The third-century poet Shu Yuexiang (1217-1301) noted how hard rural women in Zhejiang labored, picking tea, carrying water, drawing water from wells, delivering food to the fields, threshing rice, making clothes, growing crops, and selling fish and vegetables. He wrote a set of 10 poems commemorating their labor, the first three of which are as follows:

The woman who picks the tea in the front ridge pours the basket with the dew.

Hardships know that there are lessons, and singing and laughing seem to be worry-free.

According to who paints the eyebrows, the hairpin face is not ashamed.

Life is important to appearance, so don't you have to comb your hair?

The women in the fields are driving and water, and the water must be circulated.

The black hat lifts the hot day. The green skirt drums the evening breeze.

Turning over the old steps, stepping on it is like a void.

Listen to the song of Lao, and don't marry a farmer.

The fish woman on the river is lifted and enters the market in the morning.

Guarding the ship and keeping the child, changing the drunken lover.

No Limbo socks, long splash skirt.

The Hun family is the same as the general guest, and the smile is goodbye. ①132

Poets and painters seem to have taken pleasure in depicting women at work; Looking at the woman who is immersed in labor and does not realize that she is being observed, the imagination at this time is a little colorful. Affection. Still, we have to thank them for leaving evidence. After all, in most families where they have to work to feed and clothe themselves, women have to work as hard and long hours as men. In warmer parts of the central and southern regions, women are depicted as doing farm work outdoors. Lu You (1125-1210) recorded in his diary that he noticed a woman in Chongde County, stepping on a waterwheel and twisting twine in her hands. A poem by Fan Chengda (1126-1193) describes old ladies, young girls, and mothers with children sleeping on their backs, who go to pick tea as soon as the season of picking mulberry leaves has passed. Chen Zao (13th century) wrote a poem entitled "Tian Housewife", making a joke about women, "A Tian couple with two bodies of mud". ②

Yet both women. How much farm work they have done, in the eyes of Chinese scholars, their main task is elsewhere. A woman's job is a time-consuming, labor-intensive spinning and weaving process that needs to be done indoors. The thing that accompanies a woman in the symbolic sense is cloth, because since ancient times, the simple and concise term for the gender division of labor is "male ploughing and female weaving". (3) The textile industry is regarded as a basic production activity that can be compared with farming. Just as people need to eat, they need to be clothed to keep them warm. Men and women do their part, and the family has enough food and clothing. This model has long been the basis of the imperial tax system. For centuries, farmers had to pay the lion's share of their taxes on grain in the autumn and a large part of the rest in the summer. In this way, the imperial court exerted the power of the taxation system behind the encouragement of every household to weave cloth.

Song writers inherited a long-standing tradition of equating men growing crops in the fields with women making cloth at home. In his essay reminiscing about the emperor's accession to the throne, Sima Guang described the men plowing the land, sowing and harvesting from summer to winter despite the bitter cold, and the women raising silkworms, making hemp, loading threads on looms, and weaving threads into warp and weft cloth. He observed that the peasants had to work intensively in the summer and autumn in order to pay their taxes and pay their debts, so that the fruits of their hard work were no longer their own before the grain was brought from the fields to their homes, or the cloth was unloaded from the shuttles. (4) The magistrates who supervised the production of the common people.133 The contribution of women was often mentioned. In 1179, Zhu Xi urged the people of Nankang to work the farms, and specially called on them to plant mulberry and hemp, so that women could raise silkworms, spin thread, and weave linen and silk. (5) In a legal judgment, Hu Ying (1232) described how the peasants who pawned their fields toiled on the land, accumulating every money to redeem their fields: "Day and night, the husband and the woman ploughed the silkworms, and a spoonful of millet did not dare to feed themselves, and a wisp of silk did not dare to be used as clothing...... Baht accumulates. ”⑥

Not all peasant women have to weave. The difference in climate and soil quality makes some places not produce cloth, but suitable for other things such as tea, and professional tea farmers can always buy back the cloth they need. The poorest farmers may not be able to afford the land and equipment needed to weave the cloth. Families planting mulberry trees should have ladders and baskets for picking and storing mulberry leaves; Silkworm rearing and silk reeling require a silkworm room for hatching silkworm moths, a flat dustpan, a rack for placing silkworm foil, a large frame for winding threads, a spindle and a shuttle, a spool, and a large spinning wheel for spinning. If you weave your own cloth, you also need to have a loom, which is generally a bamboo machine and a bamboo reed. Farmers who only grow hemp, ramie, and cotton still need to buy some spinning and weaving equipment, even if they don't need to produce as much as the things used to produce silk. (7) For every 5 horses of linen or ramie cloth (each horse is about 0.6 meters wide and 12 meters long), it is usually necessary to use 1-3 acres of arable land to plant fiber plants. If the goal was to produce the same amount of silk, they would have to take out about a few acres of land and plant a thousand mulberry trees. The family of five weaves five pieces of cloth a year, enough to make two sets of clothes for each person, and the rest is used for donations. ⑧

There are very few records of the living conditions of peasant women in the Song Dynasty. But we can say with a fair degree of certainty that they spend a lot of time doing all kinds of work. This chapter examines in detail what their textile work requires. I devote a considerable amount of space to the work itself for two reasons. The first reason is our ignorance. Living at the end of the 20th century, we knew what it meant to cook, do laundry, take care of children, and even know what it meant to be a supervising servant or picking tea; But we rarely know what twisting, spinning or weaving looks like, and what each step in the process of making cloth looks like. The second reason, because the final finished product can be easily sold for money, raises many questions about women's textile work, such as women's participation in the commodity economy, their status within the family, how their textile performance affects the broader assessment of women's social value, and what is the relationship between the three? From the late Tang Dynasty to the Song Dynasty, the commercialization of the economy was very fast. The capacity of the market has expanded, and an unprecedented number of commodities — including cloth, mostly produced by women — have been brought into the market. Commercialization has had an impact on the organization of cloth production, and more households have become specialized households in the form of special 134 or specific processes. How have these developments affected women? (9) After women's labor could be exchanged for a lot of money, did they get more power in deciding how to use the family property? Does the increase in earning opportunities make women more autonomous?

Twisting and spinning

Women are not the only ones involved in making cloth. Men grow fibrous plants, help women raise silkworms, manage the buying and selling of raw materials and semi-finished and finished products, and much more in the more specialized weaving process. However, women and girls work long hours in monotonous, time-consuming and labor-intensive jobs. As a side hustle for farmers who also grow crops, the threads needed for weaving are spun by women. The technology is simple enough that the owner or contractor does not have to purchase large equipment and hire workers. Indeed, the spinning of the thread can be done by a woman in her own home with a simple apparatus, and when it starts and when it stops, it can be subordinated to the needs of other things in the house.

Since ancient times, people have been wearing linen cloth for their daily lives, and rough linen clothes have also been used as mourning clothes. Hemp is an annual plant that can be grown in most parts of China. Hemp seeds can be squeezed for oil, and the stem bark (bast) will grow into long fibers, and the fibers of male hemp plants are better than those of females, so the bast of male plants is often used to spin and weave cloth, and female plants are used to make hemp rope, sacks and similar products. Almost as important as hemp is ramie, which grows mainly in the south, but also in Sichuan and Henan. Ramie can only be used for textiles, and it cannot be grown in the cold north. In addition, it is a perennial plant that can be harvested 3 times a year. Ramie fibre is softer and shinier than hemp fibre, making it particularly suitable for summer clothes and easy to dry even in humid climates. Once sold, ramie cloth costs several times more than linen. ⑩

There are many steps involved in the processing of hemp stalks. The man cut off the hemp stalks and put them in the water for a day. Then, a man or woman, usually a man, peels the hemp skin, that is, the hemp fibers, from the hemp stalk; The hemp should be soaked overnight, and then washed and dried during the day. In the next step, either a man or a woman beats the sun-dried hemp stalks to soften them to separate the hemp skin from the stems, and then peels off the hemp fibers from the stems and combs them into handfuls. Then use your hands to form a smooth ball of hemp, remove the impurities remaining on the line, and then put it in the water again, and then divide it into threads one by one. The next process is spinning, which is particularly time-consuming and labor-intensive, and is always done by women: the end of the twine is joined together and twisted by hand, and the long threads are twisted Fig. 16 The women who spin the twine are made by Liu Songnian (c. 1150-1225 onwards). National Palace Museum: Selected Paintings of the Palace Museum, Taipei, 1970.

(Fig. 16 is an ideal representation of three women spinning serenely.) After the twine is spun, the two threads are twisted together, or put together in double threads to make them strong enough to weave linen. The process of making ramie does not have so many steps,135 but it has to be completed within a certain time limit. After the hemp stalk is cut, the fibrous hemp fibers must be stripped from the stem at the edge of the field. Then soak the hemp, scrape off the impurities on the outer skin, and then hang it up to dry. In the end, the women separated the fibers one by one, connected them into long threads, spun and weaved, and still had to be completed within a certain period of time.

Since the work of twisting does not have any degree of mechanization, the work of twisting hemp takes a lot of women's time in areas where hemp and ramie are grown in large quantities. Fan Chengda recorded that in a town near Suzhou, which is famous for producing cloth, women in the village can be seen twisting twine while walking. Comparatively speaking, if the person who spins the thread has a better spindle, the work efficiency is higher. Many families in the Song Dynasty used simple hand-held spindles. 136 Wang Zhen's Book of Agriculture (1313) describes a simple spindle in which the left hand holds a thread around the spindle held in the right hand. The villagers found that with this spindle, they could use their free time whenever and wherever they wanted. The problem with hand-held spindles is not only that the threads spun out are unevenly thick, but also that they are too slow. It has been calculated that the twine used to work on a pedal loom for one day would take 30-40 days to spin with a hand-held spindle. Families who can afford to invest a little more can thus buy a spinning wheel for their women, as shown in Figure 17. At this time, one woman holds a ball of thread, and the other shakes a spinning wheel. The more efficient is the pedal spinning wheel, which has three or four spindles rotating at the same time, and the efficiency is increased several times. In order to ease the labor of wives and daughters, and to meet deadlines, there was an obvious possibility in some parts of northern China that the twisted threads were loaded onto large hydro-driven spinning wheels. Wang Zhen copied a picture of a "big spinning wheel" and suggested that this kind of spinning wheel should be used in other places.

Hemp and ramie are not the only plant fibers that can be used to weave cloth. The fibers of some leguminous creeping plants and bananas can also be used to weave cloth in a unique way. Small ethnic groups along China's borders have been weaving cotton for centuries. Cotton was originally produced in India and introduced to China by the Central Asian, Burma-Yunnan routes. But during the Song dynasty, cotton production flourished dramatically. In the 11th century, cotton was already cultivated in Guangdong and Guangxi, and by the end of the 12th century, it had reached the sea

137 South Island and Fujian. Due to the large northward extension, the characteristics of the cotton plant have changed. The growing period has gradually become shorter, and an annual variant with few or no branches has been developed. If not earlier, this change took place in the 13th century. It is easier for farmers to control the yield of annual plants, which leads to a significant increase in the economic potential of the cotton industry.

Cotton is not a bast fiber plant like hemp and ramie, but a seed fiber plant. Before it is spun into thread, the cotton must be loosened with a large fork, dried in the sun, rolled out of the fiber, and the cotton is fluffy and fluffy with a silk thread bow, and then the cotton ball is straightened and divided into cotton strips of uniform length and weight. Cotton has several attractive features: it is an excellent thermal filling for winter clothes and quilts, as good as silk cotton but cheaper than silk cotton. After weaving into cloth, cotton cloth is lighter and warmer than linen or ramie cloth. Moreover, the cotton cloth is soft and comfortable. In 1313, Wang Zhen explained the benefits of planting cotton: "Compared with mulberry silkworms, there is no labor of harvesting, and there is an effect of harvesting." The work of the sword is exempt from the work of the arrest and the benefit of the cold. "The reason why it didn't spread quickly in China seems to be that varieties suitable for the Central Plains appear more slowly and are more difficult to deseed. 138