On Women's Work in Silk Reeling:

Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Historical Silk Industries

Of Connecticut and South China

 

 

By Janice E. Stockard

 

In this paper, I consider the historical silk industry of Windham County (Connecticut) in light of the several years of anthropological field research I conducted on the silk industry of Shunde County (Guangdong Province, South China). These two sites present an unusual opportunity for cross-cultural analysis: In the heyday of the silk industry in both the Windham case (1800-1840) and in Shunde (1860-1930), each county practiced “sericulture” more intensively than any other county in the U.S.A. and China, respectively. In sericulture, families produced raw silk thread, unwinding (or “reeling”) filaments of silk by hand from the cocoons produced by the larvae of silk moths (Bombyx Mori).  Cocoons were “home grown,” raised from silk worms tended by families that fed them fresh mulberry leaves, harvested from family mulberry orchards. In my analysis, I focus on the organization of the work of sericulture within South China and Connecticut families, especially on silk reeling performed by women.  In both cases, I consider the effect of developments in the technology of reeling on the quality of silk thread produced.  In the Connecticut case, I re-examine the decline of sericulture there, looking beyond the failure of imported Chinese mulberry trees to the limitations that reeling placed on the full development of that silk industry.

 

A cultural anthropologist, Janice Stockard received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.  Her specialty is Chinese culture and society, and her cross-cultural areas of expertise include family, kinship, gender, and work. She has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and Connecticut College.  Currently, she is an Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.  Dr. Stockard is the author of two books, the first based on her several years of field research in South China that focused on the history of family and marriage in the rich silk-producing district near Canton (Guangzhou).  In that book, Daughters of the Canton Delta:  Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860-1930 (Stanford Press), she analyzed how changing technology in the silk industry affected local marriage and family customs.