Prostitution and the Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

“…But just as attention to gender shows the inadequacies of class as a determinative unit of analysis, gender is undermined by crosscutting ties of kinship and native place. Like male factory workers in the Republican era and indeed like urban dwellers more generally, many women mill-hands came from the countryside, maintained ongoing ties there, and moved across the urban-rural divide multiple times in their working lives (Honig 1986;Hershatter 1986). Many were contract laborers, recruited by the powerful underworld organization known as the Green Gang, and had little control over their living conditions or the disposition of their income.…”

“…Nevertheless, prostitution was a powerful theme in Republican narratives about modernity. While intellectuals linked prostitution to social disorder, cultural backwardness, and national weakness, popular writings narrated a devolution from the cultured nineteenth-century courtesan (X. Ye 1999; Henriot 1994 Henriot , 1997 V. Ho 1993; Yingjin Zhang 1999b; C. Yeh 2005) to the diseased streetwalker who worked the streets of Shanghai, Canton, and other expanding cities / 39 Marriage, Family, Sexuality, and Gender Difference / 39 (Gronewold 1984;Hershatter 1989Hershatter , 1991Hershatter , 1992a Hershatter , 1993Hershatter , 1994 Hershatter , 1997 Henriot 1992 Henriot , 1994 Henriot , 1996 Henriot , 1997 V. Ho 1993; Yingjin Zhang 1999b). Such accounts may well be more useful as indicators of elite male anxiety-individual, social, and national-than as accurate renderings of prostitution, but they do convey a sense of the variety of motivations, arrangements, social standing, and regulatory constraints of women in the sex trades.…”

“…Women and children also formed significant proportions of outworkers and casual laborers in urban settings, although precise numbers are difficult to come by. They processed foods and wool for export, glued matchboxes, wove mats, and sewed uniforms in homes and in small workshops (Hershatter 1986; Honig 1986). In Hangzhou, they worked in family workshops preparing silk yarn for weaving by men (Rofel 1999b).…”

“…During the Nanjing Decade (1928-37), women in Tianjin cotton mills and Shanghai silk filatures joined in defensive strikes to prevent factory closings and protect welfare provisions (Hershatter 1986;Perry 1993). Only after World War II did women workers emerge in substantial numbers as activists in an organized CCP-influenced labor movement (Honig 1986;Hershatter 1986;Perry 1993). The variety and unevenness of women's participation in collective action defy categorization and suggest that labor activity more generally may be equally resistant to easy narration.…”

“…This practice was widely encouraged by Communist organizers in the 1940s, during and after the Japanese occupation. In less visible ways as well, native-place ties helped structure everyday forms of coping with factory regimes, from taking long bathroom breaks and napping on the job to stealing cotton yarn (Honig 1986;Hershatter 1986). …”