Women Till and Women Weave: Rice, Cotton, and the Gendered Division of Labor in Jiangnan

Abstract: Composing roughly 40 percent of the total Chinese population, village women were the linchpin of the thriving rural economy in late imperial China. This article addresses the question of women's work by reassessing the millennia-old "men till and women weave" trope, which asserted that farming (or the outer sphere it represented) was improper for women. It argues that, despite being marginalized or even eroticized in male-centered narratives, many women in Jiangnan China's economic and cultural center sweated in the fields and swiftly shifted their tasks for the family or market needs. Specifically, men dominated the more lucrative, more recognizable, and, in many cases, less arduous tasks in rice cultivation, while women significantly contributed to other tasks in the rice paddies and dominated cotton farming. Such a gender division of labor was affected less by biological factors or gender norms than by a combination of the physical property of crops (especially if the crop invites animal traction), the labor market, and a constantly evolving gendered narrative. In addition to self-conscious scholarly records of the gendered labor regime, much of the research relies on an original use of 891 criminal cases in the First Historical Archives (aka xingke tiben) to approach rural work patterns and the digital humanities methods to analyze and visualize the cases that serve as random samples of the crop regimes and everyday activities of rural men and women.