A Woman’s Place: On the Farm

YANAN, China —  In the arid, yellow hills of Shaanxi, farmers still winnow grain by tossing it from baskets, stack sheaves by the doors of cave houses and grind it between farmyard millstones.

Farm life in this poor area of north-central China seems timeless. But one crucial thing has changed--increasingly, it is women who are running the farms.

Across China, millions of men have left tiny plots that are too small to provide a good income. Some find work near home in mines and rural factories. Others head to the cities, joining a floating population of migrant workers that has ballooned to at least 100 million people in recent years.

Still, farm families in China tend to hold fast to the long-term leases on their state-owned fields. As the men move on, the women are left to do the work.

In northern Shaanxi, where the Red Army found refuge during the civil war decades ago, most farming still is not mechanized.

In Houjiagou Valley, where electricity has yet to replace kerosene lamps, farmers build and maintain the mud walls of their terraces by beating the earth with shovels. Irrigation is by buckets of water hauled on shoulder poles.

But local women, helped by government training programs, are improving on the old ways and making more money.

“The status of women farmers is rising along with their income,” said Zhang Yuhuan, a researcher with the Rural Development Institute in Beijing.

“Women now don’t have to ask permission from their husbands when they want to buy something. For big purchases, husbands and wives discuss it and decide together,” she said.

Xie Xiufeng, a 38-year-old teacher and women’s federation leader in Baimao village in northern Shaanxi, began a new local industry by planting apples.

When she got a fat check for her first harvest, everyone wanted in. So Xie spent many evenings teaching other village women to read enough to understand pesticide instructions and sales receipts. The women’s federation provided training in apple growing.

Commercial buyers now are willing to visit the remote village to buy a large crop.

At harvest time, Xie supervises while hired men haul baskets of apples downhill, balancing carefully to avoid bruising them.

Her family--a husband working in local government and two sons--had just enough to eat before that first apple harvest. Now they have more than $2,400 in savings and plan to move to a new cave house.

Xie expects to earn the equivalent of $3,500 from the apples this year, giving her family an income of nearly $900 per person. That compares with the national rural average of $190 per person.

“When I got married in 1976, I had no money and just two sheets. Now we have almost everything new--sheets, quilts, pillows, everything,” she said.

A study this year by the International Fund for Agricultural Development found that many of China’s 450 million rural women have their own income now. Millions have been able to take agricultural training courses sponsored by the government and have become “more visible, influential and independent.”

In Yanan, the government-sponsored All China Women’s Federation opened a training center for agricultural technicians in June. These women fan out to villages to teach better ways to grow vegetables, plant apple trees and raise chickens or pigs.

The biggest change is in women’s self-confidence, said Wang Jiaxiang, a Beijing literature professor who visits rural areas to help with development work.

Wang has visited many villages where women do all the farming. Only the oldest women remember the days of complete subservience to men, when Chinese women rarely left their houses and many were crippled by foot-binding.

“Learning agricultural skills involves getting together with other women and exchanging ideas,” Wang said. “Without a sense of self-worth, equality is just talk.”

Not all is rosy in this scenario.

Women are less likely to migrate to the cities because they still are the traditional care-givers for children and elderly family members.

That means women are left with low-paying jobs in the fields. In some cases, husbands leave for good, or they find mistresses in the cities and rarely return home.

“Who knows what’s going to happen to those husbands?” said Wang. “And who suffers? The woman who gets left behind.”

Farmers in China generally complain about lagging income growth, high costs for fertilizer, and various rural fees and taxes.

For women it can be worse because they face discrimination in government development programs aimed at male heads of households, the China Youth Daily recently reported.

Rural schools are underfinanced, and most dropouts are girls. Studies say only 48% of rural women can read.

All these problems can be solved as China develops, said Xie Lihua, the editor of a magazine for rural women.

Xie, who visits and corresponds through letters with rural women all over the country, argues adamantly that it is wrong to say life is getting harder for women in rural China.

“It’s a life of hardship, but they have hope,” she said. “Real hardship would be having no hope.”