Man ploughs and woman weaves
The expression ‘man ploughs and woman weaves’ (nan geng nu ghi) represents a pre-industrial pattern of gender-based division of labour within peasant families. Though the pattern is thought to have been universal in pre-modern Chinese history,26 it should be noted that even in the late Ming period, the vast majority of rural women in Jiangnan still worked with men in the field, while men also worked on spinning and weaving with women.
It is in the period under study that division of labour between the sexes became clear, reaching its highest point in the mid-Qing period (Bozhong Li 1996Λ, 1996c). Consequently, there was a significant increase in the number of women who shifted from farming activities to spinning and weaving. In Songjiang Prefecture (the centre of the cotton industry of Jiangnan) during the mid-nineteenth century, 90% of the female rural labour force spun and wove for 60 hours a week.27 Such was the case in other places in eastern Jiangnan, but to alesser degree. In western Jiangnan, a similar phenomenon happened even earlier. Women in this region were drawn to silkworm raising and silk spinning as early as the late sixteenth century and did not work in the fields (Bozhong Li 1996⅞ 1996r). Since the return to female labour was considerably higher in textile handicrafts and silkworm raising than in farming, the incomes of peasant families increased substantially28 Therefore, the development of this pattern of ‘man ploughs and woman weaves', not only reduced the supply of labour in farming, but also led to an increase in incomes, the source of agricultural investment.
On the basis of the three major advances of peasant economy discussed here—‘one year double-cropping', ‘one man works 10 mU, and ‘man ploughs and woman weaves'—a new pattern of peasant economy, the ‘trinity pattern', was formed in Jiangnan. This combination of advances underpins the tremendous gains in efficiency in the peasant economy of pre-modern Jiangnan. In the next section, I will examine whether this pattern did in fact increase farm labour productivity.
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