A Conversation between Archival Research and Oral History: A Critical Approach to Studying Gender and the Urban Labor Regime in Maoist China

Yige Dong, University at Buffalo, SUNY

Archival research and oral history are two principal methods in historical studies of politics and society. While archival sources reveal the perspective of the “state,” oral history focuses on voices of individuals. Whereas most studies rely on one method or the other as their primary mode of inquiry, and some make the two supplement each other, few have systemically discussed how separating or integrating the two methodological approaches would make a difference in probing the substantive issue. This paper explores these methodological implications in knowledge production by reflecting on a study of gendered labor in a mill town in Maoist China. While the oral history data may lead to a conclusion that socialist public care facilities substantially uplifted working women’s “double burden” in this local case, the archival data documenting the same community suggest otherwise: Those public institutions had never properly addressed workers’ reproductive burden. In both the public care facilities and the domestic sphere, it was jiashu, an older generation of women who were mothers and in-laws of the textile workers, became the primary provider of reproductive labor. Rather than invalidating or supplementing each other empirically, I argue, the two sources of data should be read in a non-positivist way and the tension between the two reveals a structural tension within the Maoist urban labor regime: While serving as the backbone of reproduction in both public and domestic sphere in socialist China, jiashu was deemed “parasite of socialism” at the discursive level. Their contribution and subjective experience have been doubly muted by both the state and the veteran textile workers. It is through appropriating these older women’s reproductive labor on the one hand, and excluding them from the discursive category of “socialist women,” that the highly gendered socialist regime of industrial accumulation was made possible but remembered differently.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 67. The Data of Labor History II