The Daily Life Of Shanghai Female Workers In The Anti-Japanese War(1937-1945)

In Anti-Japanese War,the textile industry and the tobacco industry with Shanghai women Labor-intensively have experienced the prosperity and 'deformity'development,also experienced depression and contraction.Influenced by the factors,Capital market demand for women workers had ups and downs.Whether in the volatility of the market or in occupied time,large numbers of rural girls come to Shanghai.Most of them were come from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces or from Shanghai countryside.They lack the national consciousness,national concept.The motive of the girls into the factory were different,"having enough to eat " and let the family live a better life were the most consistent pursuit.They used to endure long working hours,high labor intensity,low wages and inhumane management and exploitation.Whether the oppression and exploitation was from Chinese or Japanese,they were unconcerned.As the girls came from the countryside,they were apt to be tempted to the modern style of life in big cities.Stable income relatively made them to pursuit the independent consciousness and the demand of fashion.Sino-Japanese war environment did not prevent them from Shanghai,they began to imitate the city dwellers just like the predecessors.Their views on marriage and family were different from their parents progressively.Looking from the view of class,once workers provided their labor to the manager,it means that they must obey the labor discipline of capital power.But as women,under the superposition of workers and female identity,they were endured the male managers,language and physical violence,also suffered sexual harassment,sexual assault of sex control.It is this long-term Shared experiences,to promote women formed a certain degree of self-consciousness of rights,promoting them to seek all possible opportunities to fight in the work.Lots of similar action gathered for a long time,made them easy to class consciousness,begin to realize the interests of the workers and the management,and then began to agree that the role of the collective struggle.On the whole of the female workers in war time,the national consciousness was very weak.But at the start of the war,influenced by the upsurge of public opinion in the war of resistance against Japan,they were infected with nationalist sentiments.As the battlefield away from Shanghai gradually,the Female Workers and their families who.were at the bottom of the society can strongly feel the injustice of the opposition,the relations between workers suffered,and gender discrimination and oppression,but the national struggle consciousness and action were reduced significantly.Inspect from the Shanghai female workers' daily life,we can see that most of them were subject to the status of workers by the formation of experience,to feel the pressing deeper,more subject formed in the female identity and gender identity in experience,often had negative cognition.This is the main reason for the weak national consciousness of women workers in Shanghai during the war.At the same time,through although sporadic cases,we can find that the influence of the environment,including the various political forces in secret work,some women still may participate in the national struggle against Japan.