WOMEN COTTON MILL WORKERS IN SHANGHAI, 1919-1949 (CHINA)

Modern Industrial capitalism in twentieth-century China, as in Lancashire and Lowell a century earlier, was built on the employment of women and children. In Shanghai, China's largest industrial center prior to 1948, cotton was king, and the majority of mill workers were women. Women cotton mill workers represented over one-third of the ranks of the Shanghai industrial proletariat. This study examines the nature and extent of the transformation women experienced as they gradually severed their ties to the rural economy and became members of a working class in Shanghai.; The first half of this study focusses on the origins of the women workers and the means by which they were recruited. The diversity of their origins often resulted in mutual distrust and hostility. The most pronounced division was between those who came from the poorer rural districts north of the Yangzi River and those who came from south of the river or from Shanghai proper. In Shanghai, these two groups often lived in separate parts of the city, dressed differently, and had different types of jobs in the mills. In addition, women from the north were often recruited through a system of contract labor, in which a recruiter (usually someone related to the Shanghai gangs) went to villages and purchased teenage girls from their parents, kept them in their houses in Shanghai, and then hired them out to the cotton mills. In the mills, the labor bosses at some times controlled more than half of the women workers.; The second half of the study focusses on the women themselves: their daily lives in Shanghai, and the patterns of their "careers", as peasants and workers, and as daughters, wives and mothers. Traditional customs, patterns of localism, and social relationships based on identification with one's native place did not dissolve as women were integrated into the industrial world of Shanghai. This was largely because women never completely severed their ties to the land, and because the Shanghai in which they lived their daily lives was not drastically different from the world they had left behind in their villages.