Description

For decades after the socialist revolution, people in rural China continued to wear homespun cloth, and millions of rural women continued to spin and weave at home. This is puzzling because the state opposed manual cloth production as wasteful and outdated, because state monopolies should have ensured that all cotton ended up in the hands of the state, and because rural people were in theory supplied with cloth through the rationing system. In this talk, I look at the reasons for the survival of handloom weaving, including interlocking scarcities of grain, cash, cloth, and cotton that forced rural women to make cloth from whatever little cotton they could scrape together, as well as the many ways in which manual cloth production was integrated with rural gender norms and socially prescribed gift exchanges. My focus on cloth and textile work allows me, I hope, to describe how socialism changed the daily lives of rural women.

Jacob Eyferth is a social historian of twentieth-century China interested in the lives of non-elite people. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of papermakers in Sichuan. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China.