiterations of powerful norms. The group of women who shed their shame in the creation of new political convictions about gender materialized their sex in the discursive practices of state-defined labor. They performed new gender identities in the transformed meanings of that labor.
Through disjunctions, refusals, bitterness, pride, laughter, reflexive commentary, contradictions, and a heroic display of hard work, Yu Shifu and Chen Shifu marked their gendered, generational histories of class. Their stories show us that "Chinese woman" is not a fixed identity but is shifting, multiple, and subject to change. Attempts to create a dialogue along only one axis?for example, class, family, or sex?obscure this multiplicity, which exists not just as differences between Chinese and western women but as differences among Chinese women.
In this liberation, there was a simultaneous marking and erasing of sexual difference. Official discourse did not simply address these women workers; it led them to set in motion the performance and narration of an altogether different gender identity. Chen Shifu and Yu Shifu werewomen doing the weaving, and in the fact of their gender lay their liberation. But they were not doing the weaving as women. Their transgression was part of a larger process that would later redraw the boundaries of what counted as "women's work" and "men's work." But for this generation, the embrace of a class position appeared to make femaleness irrelevant to the one marker that counted?"work" itself. In negotiating the gendered terrain of liberation, the oldest cohort's stories speak to but also go beyond recent feminist theoretical assertions that "woman" is not an essentialized locus of experience but a shifting subject-position not reducible to any essence (Butler and Scott 1992). The transformative dislocations in their lives reveal multiple meanings of liberation and thus of woman. But they also lead us to entertain the possibility that at certain historical moments and in distinct places, "being" a woman is not relevant.18 Real liberation could be found in that irrelevance, for a time.
A Woman Capitalist
Yet not all women were liberated by Liberation. Official feminism and the heroics of labor transgressions may distinguish the gender identities of this oldest cohort of women workers from those of the two younger cohorts, but cohorts are not uniform. Members neither have a unified agenda nor think of the challenges of femininity in exactly the same way. There are other stories about the changing cultural meanings of gender at the time of the revolution that do not fit neatly within the dominant discourse that authorized what counted as liberation for women. Put another way, the novel foundational discourses of women's liberation operated through differential and exclusionary means, disqualifying some women?and certain activities?from becoming the subjects of a liberated womanhood.
Perhaps the person I gained the most insight from in this regard was Lou Shengzhi, the former owner of one of the major silk factories in Hangzhou. I had heard of her by chance one day when I went to interview the party secretary of the Fudan Silk Weaving Factory she used toown. In offering me the official history of the factory in its transition from capitalism to socialism, he mentioned the "woman capitalist" who had run the factory and still lived around the corner. There were only a few capitalists in Hangzhou's barely industrialized silk industry before the revolution. They were all locally famous, the "woman capitalist" among them. I eagerly requested a meeting with her and he reluctantly agreed. Over the next year, I often visited with Lou Shengzhi and enjoyed long, leisurely conversations with her in her home.
I had initially assumed?given the official histories I heard in all the silk factories, as well as what I already knew about socialist state politics?that she would tell me a story about her struggles with having been labeled a woman capitalist . As you will see, Lou Shengzhi did sometimes talk about her bitterness at having to take up that identity under socialism. But she also led me to recognize the ways in which I had been stereotyping her as a capitalist. Hearing her stories about the gender challenges she faced, I began to think about her as a woman capitalist. She opened up for me an appreciation of the gender politics that had led to her capitalist activity. I came to ask a new question: What kind of gender constitutes a capitalist?
Lou Shengzhi told a story specifically highlighting a gender politics of marriage that disrupts and challenges the homogenizing discourse of socialist state feminism. The heroism she portrays in her gender transgressions does not fit the parable of capitalism and socialist modernity that others try to tell about her. Her story is positioned eccentrically in relation to the dominant discourse, which brushes past and partially occludes its powerful import. She nonetheless disrupts the official norms of gendered knowledge, offering possibilities for conceiving of other heroisms in reconfiguring gender identity. I hope, in the way I tell her story below, that I honor how Lou Shengzhi led me to join her in going against the grain of the stories told about her.
The first time I spoke with Lou Shengzhi, two cadres from Fudan's party committee insisted on accompanying me to her home. Lou Shengzhi would confide, much later, that because Fudan's party representatives had never formally apologized to her for their treatment of her during the Cultural Revolution, they were particularly concerned aboutwhat she would say to a foreigner. She remarked, with satisfaction, that my visit prompted them to say at last, "We wronged you."
Fudan's cadres, Lou Shengzhi, and I sat in her two-room courtyard home crammed with layers of objects that silently spoke about the various periods of her life: prerevolution bed and armoire of dark red wood, Singer sewing machine, bright new refrigerator, and various knick-knacks. Then in her mid-sixties, Lou Shengzhi was a slight woman with vital, sparkling eyes and a severely hunched back. She told a fairly conventional story that day, with much officious interruption by cadres she had barely spoken with in the fifteen years since she had left the factory.
In 1949, just before the Communist Party came to state power, her husband, who already owned and managed a silk store, bought Fudan from the man who ran the Bank of China; the seller wanted to get rid of some of his holdings and sold it cheaply. It was one of only five existing silk factories in Hangzhou. Her husband knew very little about the production aspects of silk and a previous factory he owned had gone bankrupt. He wanted to buy a luxury home by West Lake, but she insisted he buy a factory. She ran the factory while her husband ran the store. Her determination turned the factory from a losing venture into a success. After the revolution, the state reorganized the factory. Her husband was appointed the manager, she the assistant manager, and her husband's cousin, who was a silk "insider," became the factory director. At first, they still owned the factory, working the raw material that the newly established state-run silk bureau distributed to them. But times were so hard that they cut their own salaries in half, also making a gesture to show workers they had the right attitude. The silk bureau, impressed by her skill and attitude, appointed her to be the accountant after the factory was nationalized. Though workers complained, she instituted a successful system to keep a close accounting of the production process. In 1965?she had no need to clarify, especially in the presence of these cadres, that this year was the prelude to the Cultural Revolution?she was sent down to work in the weft preparation shop. Former capitalists?actually she used the term sifang , or "private persons," as a euphemism for her class label?were no longer allowed to work in the administration. She learned prep work quickly and after only a shortperiod was able to do all the different kinds of spinning in the shop. Originally she was afraid of how difficult the work would be, but after she went to work there, she saw that it was fine. She also learned a great deal about how workers' lives were different from her own. In 1971, at the age of fifty-one, she retired (early and in anger, she would later tell me, before the Cultural Revolution had ended). Currently, she was helping one of her sons manage a dry goods store that he opened in Hangzhou.
That was the story she told that day. As I sat there, I felt like I was only a marginal participant in the conversation, listening while the important and indirect communication was taking place between Lou Shengzhi and the party. She was telling the party committee that she only ever did what was needed, that she respected workers, that she was willing to do whatever was demanded of her, even spinning thread on the shop floor, and, by the deadpan tone in which she recited the story, that she had no feelings about the past. I was, frankly, disappointed and bored. Like the workers, Lou Shengzhi had been brought to speak a class-inflected narrative about her life. She had been taught to express public humility about her class background and to demonstrate that she had undergone a change of "consciousness" about class. I was certain (but felt it inopportune to ask) that she had been "struggled against" during various political campaigns aimed at individuals with bad class labels. Of course. That was why the party cadres were there, to make sure I avoided those questions.
Over the weeks and months that followed, however, as Lou Shengzhi told me a story about her life that had a quite different gender inflection, I came to realize the importance of having first heard this more-or-less official story. It was not grumbling about mistreatment that made the contrast between the two kinds of storytelling so vivid. Rather, her subsequent narrative amplifies how her first story normalizes her identity by excluding and foreclosing the gender challenges whose transgressions, from her perspective, propelled her to become a capitalist. Lou Shengzhi pulled her resources from several overlapping cultural frameworks?namely, a system of filial piety, polygamous marriage, and capitalism?to formulate oppositional commentary, barely audible from theedges, about sexuality, gender, and the construction of political knowledge.
Filiality
Filiality in China is often described as the domain of men. It is the reason men live with or near their parents, and the reason it is so important for men to have sons. Sons carry the family line in this patrilineal kinship system and thus fulfill their filial obligation to parents and ancestors. They must also support their elderly parents. Women marry out; they must help their husbands carry on their husband's family line by giving birth to sons. Families that give birth only to girls are said to have experienced tragedy. But Lou Shengzhi inverted the gendering of this cultural logic.
My mother and father had only one child. Mother couldn't have any more. Father had a wife before, but she died. He was already forty-five when he married my mother. He regretted that he had no son. But then he decided that daughters and sons were the same .
As Lou Shengzhi spoke of her family background, I was struck by how she placed a tale of her very unusual life trajectory in a conventional cultural form of respect toward her parents. Her story could have been a parable about gender paradoxes, about how she flouted the proprieties of the period. Instead, she utilizes the conventions of filial piety and places herself in an obeisant position within them. She respectfully attributes her ability to blur gender identities to her father. Hers is a tale not of rebelling against customary parental strictures but rather of fulfilling them. Thus her father supported her later studies at the university, when such education was unusual for women.
I studied music at Nanjing University. There were only two or three women students in each school. My father had progressive thinking. He said that women must have ability (benshi). Otherwise, if their husband turns out not to be good, there's nothing they can do about it. I also wanted to study. But after my marriage, I had to throw out my music .
I thought, as Lou Shengzhi continued her story, that she was describing in effect how she became a surrogate son for her father. Her father wanted to ensure that his only child, his "son," was properly educated and trained. Since this son would need to marry a husband, it was all the more imperative to provide her with the means for becoming self-reliant. Lou Shengzhi attributes much prescience to her father in his thinking about husbands. In effect, she makes him the wise and learned father who foresaw her life. It seemed to me that Lou Shengzhi, in turn, assumed the responsibilities of a filial son.
Father worked in the Salt Administration. First he was a teacher in a family; the head of the family was in the Salt Administration. He saw that my father had ability, especially with foreign languages, so he asked him to come work in the Salt Administration .
The Salt Administration, which oversaw the collection of taxes on salt, was one of the key ministries of the Republican government.
Father had money in the bank, %20,000 GMD [Guomindang] money [one yuan equaled approximately thirty-five cents before the war]. Then with the Anti-Japanese War, there was chaos. My father's money was worthless. You could only buy a few socks with it .
In telling a story of the dramatic misfortunes of her parents, Lou Shengzhi presents herself as "naturally" pulled by filial desires to follow the course she pursued within the constraints of gender.
I married because I needed to care for my parents. Originally, we could live well off the interest from his [her father's] money. But suddenly, there was no money. So I had to go out to work. But there was a problem with going to work. Women were like flower vases, you had to be like that with the boss. But I wasn't willing. The best work was to teach, but that was not enough to support my parents .
Listening to Lou Shengzhi slowly unfold the story of her marriage, I realized that it was largely about reluctance. Only because disaster facedher parents did she consider this step. Sexual harassment?the requirement to "be like that" with the boss?and the lack of remunerative work for women also forced her down what she implies is a road she wished she never had to take.
Lou Shengzhi told me these details about her life not long after our first meeting. I had pressed for further explanation about how a woman in the 1940s had managed the unusual feat of owning and running a factory. For some time after that, I took Lou Shengzhi's story about her reluctance to marry as indicative of a culturally appropriate response of many women of her time, though not all, toward marriage (Silber 1994). There were some who told me otherwise. The elder Lius, for example, loved to regale me with memories of their passionate attraction for one another. They pulled out photos to show me what a beauty Liu Bomu had been as a young woman, as if to explain why Liu Lao couldn't help his sexual desire for her. But they also told their story to me in a tone that delighted in the brazenness of their open acknowledgment. For many young women at that time, too forthright a display of interest in men and marriage was considered socially unacceptable. Thus, I did not think Lou Shengzhi's story particularly remarkable.
A Tale of Polygamy
But I was curious as to the whereabouts of her husband. Occasionally, she would mention that her "old man" had been by, and that she had told him about our friendship. That surprised me, because she seemed to be living just with one of her sons and at first I had assumed her husband had died. It was only after we had known one another nearly a year that she unexpectedly offered me the rest of her story. One day, she said she was ready to tell me.
He already had an old lady. His mother made him marry her. He didn't want to. She agreed to let him marry again if he married her. He pursued me; he went up to my college for me. I had one condition. I love my parents. I said he must live with my parents. I was the only child and wanted to look after my parents. At that time, they didn't used to have this, a daughter having her parents live with her. He agreed .
This is a story of love: her husband's love for her and her love for her parents. In Lou Shengzhi's telling, her husband's relationship with his first wife was one of obligation; with her, of romance. She hardly resembles the conventional image of the second wife, or concubine, as a beautiful plaything acquired to enhance the status of the man. She demands proof of her husband's love and threatens his status by insisting on a form of marriage that only poor men usually agreed to, a uxorilocal marriage whereby the husband moves in with the wife's family (Wolf and Huang 1980). Of course, to this day her husband goes back and forth between the two households of his two wives. Still, Lou Shengzhi reverses the established conventions of polygamy. Her marriage would usually have been a matter of shame for women of her class, signifying a loss of status for her family. Instead, Lou Shengzhi transforms it into a narrative of her unusual bravery. She uses the accepted prescriptions of filial piety as the source of her strength to challenge the strictures of polygamy.
Shortly after the revolution, her husband wanted her to flee to Hong Kong with him.
He said he wanted to go to Hong Kong. He wanted me to go with him. I had four children. He wanted only me to go, also his mother and the other one [i.e., his first wife]. He only wanted me to go because I was able to help him with the business. I wanted to take all of my children and my parents. He wouldn't go if I didn't go. So we stayed .
Lou Shengzhi resignifies her experience of the socialist revolution, stressing not its meaning for her as a capitalist but its role in revealing her husband's devotion to her, his second wife.
Lou Shengzhi had four children in rapid succession. Then she insisted that she and her husband buy a factory for her to run, so that she could continue to care for her parents and raise her children.
My husband owned two silk stores, one in Hangzhou and one in Shanghai. He wanted to buy a house next to West Lake, but I told him we should buy a factory. I told him that the factory he had before went bankrupt because he didn't get involved closely in the production. My husband didn't want me to go out to work. He said I would only be a flower vase, a showpiece to attract business. My father got angry. He thought all my studying should not go to waste .
In the version of her story encouraged and managed by Fudan's party committee, Lou Shengzhi had emphasized her husband's importance in buying the factory. Here, she changes the description not so much of herself as a capitalist but of the politics of marriage that led to her becoming a capitalist. And the details of capitalist investment that she now offers emphasize her independence from her husband.
Some of it was my husband's money, but I had money. I sold all of my dowry. Jewelry, real pearls, gold. Some women like to save their money, to satisfy their small pleasures, but I don't care for that. I thought I should make a living. What are small pleasures? I thought I needed to study a skill. My husband's part came from Li Daoshi, a wealthy Buddhist monk who had money given to him by people who wanted him to pray for them or build statues of gods for them. He was a good friend of my husband .
Her husband should not even have been given credit for his portion of the investment.
I only wanted to be together with my parents. I never had anything to do with them [i.e., her husband's family with his other wife]. If I had money from this factory, I could raise my family . Zili gengsheng. Popo [mother-in-law] thought I was capable. She said, "Her parents don't eat up our food for nothing. None of her other daughters-in-law lived with their mothers. Only me. I gave her money. She said, "No one else does this. Even my sons don't give money to me." She told her children I gave her money .
Lou Shengzhi mixes in contemporary official language?zili gengsheng , or "self-reliance"?to describe herself. Yet from the official story of her life she wrests and disposes of the idea that her husband was a key figure in the factory, either in its purchase or its management. Running the factory herself is critical to her inversion of conventional stories about second wives. Buying the factory, for Lou Shengzhi, was both a continuation of filial piety and a way to distance herself from the potentially demeaning status of second wife.
And she was no plaything:
I was never like the other wives with their cards, poker, and dancing. I wasn't willing to learn. If you learn to dance, then after marriage, your husband "eats vinegar" [i.e., gets jealous or gets cuckolded] .
She reiterated this point in another conversation:
Women like to chat, gossip, play cards, eat at each other's homes. They spend their money on little things. Like in Dream of the Red Chamber [a famous eighteenth-century novel of a wealthy gentry family]. I don't like that. They said I was aloof, that I thought I was too good .
Engendering Capitalism
Many times, Lou Shengzhi spoke to me about her anger with the socialist state and with Fudan's party members for their treatment of her and her children. Her list of grievances was long. Speaking of problems with her health, she once said, "My trachea tore open during the Cultural Revolution. It tore open out of anger." She also attributed her hunched back to working so hard in the prep shop during that time. Her children never had opportunities for education because of her class status; they had to scatter to various "remote" areas. The government never fully reimbursed her for her capital investment in the factory; the factory's party cadres never admitted any wrongdoing until they had to speak to her about my visit.
Since the state began to introduce capitalist means of acquiring wealth, the party committee has sought out her knowledge. "They asked me to write down my methods. I said they are too old. They asked me to write down my experiences. I said I forgot." A few years before we met, Lou Shengzhi had become a Christian, and perhaps that gave her a way to grapple with the pain of her past. Sometimes, she said, she used her Christian forgiveness to overcome her animosity. But her Christian desire to forgive continued to war with her anger.
Yet alongside this bitterness, Lou Shengzhi offered a different commentary that implicitly challenged the gender politics of the party's inscription of her into their critique of capitalism. After my first visit, Lou Shengzhi took great pains to correct the party's placement of her as subordinate to her husband. Eventually, as the story I have already told makes clear, she also challenged the socialist pretense that her class status as a capitalist grew out of a monogamous marriage. The party had long championed monogamy as one means to liberate women from "feudal" marriage arrangements and after the revolution prescribed it in the socialist constitution.19 Party members had embraced and fostered monogamous marriages as part of an Enlightenment project begun in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Socialists and nonsocialists alike advocated a thorough cultural revolution to strengthen China in the face of imperialism. They had viewed radical transformations of the Chinese family as critical to modernizing Chinese culture. The end of polygamy would free women, they believed, but it also would help poor peasant men acquire a wife. In the countryside, the party explicitly ended polygamy as part of a larger campaign to challenge wealthy elites. Party cadres in the cities, for reasons unclear to me, merely insisted on the appearance of monogamy when men had more than one wife.
Recall that shortly after the revolution, before the nationalization of industries, the Central Silk Bureau had appointed Lou Shengzhi's husband to be the manager. They did so because the ownership of the factory was technically in his name. She became the assistant manager; their valuation of her in relation to her husband was marked by the lower salary she received. This ironically reinscribed the kind of subordinate relationship through marriage that Lou Shengzhi had taken such pains to subvert.
My husband didn't pay attention to the factory at all. I took care of everything. He had two stores. He took care of selling the goods once they were produced. He didn't understand the factory business. He depended on me for everything .
As she explained during another conversation, "The concrete work, he didn't do any of that." The success of the factory, both before and after the revolution, was due to her initiative.
I didn't know anything, but I was determined. I did it "with one heart and one mind." When the weavers talked, I listened carefully. I often went to the workshop and listened to their analysis. Then I finally understood "the talk of the profession ."
Lou Shengzhi changed her name when she acquired the factory, to get rid of the flowery and feminine connotations of the characters in her name. She chose a masculine-sounding name.
Originally, my name was Shengzhu. I changed it to "zhi" because "Shengzhu" didn't sound good for going out and doing business, it didn't have boldness. "Shengzhi" means to succeed at things, to conquer all .
Eventually, even the party had to recognize who was really in charge.
In 1956, of all the capitalists, I was the only one whose wages they increased. The others had their wages cut. They made me the accountant and they sent my old man to another industry .
The party's portrayal of the "woman capitalist" obscured Lou Shengzhi's narrative of herself as someone who set into motion particular transgressions of gender that led her to capitalism. Everyone involved at Fudan in the early years surely knew of her marital circumstances, which could hardly have been a secret. I can only guess that in the aftermath of the revolution the party decided, discreetly, to ignore her situation and act as if she were monogamous. In so doing, the party glossed over the importance of her imagination and initiative in addressing a politics of gender they suppressed. But they, too, showed a certain degree of imagination in deciding to treat Lou Shengzhi as if she had a modern socialist marriage and family. In 1986 the neighborhood committee awarded Lou Shengzhi with the title of "the five goods household" in recognition of her sterling family life.
By gendering capitalism, Lou Shengzhi led me to appreciate the kinds of struggles that are barely discernible in any of the multiple meanings of women's liberation in China. She does not simply fail to conform to a unified project of liberation for women of her cohort. Her tactics formaneuvering the gendered obstacles she faced are the fugitive methods of someone whose project never opened into a larger agenda for women. Her own story has no public life, despite her reputation as the "woman capitalist." By offering her story to me, however, she refused to fully accede to the official stories about her. Her critical perspective helped me to think through the unexpected connections one should always seek among gender, class, and political convictions that challenge hegemonies of power and knowledge.
Stories of freeing oneself from the confines of patriarchal households, inverting sociospatial cultural logics that defined female virtue, challenging the male dominance of silk weaving, and surmounting a polygamous marriage by way of capitalism, as well as my own story of repositioning my previous political convictions?these liberation narratives could not have been told without a modern socialist revolution or international feminism. A small group of women from the oldest cohort felt "hailed," to borrow a term from Althusser (1971), by the discursive power of the socialist state because of the unprecedented possibilities it extended to them. They spoke enthusiastically as subjects of the new state, even as?or perhaps precisely because?its version of women's liberation effaced the alternate meanings liberation had for them as women already working in silk households and factories. Others, like Lou Shengzhi, nearly lost the capability of narrating her version of liberation, caught in the storm of class struggle. And as for myself, I learned to topple the figure of the Chinese woman as she had been conceived by U.S. feminists, with our modernist aspirations, in dialogue with a Chinese state reaching for a postcolonial modernity.
Together, these liberation stories reveal the specificity of cultural imaginations that shape the longing for modernity. They indicate precisely how these cultural imaginations are forged within global networks of unequal power and how they are also located in time and space, in culture and history. Then, too, they rupture the referential solidity of modern imaginaries, which rest on allegories of gender. For the multiple meanings of liberation cannot be contained in a singular, homogeneous master narrative of modernity. We find instead the articulations of particular histories formed in the phenomenal existence of desires for modernity?desires that motivate western feminism no less than the Chinese state. The long legacy of colonial dynamics has reached down into these transnational investments in modernity, as a socialist state speaks back to the West and western and Chinese feminists speak back to Chinese state power. But these women's stories reframe that dialogue. They reveal the ongoing but shifting process of pursuing agendas of modernity in the conjoined histories of "East" and "West." And the gaps that they disclose show the historicity of transcendental claims for modernity and feminist theory, as well as of the changing gender meanings that have accompanied those claims.
Yu Shifu's analysis, along with the others', makes possible an engagement while simultaneously breaking down the dichotomy of western self/non-western other. This dichotomy continues to inform certain "dialogical" versions of experimental ethnography. A somewhat cartoonish description of that dialogue posits a unified and coherent self, usually male, meeting a unified and coherent other, usually male, and the two, as representatives of their respective cultures, finding a common ground. It might have been possible for me to construct such a narrative. In the factories, at least, male managers encouraged me to take up a position as honored western expert and talk with them, one "man" to another, about how "we" in the West think about efficiency and productivity. They were alternately perplexed and worried that I wanted to spend so much time with the women. "They have nothing to say," they would invariably insist. "They don't understand very much." As Trinh T. Minh-ha has noted, "Difference is not difference to some ears, but awkwardness or incompleteness" (1989:80). Yet these "inarticulate" women taught me how to reconceive the meaning of liberation. In so doing, they ultimately led me to see the imaginary quality in modernity, which rests so intimately on categories and meanings of gender. Yu Shifu and others were not "informants" but analysts and producers of feminist discourse in their own right. They were interlocutors with whom I might, in fact, disagree.
My deconstruction of liberation feminism in light of their stories has made it more difficult, I hope, to approach Yu Shifu, Chen Shifu, LouShengzhi, and other women of the oldest cohort as unreflexive recipients of state ideology with a "contradictory consciousness" (Gramsci 1971) apparent to the western observer. They are not, in fact, in that sense ideologically constructed at all. Their interpretation of liberation leads us to the insight that "women's liberation" is not a state of being that, once achieved, exists suspended outside of time and space. It cannot claim an ontological status as such, or a "metaphysics of presence" (Butler 1989; Derrida 1974; Kondo 1990); nor can the modernity that rests on such contentions.
The manner in which women workers of the senior cohort came to conceive of themselves as revolutionary women reveals the power of political narratives to produce activist subjectivities. By enabling women to render as arbitrary the gendered meanings of inside/outside, the functional discourse of liberation generated political convictions?not for all women, but for those women who could then leave behind in the hazy shadows of "feudal custom" their inarticulate shame and frustration as women. Their liberation from that shame?their ability to conceive of themselves as unmarked by their gender?led this small group of women to become staunch proponents of the new regime's ultimately exclusive power to construct gender difference. It led them, as well, to embrace a broader teleology of modernity that shaped their experience as one of linear "progress" toward a coherent future.
To younger generations of women, this oldest group came to represent the hegemony of official feminism. Feminists in post-Mao China have argued that the dominance of this liberation discourse excluded and foreclosed a gender consciousness for women (see Barlow 1994, 1997; X. Li 1990; Meng and Dai 1990). Certainly Lou Shengzhi's story bears them out. The most important political challenge, in their view, is to reconceptualize themselves as women. Their argument is analogous to feminist critiques in the United States that have pointed out how the domination of the women's movement by white, middle-class women continues to exclude other gender projects. As we will see in considering the younger cohorts in China, the dominance of this liberation discourse is precisely what they will perceive as in need of challenge in order to rediscover how their gender should be marked. Their rebellions consist,however, not in rejecting modernity as their goal but in recasting its deferred enchantments.
The oldest cohort, too, has lived through the rejection of Maoism in the post-Mao reforms. As these women became marginalized by new imaginaries of modernity, their stories of liberation held but a faint echo of their former power to inspire. These tales exist instead as nostalgic traces in the clamorous insistence on a market economy that will finally, many hope, bring China to the threshold of a modernity globally recognized as such.
Continues...
Excerpted from Other Modernitiesby Lisa Rofel Copyright © 1999 by Lisa Rofel. Excerpted by permission.
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