The 13th-century poet Shu Yuexiang (1217-1301) noticed how hard rural women in Zhejiang worked, picking tea, driving water, fetching water from wells, delivering food to the fields, pounding rice, making clothes, and growing crops. Selling fish and vegetables. He wrote a set of 10 poems to commemorate their labor. The first 3 poems are as follows:

In the front ridge, she picks tea leaves, tilting the basket to reveal the harvest.

There are lessons to be learned from hardships, and songs and laughter seem to have no worries.

Who can paint the eyebrows according to the water? It’s not shameful to wear hairpins on the face.

Appearance is important in life, so do you have to comb your hair?

The woman driving the water in the field must keep the water flowing.

The black hat lifts the scorching sun; the green skirt blows the evening breeze.

Turning over and over and following the same steps, stepping on the ground seems like empty space.

Listen to the song of labor and never marry a farmer.

Fish wives are picked up from the river and brought into the market.

Guard the boat and leave the child behind, and exchange it for a drunken husband.

No socks, just a long skirt that splashes water.

The Hun family and the Fanke parted ways in Tianjin.①132

Poets and painters seem to enjoy depicting women at work; looking at women who are immersed in work and unaware that they are being observed, the imagination at this time is slightly erotic. Nonetheless, we have to thank them for leaving After all, in most families who had to work to meet their food and clothing needs, women had to work just as hard and long hours as men. In warmer places in the center and south, women were depicted doing farm work outdoors. The image of Lu You (1125-1210) recorded in his diary that he noticed that women in Chongde County were stepping on water wheels and twisting twine in their hands. A poem by Fan Chengda (1126-1193) described Old ladies, young girls, mothers with children sleeping on their backs, the season for picking mulberry leaves has just passed, and they immediately go to pick tea. Chen Zao (13th century) wrote a poem titled "Tian Jia Fu", opening up women's A joke, "Yita and his wife are both covered in mud".②

However, no matter how much farm work women do, according to Chinese scholars, their main tasks are still elsewhere. Women's work is time-consuming and labor-intensive, and most processes need to be completed indoors. In a symbolic sense, they accompany women. The thing is cloth, because since ancient times, the simple and concise term for the gender division of labor is "men farm and women weave." ③The textile industry is regarded as a basic production activity that can be compared with farming. Just like people need to eat, they You also need to wear clothes to keep out the cold. If men and women each do their part, the family can have enough food and clothing. This model has long been the basis for the imperial tax system. For centuries, farmers must pay the bulk of the tax due in grain in the autumn. , and a large part of the rest was paid for natural fabrics in the summer. In this way, the imperial court exerted the power of the taxation system behind encouraging each household to weave cloth.

Song Dynasty authors inherited a long tradition of equating men planting crops in the fields with women making cloth at home. In an article recalling the emperor's accession to the throne, Sima Guang described men plowing, sowing and harvesting from summer to winter despite the severe cold. , women raise silkworms, weave hemp, put the threads on the loom, and weave the silk threads into cloth with crisscrossed warp and weft. He observed that in order to pay taxes and donations and repay debts, farmers have to work harder in the summer and autumn. Before the grain is transported from the fields to their homes, or the cloth is unloaded from the shuttle, the fruits of hard work are no longer theirs. ④ Supervise the people's input into production,133 local officials who are active in farming often mention women's Contribution. In 1179, Zhu Xi urged the people of Nankang to work hard on farm work and specifically called on them to plant mulberry and hemp so that women could raise silkworms, spin thread, and weave linen and silk. ⑤ In a legal judgment, Hu Ying (mid-1232) (Example) describes how the farmers who sold their fields worked hard on the land and saved every bit of money to redeem the fields: "The husbands and women cultivated sericulture day and night, not daring to feed themselves with a spoonful of millet, not daring to think of a strand of silk. Clothes... baht accumulates."⑥

Not all farm women must weave cloth. The difference in climate and soil quality means that some places do not produce cloth, but are suitable for producing other things such as tea. Professional tea farmers can always buy back the cloth they need. The poorest

Farmers may not be able to purchase the land and equipment needed for weaving. Families growing mulberry trees need ladders and baskets for picking and storing mulberry leaves; raising silkworms and reeling silkworms require silkworm rooms for hatching silkworm moths, flat dustpans, and shelves for placing silkworm foils.

, a large frame for winding thread, a spindle and shuttle, a spool, and a large spinning wheel for spinning. If you weave your own cloth, you will also need a loom, usually a bamboo loom and bamboo reed. Only hemp or ramie is grown,

Even if cotton farmers do not need as many things for producing silk, they still need to purchase some spinning and weaving equipment. ⑦ For every 5 pieces of linen or ramie cloth produced (each piece is about 0.6 meters wide and 12 meters long),

Usually, 1-3 acres of cultivated land are needed to grow fiber plants. If they aim to produce the same amount of silk, they have to take out more than several acres of land and plant a thousand mulberry trees. A family of five weaves 5 pieces of cloth every year.

, enough to make two sets of clothes for each person, and the rest is used for donations.⑧

There are very few records of the living conditions of peasant women in the Song Dynasty. But we can say with reasonable certainty that they spent a lot of time doing a variety of tasks. This chapter will specifically examine what their textile work required. I devote considerable space to the description for two reasons.

The work itself. The first reason is our ignorance. Living at the end of the 20th century, we know a little about what it means to cook, wash clothes, look after children, and even know what it means to supervise servants or pick tea; but we know little about twisting thread,

Spinning or weaving cloth, and what each step in the process of making cloth looks like. The second reason, because the final product is easily sold for money, women's textile work raises many questions, such as women's participation in commodities

How do the economy, their status within the family, and their achievements in textiles affect broader assessments of women's social value, and what is the relationship between the three? From the late Tang to the Song dynasties, the commercialization of the economy progressed very quickly

.The market capacity expanded, and an unprecedented number of commodities—including cloth mostly produced by women—were involved in the market. Commercialization had an impact on the organization of cloth production, and more families became specialized in specific forms or specific processes.

Professional households. How have these developments affected women? 9. After women's labor can be exchanged for a lot of money, have they gained more power in deciding how to use family property? Has the increase in money-making opportunities made women more independent?

Twisting and spinning thread

Women are not the only ones involved in the work of making cloth. Men plant fiber plants, help women raise silkworms, manage the sale and processing of raw materials and semi-finished products and finished products, and have more to do in the more specialized weaving process. However, women

Working with girls for long hours, they did tedious, time-consuming and labor-intensive work. As a side job for farmers who also grew crops, the threads needed for weaving were all spun by women. The technology was simple enough that owners or contractors did not have to

There is no need to hire workers when purchasing large equipment. Indeed, women can do spinning in their own homes with simple equipment. When they start and when they stop work, they can follow the needs of other things at home.

Since ancient times, people's daily clothes have been made of linen, and rough linen clothes have also been used as mourning clothes. Hemp is an annual plant that can be grown in most parts of China. Hemp seeds can be pressed for oil, and the stem bark (bast)

It will grow into long fibers. The fiber of male hemp plants is better than that of female plants. Therefore, the bast of male plants is often used for spinning and weaving, while the female plants are used to make hemp ropes, sacks and similar products. A plant that is almost as important as hemp.

It is ramie. Ramie mainly grows in the south, but also in Sichuan and Henan. Ramie can only be used for textiles and cannot grow in the cold north. In addition, it is a perennial plant and can be harvested three times a year. Ramie fiber is softer than hemp fiber.

, more shiny, especially suitable for summer clothes, and easy to dry even in humid climates. Once sold, the price of ramie cloth is several times that of linen cloth.⑩

There are many steps in the processing of flax stalks. Men cut the flax stalks and let them soak in water for a day. Then, a man or woman, usually a man, peels off the flax bark, which is the fiber, from the flax stalks; retting the flax.

It needs to be soaked overnight, and then washed and dried during the day. Next, men or women soften the dried hemp stalks to separate the hemp skin and stems, then peel off the hemp fibers from the stalks and comb them into handfuls.

Then use your hands to comb the flax into a smooth ball, remove the impurities remaining on the thread, then put it into the water again, and then separate it into threads one by one. The next process is spinning, which is very time-consuming and labor-intensive.

It is always done by women: connect the ends of the twine threads together and twist them with your hands to form a long thread. Figure 16 Women spinning twine threads, by Liu Songnian (about 1150-1225 or later). National Palace Museum: "Selected Paintings from the Palace Museum"

Collection", Taipei, 1970.

(Picture 16 ideally shows three women spinning threads calmly and calmly). After the linen thread is spun, the two threads must be twisted together or spliced ​​into double threads to make them strong enough to weave linen and ramie.

There are not so many processes in the production process, 135 but it must be completed within a certain time limit. After the hemp stalks are cut, the fiber-containing hemp fibers must be peeled off from the stems on the edge of the field. Then they are retting and scraped.

The impurities on the outer skin are then hung up to dry. Finally, the women separate the fibers one by one, connect them into long threads, spin and weave them, and they still have to complete the work within a certain time limit.

Since the work of twisting threads is not mechanized to any degree, in areas where hemp and ramie are grown in large quantities, the work of twisting threads consumes a lot of time for women. Fan Chengda recorded that a town near Suzhou that is famous for its cloth production can be used on the road.

I saw women in the village twisting hemp thread while walking. Comparatively speaking, if the spinner had a better spindle, his work efficiency would be higher. Many families in the Song Dynasty used simple hand-held spindles. 136 Wang Zhen's "Agricultural Book"

(1313) describes a simple spindle. The left hand holds the thread and winds it to the spindle held in the right hand. Villagers found that with this spindle, they can use their free time anytime and anywhere. The problem with hand-held spindles is not only the spinning

The reason for the uneven thickness of the thread is that the speed is too slow. Someone has calculated that the twine used for a pedal loom to work for one day needs to be spun with a hand-held spindle for 30-40 days. Families with the ability to invest a little more can therefore

A woman buys a spinning wheel, as shown in Figure 17. At this time, one woman holds the ball of thread and the other spins the spinning wheel. The more efficient one is the pedal spinning wheel, with three or four spindles spinning at the same time, which improves efficiency

Several times. In order to reduce the labor of wives and daughters and meet the deadline, there is an obvious possibility in some places in northern China, that is, to load the twisted threads onto large water-driven spinning wheels for spinning. Wang Zhen copied a "

"Big Spinning Wheel" picture, and suggested that this kind of spinning wheel should be used in other places.

Hemp and ramie are not the only plant fibers that can be used to weave cloth. The fibers of some leguminous creeping plants and banana plants can also be used to weave cloth through unique methods. Small ethnic groups along the border with China have already used cotton to weave cloth.

It has been around for centuries. Cotton was originally produced in India and was introduced to China through two routes from Central Asia, Myanmar and Yunnan. But in the Song Dynasty, cotton production flourished dramatically. In the 11th century, cotton had been planted in Guangdong and Guangxi, and by

At the end of the twelfth century, it reached the sea

137 South Island and Fujian. Due to the substantial extension to the north, the characteristics of the cotton plant have changed. The growth period has gradually become shorter, and an annual variety with few or no branches has been cultivated. If it is not more

As early as the 13th century, this change occurred. Farmers could more easily control the yield of annual plants, thus greatly increasing the economic potential of the cotton industry.

Cotton is not a bast fiber plant like hemp and ramie, but a seed fiber plant. Before being spun into thread, the cotton buds must be fluffed with a big fork, dried in the sun, and the cotton seeds rolled out of the fiber.

Use a silk bow to fluff the cotton and make it fluffy, then straighten the cotton ball and divide it into slivers of even length and weight. Cotton has several attractive characteristics: it is excellent for making winter clothes and quilts.

Thermal filling is as good as silk floss but cheaper than silk floss. After being woven into cloth, cotton cloth is lighter and warmer than linen or ramie cloth. Moreover, cotton cloth is soft and comfortable. In 1313, Wang Zhen explained the benefits of growing cotton: "And

Compared with mulberry silkworms, there is no labor in collecting and raising, and the results are sure to be harvested. The ramie is free of labor and has the benefit of keeping out the cold." The reason why it was not promoted in China quickly seems to be that it is a variety suitable for the Central Plains region.
Chapter completed!