Technology and gender: fabrics of power in late Imperial China.

By Francesca Bray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. xvi plus 419pp. $50.00 / cloth; $19.95/paperback).

Francesca Bray's book on gender and technology in China from the Song until the late mid-Qing is structurally three substantial and to some extent separate monographs, set in context by an introduction and rounded off by some general conclusions. The first 'monograph' looks at the interactions between late-imperial Chinese domestic architecture and gender relationships, with the conceptual focus on 'seclusion'. The second examines gender roles in textile technology, especially that of silk, suggesting that men tended over time to take over much of the weaving previously performed by women; and that social valuation of the economic contribution made by the work of women fell in late-imperial times, counterbalanced by a rising emphasis on their role in bearing children. The third reconstructs late-imperial Chinese medical technology relating to reproduction, whether to facilitate it or prevent it, and places this analysis in the context of a discussion of the contemporary Chinese conceptions of 'motherhood' and the proper roles of a 'wife'. All three are interesting, important, and conceptually elusive domains of inquiry and Bray deserves the thanks of historians of Chinese society for bringing them to our attention.

The core concepts informing the work are stated to be that "technology is a form of cultural expression .... and plays a key role in the transmission of ideology," and that "technologies that define women's place and roles are not marginal but integral to these historical processes" (p. 369). Readers will have their own view of the validity of these positions. My own is that they capture only a part of the truth, albeit an important part, but that economic and other pressures external to an established pattern of gender relationships can often quite rapidly transform a situation. To make this concrete, let me quote part of a Qing-dynasty poem (my translation), Guo Jiuhui's Farming Family, which was written in the later seventeenth century and probably refers to northern Zhejiang province. A farmer has told his wife and two young sons that they are going under economically. Only if all of them work in the fields have they a chance to survive:

Hearing this, his wife gave a sigh. - A sigh long drawn-out and rueful. But out of her startled spirit there emerged a determined excitement. So now her hair is dishevelled, and both of her feet are shoeless. She does not make herself up any more, as she did when staying inside.

Instead, through the middle part of the day, she wields the hoe and the plow, And totes tubs of manure on her carrying-pole during the hours after. Since her younger son doesn't yet possess this sort of physical power, He seats himself on their ox's back, and directs him out to the pasture.

The wife is out and about in the wind. Out under the rain and the heat. With nothing but patches to baste together her tattered jacket and trousers. Her farmer husband bustles around, fired with fresh vigor and speed, Busy non-stop, turning over the furrows, and getting weeds rooted out.

Neither begrudges, not one nor the other, transforming their sweat-drops to grain. What makes them suffer is 'cutting the flesh merely to doctor a sore'. Their burdensome toil, in my humble opinion, is bitter and distasteful, But the sting of the whip on the debtor's back is even less easily borne.

The modem reader applauds their successful joint struggle; but maybe Guo is arguing that it should never have been necessary in a well-run society. Be that as it may, he is clearly applauding her too, and her family-saving economic input, whatever he may think of society and the government. It is my personal guess that some at least of the technologies of production became to some degree degendered during the Qing, under the pressure of economic necessity, as here. And note how easily the farmer's wife leaves the 'seclusion' of her former life indoors. None of this means that Bray is wrong, but just that the situation is more complex than she allows for. There is a tension: the famer's wife ought to have been inside and not farming, but her choice to come out and do so is seen as the right one under the circumstances. On page 376, there is, it is only proper to add, a partial modification of the main thesis of the second monographic section: namely, while "changes in textile production" did increase "female separation and dependence," it was not "a universal feature" of the culture to "discount ... women's work." But this is something of an afterthought, I feel: there should be an attempt to establish where the balance lay between the two tendencies, if two tendencies there were.

My only quarrel with the view that the "technologies that define women's place and roles are not marginal but integral to these historical processes," which contains an important point, is that, as stated, it is too absolute. There were quite a number of technologies practised by both men and women, including agriculture (according to region, period, and particular circumstances), weaving, and gathering mulberry leaves for silkworms, just to take some obvious examples. We are dealing for the most part with tendencies and emphases, rather than rigid compartmentalizations, and this flexibility is an important characteristic of late-imperial Chinese society. Thus the late-nineteenth-century gazetteer for Jiaxing prefecture (in the lower Yangzi valley) tells us that in the seventh lunar month, "the busy month," "[people] plant wheat and beans, care for the mulberry trees, and build the threshing-floors, children and women working fiat out." But the compilers think the fact worth noting, which is in itself worth our noting. One poem in this same gazetteer speaks of "the women transplanting the rice-shoots in the fields, and the men doing the irrigating," while another poem that follows has the men doing the transplanting, and the women pulling out the clumps of sprouts from the nursery field. So there were limits to the sharpness with which a technology, or as here a sub-technology, 'defined' a gender role. Nonetheless gender distinctions were indeed made. When the time came in Jiaxing for draining the paddy-fields dry so that a crop of wheat could be planted, the gazetteer informs us that "one tells the women and the serving-boys to take it easy for a while."

On page 375 Bray gives as one of her main conclusions that the "late imperial period saw the steady spread of patrilineal practices and values to all social classes," complemented by "a strongly patriarchal form" of neo-Confucian morality, while a contrary "philogynistic philosophy" was "at best ... intermittent." This takes us into issues too complex to be dealt with easily here, but let me illustrate the problem by pointing out that the enormous late-imperial rise in the cult of and award of state and social honors to 'virtuous' women, especially faithful widows, both embodied an inculcation of what might be called 'patrilineal' values into women (which fits well with Bray's formulation), and also at the same time opened a domain of socially approved disobedience to parents, parents-in-law, and senior male kinsmen under certain circumstances (which doesn't fit, though this negation in its turn requires some nuancing).

It is also important to note, in broad support of Bray's thesis about long-term change, that the nature of the kind of virtue officially approved may have changed to some extent. It is not easy to imagine by Qing times the request submitted for an honor for the faithful widow from the Wu family given in the Song Digest (p. 1688, again my translation and emphases) in the year 1092:

She married the commoner Wang Ling when she was 23 [western years of age], but he died within a year, leaving her alone with a son. Her elder brother wanted to marry her off [to a second husband] but she wept and would not agree .... She lives [now] at Huangchi-bei, and every year in the slack season for farming she personally leads several thousand farm laborers to repair the dike, and the irrigation [system], and [safeguard] the benefits from the fields. Across the whole area, the people of the county obey her commands, and I beg for the especial award of honorific insignia.

True, she was a general's daughter, but here she is being commended both for virtuous disobedience and taking a public leadership role, to some extent of course one may guess as a replacement for her deceased husband. In Yuan-dynasty Hangzhou the gazetteer mentions without censure that in the parklike

surroundings of the West Lake, "during spring and summer men and women assemble together, and no day is without music and singing" (Song-Yuan fangzhi congkan, p. 6580, my emphasis). Something indeed did happen to undermine this robust and much less gender-biased attitude in the Chinese elite as the second millennium proceeded. When, in the sixteenth century, Wang Yangming, the great philosopher, wrote a complimentary epitaph for a Guiyang lady whose husband was constantly away from home travellling, he observed that "she dwelt in the women's apartments regulating both internal and external affairs" (Guiyang shizhi, wen wu, p. 232, my emphases). I would urge that our sense of the change ought to be anchored in concrete examples like this, partly because trying to interpret the texts forces both author and reader to confront the complexities and the ambiguities both of representation and 'reality'. The first two sections of Technology and Gender give sadly few such items (if any), and Francesca Bray is sinological scholar enough not to have to limit herself in this way.

Turning to the texture of the work, it is broadly fair to say that the first two sections are essentially reflective reviews of recent Western and Chinese literature, with only fleeting coverage of the Japanese. They do not represent a systematic personal encounter with Chinese primary material. The almost complete absence of any use of local materials, notably from traditional prefectural and county gazetteers, is a pity because China was full of variations, and if one wants to test the probable validity of any theoretical hypothesis then looking at what co-varied with what is an essential part of the process. It would be interesting to know, for example, how much weight was laid on 'seclusion' and the segregation of the sexes, which is not quite the same thing, in different parts of China. The gazetteer calendar of annual events for Jiaxing, for instance, notes that on the second of the second month "most women go out for a trip," that on the third of the third "the women escape to the outside, which is called 'escaping into the blue-green [of nature]'," and on the fourth of the eighth, when the ritual of washing the Buddha's body took place, "men and women eat vegetarian food and all gather together." These passages may suggest an element of seclusion (note the term 'escape', though a good deal depends on how one interprets it, and also that the gazetteer compilers pick on women's outings as deserving of gender-conscious entries), and at the same time no essential taboo (since the gazetteers were very proper, normative, and official publications) on women venturing into the world outside the house, or even mingling in public with men on certain occasions. Did such social attitudes vary across space in China, and, if so, does this variation correlate with any differences in domestic architecture? This is the sort of insight that becomes inaccessible if China is treated, in terms of method, as a more or less undifferentiated whole, and local materials are left unexamined. These strictures emphatically do not apply to the third section, which opens up some very interesting new Chinese material on reproductive medicine, and where local aspects (though they no doubt existed) are also of minor importance to the main themes.

Finally, at the general level, it is often not clear when Bray is talking about representations and when about reconstructed 'realities'. On page 257 she says of Philip Huang's view that "the commercialization of the Chinese economy in the late imperial period increased the involvement of all family members in production, including women," that this "may seem to contradict the arguments that I have been making about marginalization, but it does not, for Huang is talking about the facts of economic activity, and I am interested in its representations." This remark comes as something of a shock to the reader who will up to this point - or so I would imagine - have seen representations and realities as being presented in the discussion as having moved more or less together in this regard. Long ago (see the reprint in my Another History, p. 100) I suggested that increased female involvement in farmwork may have been an important component in keeping the Qing economy afloat as population rose in the last centuries of the empire, and I would regard Huang as most likely being correct. If there was, however, a marked contradiction between the trends in 'facts' and in representations during this period, then analyzing why this could have happened is of central importance, but it is not attempted. Bray's conclusion (p. 272) is simply that the "veiling of the material value of women's work and woman's loss of status as active contributors to household tax payments provided fertile ground for acceptance of popular doctrines on male domination and female subordination." But were they so veiled? In fact it is not difficult to find representations from Qing times that do not fit well with the 'marginalization' hypothesis. An example is Dong Hongdu's Complaint of the Weaving Wife (reprinted in Another History, pp. 46-7, my translation) where we see that, faced with economic disaster,

Her husband wants to urge her on, / But has no heart to do so, and stands mute / Beside her loom.

She chokes down her tears and

Consoles herself that they have done / Better than those next door, / So destitute, that once they'd sold their loom / They'd had to sell - their son.

One heck of an important contribution is she making! The crucial point, however, is not that such counter-examples 'disprove' Bray. They don't, being essentially interesting, stray, anecdotal snippets, though fairly easy to find. The point is that she does not ever look systematically at the range of the representations that do not conform to her hypothesis and work out where the balance between them and those that do back it is likely to lie. She does indeed mention Zhang Luxiang (p. 249), and deals with him well, but sidesteps the implications of his appreciation of women's economic contributions by, in effect, dismissing him as "remarkable." It is also only partly true to say that "men weaving or women tilling the fields were deeply disquieting occurrences, because they were the signs of a world turned upside down" (p. 243). Yes and no, as I hope was shown by the poem cited at the beginning of this review. The whole analytical problem here lies in how to treat that 'and'. Bray says that "when a member of the male elite ... noticed women working in the fields he saw it as unnatural" (p. 5, fn 4), but, put thus strongly, we have seen from the Jiaxing gazetteer that this generalization is too sweeping. Note, too, for reference later, that in Du Hongdu's poem, it is still the woman who is weaving and that from some earlier lines, not quoted here, we learn that her cloth is destined for the market, to pay rent and taxes.

Each of the three main sections also deserves some specific comment:

The section on the construction of domestic space has some fascinating material on the psychological roles of such features as the ancestral shrine and the stove, on the relative absence of "spaces designated specifically for eating" (p. 74), and also on designs thought to be lucky or unlucky. The main analytical conclusion, though, is that "the institution of female seclusion became more widespread and more systematic as commoners were ... drawn into the practices of neo-Confucian orthodoxy" (p. 169). The problem is that it is never made clear what 'seclusion' means. In the introduction it is referred to as "strict physical seclusion" (p. 4), whereas in the section conclusion (p. 172) there is the much more nuanced statement that "the inner chambers were secluded but not cut off from the wider world: the importance of the boundary was that it was neither fixed nor impermeable." Elsewhere we are told that "the spatial location of their work reinforced women's segregation from men and from the disruptive pleasures of gossip with neighbors" (p. 132). But "no[t] all decent women were continuously cloistered, for ... certain duties took a wife outside. It was not uncommon for peasant women to work outside the house at times" (p. 132). But upper-class women may have been prone to rickets, presumably because "strict seclusion" led to a lack of exposure to sunshine (p. 350, fn 39). Bray also recognizes that women in the country attended theatrical performances (p. 145). She cites with approval Dorothy Ko's excellent remark that "domesticity and purity were more contingent upon a woman's moral intentions ... than on her physical location" (p. 141). It thus becomes difficult for the reader to form any clear idea of what 'seclusion' is meant to mean, and in what respects it may (or may not) have increased.

My own feeling for the matter is that - yes - there was a long-term shift in late-imperial China towards constraining women's movements, and that it was expressed in part by - for example - the post-Song spread of footbinding (which of course never made it south past the Hakka line or into the lowest levels of society), or by the practice of the most fanatical 'faithful widows' from Ming times on (but not, I think, before) of virtually immuring themselves in a closed room, and as far as possible never showing their faces, while they passed the remainder of their days in a sort of living death. What I am not so sure about is whether there was any clear architectural concomitant of this shift. Let me add at once that Bray at no point asserts that there was, and yet the logic of her argument surely suggests that there ought to have been.

It would seem, though, speaking personally once more, that there was a constant tension between socially approved seclusion and the determination of most women to get out and have a good time. This can be seen in a poem by a somewhat sadistic moralist, Hu Ben, The Blaze of Beauties. He describes how how over a thousand of the jaded women of Xiangtan city in Hunan province, with no productive work (he says nastily) except embroidering flowers - unlike their sisters in Liuyang and Anhua who spun hemp or plucked tea-leaves - rushed off to see a theatrical performance, "struggling forward shoulder to shoulder like sheep being herded along." When they got there, they sat high up in fancy but inadequately modestly curtained boxes looking down over the throng. This immoral behavior engendered "a miasma of sexual enchantment and vapors of seduction" to the point where an enraged God of Fire sent the Wind God and the Candle Dragon to bum down the multi-storeyed theater boxes in retribution. Many of the women spectators were burned or had limbs broken, or were "treated with disrespect" by "wild city youths." Some of them then hanged themselves in shame. (See the Qing shiduo, pp. 950-1.) In other words the women here, who were fairly well-to-do if we can judge by the jewelry they were said to have lost, lived on a knife-edge: they were determined to get out to see the show, but were obliged once there to observe a sort of not very effective portable purdah; and when disaster struck some of them felt they had to commit suicide. To bring her topic fully alive, the author should have shown us something of this unpleasant neo-Confucianism in its pietistic conflict with human impulse.

The key theme of the 'monograph' on fabric manufacture is that "by the end of the Ming, weaving of all but subsistence homespuns had become essentially a male task" (p. 175). This was probably increasingly true of silks, though I would have tended to pinpoint the early eighteenth century as the date. The underlying reason was in all likelihood the rapidly rising price of silk yam, pushed by the demand for exports and the taking over of most production, from the stage of weaving on, by the so-called 'account houses', a phenomenon described by Hatano Yoshiro and Yokoyama Suguru in work published in the 1960s. Even so, there is something of a problem. Some late-ninetenth-century local gazetteers for silk-producing areas, like Jiaxing, go on saying that women wove. Often this is in the form of quoting an earlier edition, and it is not unreasonable to to suspect these remarks as having something of the nature of a crystallized cliche, but other sections were updated (such as those on water-control projects) and there were no less than seven revisions of the Jiaxing gazetteer between the early sixteenth century and the 1879 edition. It is likely this can be paralleled elsewhere. Caution may perhaps advisable before dismissing these descriptions too lightly.

What baffles me, though, is that Bray often talks about 'weaving' when what she would seem to mean is 'the weaving of silk'. Thus, "the complex changes in the textile industry ... by and large displaced women as weavers" (p. 237). No evidence is actually provided to show that this displacement also applied to cotton, the fabric in the late-imperial age for most everyday wear, though there is some reason to suspect that it did in parts of the north. But if we are only talking about silk-processing areas, we are not talking about China. Let me stress that I am not saying that Bray is wrong here, or even partly wrong, but only (1) that I don't know about cotton for sure, (2) that - for what it's worth - the handful of Qing-dynasty poems on cotton-weaving in the Qing shiduo anthology (pp. 208-9) all refer to women, and (3) that she doesn't make an explicit documented case.

The third section is important in that it underpins from a medical angle the growing scholarly awareness that the late-imperial Chinese must have had a variety of effective methods of birth-limitation (including infanticide in this category, which is conceptually incorrect but pragmatically justifiable). The fact that they must have is obvious if one considers as an ensemble (1) the virtually universal early female first marriage in China, mostly around the (Western) age of 17, (2) the mortality rates implied by most reconstructed life-tables, (3) the birth rates implied under these conditions by an unrestricted 'natural' fertility, and (4) the actual rate of growth of the historical Chinese population under the Ming and Qing dynasties. Bray's most important contribution here is showing some part of how this birth-limitation was probably done, and fitting the techniques into the context of Chinese women's ideas about the functioning of their own bodies, notably an obsession with regular menses. She also draws attention to "the generosity and understanding shown toward women in medical theories of fertility and in the laws on abortion" (p. 335), and uses this as a point of departure to demonstrate that "flexibility of reproductive maneuver was restricted to high-rank women" (p. 336). This section (apart from some very minor errors like the conversion of Chinese years of age) is of high quality.

Overall then, the first two 'monographs' are perhaps better thought of as being to argue with than necessarily to agree with, though the disagreements can I think be fruitful. The third is valuable without more than some minor reservations.

Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies Institute for Advanced Studies Canberra ACT 0200 Australia