Melissa Brown, Assistant Professor of Anthropological Sciences, Hill Gates, Independent Scholar, and Laurel Bossen, Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal present their work in progress.
How important was female labor to China's pre-industrial economy? How did its deployment change with industrialization? What was its connection with footbinding? Our previous research in inland southern China suggests that footbinding was not driven by cultural ideals of beauty and sexuality and did not limit girls' and women's contributions to China's pre-industrial economy. Rather, it was a form of labor control, encouraging productivity in lucrative forms of light labor that underlay China's massive domestic and international commerce. We propose to test whether the southern pattern holds in north and central China.
The Gender Forum is intended to offer a supportive seminar environment for Stanford faculty involved in gender research to present work in progress.