We provide evidence contrary to long-standing general expectations that before 1949 most Chinese women married up the social hierarchy and that footbinding facilitated this hypergamy. In our sample of 7,314 rural women living in Sichuan, Northern, Central, and Southwestern China in the first half of the twentieth century, two-thirds of women did not marry up. In fact, 22 percent of all women, across regions, married down. In most regions, more women married up than down, but in all regions, the majority did not marry hypergamously. Moreover, for most regions, we found no statistically significant difference between the chances of a footbound girl versus a not-bound girl in marrying into a wealthier household, despite a common cultural belief that footbinding would improve girls' marital prospects. We do find regional variation: Sichuan showed a significant relation between footbinding and marital mobility. Nevertheless, our evidence of the basic economic circumstances of rural women's marriages from several of China's regions, including Sichuan, supports a different cultural belief as relevant to the lives of most women: marriage among equals. These results have implications for understanding pre-1949 Chinese gender relations and rural life as well as for theorizing social causation.

No abstract

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women’s work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women’s status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

One hundred years ago, Mrs. Archibald Little summarized the activities of Sichuan women with whom she was, after long residence in that province, quite familiar.Except among the poorest of the poor, who do field-work or carry water, the women of China do little beyond suckling children and making shoes, except in the treaty ports, where now large numbers of them are employed in the factories lately started. (1898:122) The idea that, prior to industrialization and/or socialist transformation, most Chinese women made few economic contributions to their households is still widely held to be true. From many years of fieldwork and thousands of interviews in Taiwan, Sichuan, Fujian, and Zhejiang, however, I know it to be wrong, based on the curious assumption that only wage-work generates value for households. Such a notion excludes women from social history except as 130 of the Institute of Ethnology (Academia Sinica, Taiwan); and several western-based colleagues. Funded by the Luce Foundation, and headed by Arthur P. Wolf of Stanford University, the project is making available comparable data on a wide range of topics from approximately thirty-six hundred women and men over age sixty-five, from twelve widely dispersed counties, mostly in Minnan. While my participation in direct fieldwork was constrained by bureaucratic limitations, my week-long visits to fieldsites were made fruitful by the efforts of Professor Shih and Drs. Zhou and Zheng, who accompanied me to their fieldsites and generously shared expertise and information. I also thank Arthur Wolf for making available data from his extensive field work in this project.These data, drawn largely from the work of others, are used here against the background of two large surveys I conducted in China with cadres of the Women's Federation. Our work was supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, for which I offer our thanks. This material is still being analyzed, but provides detailed material on footbinding and economic contexts for five thousand Sichuan and 660 Fujian women who were over sixty-five in 1991-1992. I am most grateful for the efficient and friendly cooperation of the Women's Federation in the accumulation of this large and carefully collected data set. Another sort of acknowledgment is also due here: to the people I interviewed directly during my field visits. Some social researchers now name their informants, to give individual persons a deserved voice in the historical record. With real regret, I do not provide my informants' names in publication or in my fieldnotes. For the present, I prefer to maintain the anthropologically traditional anonymity of sources.

The only pre-1950 Chinese cities for which reliable demographic records exist are those in Taiwan. Analysis of two samples of the records from Taipei City produces surprising results. Urban women were far less likely to marry than rural women and consequently had markedly lower fertility. This was due to a greater demand for female labor in the city but not because employment outside of the home freed women to refuse marriages arranged by their parents. Parental authority was as strong in the city as in the country. The difference was that given the possibility of remunerative employment for their daughters many parents chose to keep them at home rather than giving them to another family in marriage.