We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Women's Work and the Politics of Homespun in Socialist China, 1949-1980.
- Authors
EYFERTH, JACOB
- Abstract
For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spend a large part of their waking hours producing cloth and clothing. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful of labor and raw materials, and because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state and that all rural people were supplied with rationed machine-made cloth. This article looks at the reasons for the long survival of handloom cloth. These include the ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and with a gift economy that prescribed the exchange of cloth at major life cycle events, and the existence of interlocking scarcities (of grain, cash, cotton, and cloth) that forced rural people to sell their cloth rations and make their own cloth from whatever cotton they could scrape together.
- Subjects
CHINA; CHINESE textiles; CHINESE women; COTTON textiles; HANDLOOM industry; HANDLOOMS; RURAL industries; CHINESE history, 1949-; HISTORY; WOMEN'S history
- Publication
International Review of Social History, 2012, Vol 57, Issue 3, p365
- ISSN
0020-8590
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S0020859012000521