Girls' and Women's Labor and Household Production in China's Economic Transformation

这个项目考察了20世纪初工业化之前和工业化期间中国女孩和妇女所做的劳动和经济贡献。它测试了现已不复存在的缠足做法是否作为一种劳动控制形式，推动女孩和妇女参与有利可图的手工生产。该项目有助于性别研究、经济发展研究及其融合。事实证明，如果经济变革在消除经常被视为对妇女身体有害的做法(如女性割礼)方面更为重要，那么改变这些做法的努力必须解决其经济基础，而不仅仅是教育和宣传层面的工作。来自南方中国的证据表明，缠足与当地的经济实践密切相关，但南方的模式从未在中国北部和中部进行过测试。时间不多了，因为大多数老年妇女是最好的信息来源，将在十年内消失。这个项目调查了1600名妇女关于她们自己和她们年长女性亲属的劳动情况，这将产生大约8000名妇女的数据，这些数据可以追溯到19世纪80年代。8个省的16个地点被仔细挑选，以包括有历史数据的地点，并代表地区多样性。这个项目解决了一个普遍的误解，即在工厂工业主义出现之前，女孩在中国的经济中扮演着微不足道的角色，而且在对美和性的文化信仰的驱动下，缠足让女性劳动几乎一文不值。对中国女孩和妇女的劳动力投入做出更准确的估计，有助于当代全球经济史的研究。了解缠足的经济影响，这曾是关于妇女身体健康、社会融合、传统文化价值观和人权的激烈辩论的中心，有助于当前关于妇女权利的政策辩论。

This project examines the labor and economic contributions made by Chinese girls and women in the early 20th century, before and during industrialization. It tests whether the now-defunct practice of footbinding served as a form of labor control, pushing girls and women to participate in lucrative handcraft production. The project contributes to gender studies, economic development studies, and their integration. If, as it turns out, economic change is more important in eliminating practices that are often viewed as injurious to women's bodies (such as female circumcision), then efforts to change these practices must address their economic basis, and not only work on the level of education and advocacy. Evidence from southern China suggests that footbinding was strongly correlated with local economic practices, but the southern pattern has never been tested in north and central China. Time is running out, as most elderly women who are the best source of information will be gone within the decade. This project surveys 1600 women about their own labor and that of their older female relatives, which will produce data on about 8,000 women going back to the 1880s. Sixteen sites across eight provinces were carefully selected to include locales with historical data available and to represent regional diversity. This project addresses the common misconceptions that girls played an insignificant economic role in China prior to the emergence of factory industrialism, and that footbinding, driven by cultural beliefs about beauty and sexuality, made female labor nearly worthless. Producing more accurate estimates of the labor inputs of Chinese girls and women contributes to contemporary research on global economic history. Understanding the economic implications of footbinding, which was once at the center of heated debate over women's bodily well-being, social integration, traditional cultural values, and human rights, contributes to current policy debates about women's rights.