Gender Division of Labour: From human to silkworm in sericultural practice

Silkworm raising and silk processing were conventionally regarded as women’s work in agricultural practices in ancient China, while contemporary gender division of labour in this field maintains this stereotype and witnesses more nuanced inequality in domestic and institutional settings. Meanwhile, although domestic silkworms in the sericultural industry won’t be differentiated by sex except for reproduction purposes, silk spun by male silkworms are concerned as of better quality by biologists, who thus worked on the feasibility of raising male-only silkworms exclusively. Male-silk products aim to meet the high-end demand for luxury silk products in the international market, while those unwanted female silkworms were made to die in the embryo by breed selections. This paper questions the genetic suppression of female silkworms and the constructed knowledge of masculine silk of premium quality, and thus shows how sexist ideologies are intentionally copied and imposed into the silkworm community to serve humans’ pursuit of cultural capital. Female silkworms thus suffer double oppression of sexism and anthropocentrism, which poses challenges to formulate trans-species ethics of care in both agricultural labour and scientific studies.


INTRODUCTION
'Men farming and women weaving' (c.男耕女织) has been a long-established and pervasive collocation in written and colloquial Chinese since ancient times.It refers to the gender division of labour in pre-modern agrarian societies where men were in charge of tilling in the fields while women weaving fabrics at home.There is an anecdote in Chinese eco-art criticism that can serve as the entry point of the discussion on such gender division of labour in human-silkworm sociality.Liang Shaoji, a Chinese contemporary artist collaborating with domestic silkworms from 1989 onwards, is renowned worldwide for his artistic articulation of Daoism-flavoured natural cosmology in his silk-wrapping projects.During my interview with Liang in 2019, he recalled the burgeoning stage of his career as a 'silkworm artist'.The most memorable feedback he received, as Liang noted, was from a reputable Chinese art critic on an informal occasion: 'Ladies rear silkworms.You, a man, why bother doing this job?' Liang didn't comment on that critic's words, just laughing as if it was merely a harmless joke.This sexually stereotyped remark, nevertheless, was astonishing as it bears the fixed cultural imprint of gendered labour division in Chinese sericultural practises.

SERICULTURAL LABOUR IN CHINA
One of the earliest textual allusions linking weaving labour to women appears in 'Shijing' (Classic of Poetry), an anthology of Chinese poetry dated back from the 11th to the 5th century BC.Vega in the constellation of Lyra, one of the brightest stars visible to human naked eyes in the sky, got its Chinese name zhinv (c.织女, weaving girl)', while its counterpart star Altair in the constellation of Aquila, was nicknamed niulang (c.牛郎, cowherd), as recorded in the poem 'Minor Odes: Da Dong'.Despite written historical accounts on sericulture categorising weaving as women's occupation, it remains obscure whether such gender segregation had ever been strictly implemented in everyday silkworm-rearing and silk-weaving activities in ancient China.However, a series of agrarian illustrations dated back to the Song Dynasty, 'Pictures of Tilling and Weaving (c.耕织图)', provide some tangible visual clues to shed light on scenes of ancient agricultural and sericultural practice (Fig. 1).'Pictures of Tilling and Weaving' is a set of forty-five paintings accompanied with poems as their captions, depicting farmers cultivating grains, raising silkworms and weaving fabrics in forty-five sequential procedures in each folio.Since the Song Dynasty, this genre had been reconfigured and evolved by literati and officials for promoting the techniques of agrarian labour or edifying the public.
Although in ancient times, the silkworm-rearing season was mainly in spring, which was also the busiest time of the year for cultivating activities (Bray, 1997, p. 189), men and women did not devote themselves to agricultural and sericultural labour, respectively, as the 'men tilling and women weaving' discourse suggests.In various versions of 'Pictures', the figures in the depictions of two essential steps in sericulture, namely 'picking mulberry leaves' and 'pulling down the cocoon frames', are all male.
As for leaf-picking, supplying fifth-instar silkworm larvae with sufficient mulberry leaves has always been physically demanding labour.The caption of male's leaf picking illustration in the 'Farmstead

Manual (c. 便民圖纂)' of the Ming Dynasty by Fan
Kuang renders the high physical demand as the reason for men's participation in this task.As the caption narrates, 'Men go to the garden to pick mulberry leaves because women are busy feeding silkworms.Worms need to be fed and leaves need to be picked simultaneously, and therefore, the division of labour should be reasonable and proportionate' (Fig. 2).Besides, the varieties of mulberry grown for sericultural production in the past, as shown in this illustration, were mostly trees rather than shrubs.Farmers thus needed to stand on a ladder or a high stool to reach the high leafy branches, which needed to be cut down as a whole with a machete or axe.This task requires robust arm muscles and therefore is more suitable for men to perform, as Chen argues (2013).In ancient agrarian books, illustrations of 'pulling down the cocoon frames' also frequently portray labourers as male, probably for the same reason that men assisted with the more physically demanding steps in the claimed 'women's job'.However, as Bray notes, in pre-modern sericultural practice, though men helped with leaf picking and moving large farming tools, it was women who paid constant attention to the cleaning and feeding work in caring for silkworms like mothers (1997, p. 248).
In contemporary silkworm cultivation for the silk industry in China, men, too, are not excluded for the toil of tending mulberry gardens and feeding silkworms, almost the same as ancient farming scenes depicted in 'Pictures of Tilling and Weaving'.However, when I conducted fieldwork in Yizhou County of Guangxi Province in China in 2019, the largest silkworm husbandry centre nationwide, I noticed that it was common for a family to send the adult male to work in the city while the wife stayed in the village to take care of the elderly, the children and the silkworm babies within the household.There were also many young couples staying at home to make a living by raising silkworms.Two persons' workforce allowed them to pick more leaves, feed more silkworms and thus make more money.On the one hand, the conventional discourse of 'men tilling and women weaving' has never been strictly executed in the domestic sphere where most silkworm farmers, men and women together, collaborated to raise silkworms in their own farmhouses.On the other hand, sericulture as a feminine field is paradoxically manifested in more institutionalised segments in contemporary China, namely in silk processing factories, sericulture departments in colleges and silkworm egg production centres.
In Yizhou, I visited a few institutions involved in the sericultural industry, such as research centres, breeding stations, silk reeling factories and the agriculture departments in local government.I noticed that most staff in positions of research and management were men, while administrative and operational works were almost exclusively done by women.The Breeding Station of Yizhou County is a representative example.Its chief manager Mr Huang holding a bachelor's degree in sericulture has been working at this station for more than ten years.He is in charge of providing professional guidance to the production of silkworm eggs as a commodity.Meanwhile, all the silkworm breeders there are middle-aged females, and their duties are cutting open the cocoons to get the live silkworm pupae, dividing the male and female pupae into two groups, assisting the metamorphosed moths to mate, separating the mated couples by hand, and handling the freshly laid eggs for further processing.
Silkworm egg production was not a very strenuous job, but the working conditions to assist silkworm moths' mating were far from friendly to those breeders.Usually, five or six female workers wearing masks and transparent veil hoods sat in a room of about 20 square metres, as the powdery scales from the moths' wings were floating in the air like a dense mist (Fig. 3).A blower was humming at the corner of the room, bringing up the wind and thus slightly improving the air circulation in the mating room.As one woman recalled when chatting with me, silkworm egg production was a much more painful job ten years ago without fans or similar equipment indoors.Even now, masks and hoods cannot completely insulate the breeders from the flying scales falling from the moths' wings.
Another female worker complained that she was easily allergic during heated summers when working in the mating room, with itchiness all over her body.I asked these ladies over lunchtime in the canteen why all the breeders here were female.They looked at me in amazement as if I had asked a silly and naive question: 'Which man would be willing to do this job?'.
'Which man would be willing to do this job?'I heard this expression again a few weeks later when I talked to a female worker in the workshop of a silk reeling factory in Yizhou.Similar to silkworm breeding, positions in reeling faculties manifest extremely clear-cut gender segregation, both in practice and perception, where almost all workers are female.Throughout the entire procedures of sericultural production in the past and at present, it is reeling cocoons and weaving fabrics that have shown a more pronounced gender division of labour compared to rearing silkworms.Since the commercialisation of the textile industry in the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, men became the owners of most silk mills in control of techniques and machines of reeling and weaving and they employed women workers who lost access and mastering of more advanced weaving skills (Bray 1997: 184).This transformation led to a significant reduction in women's tribute to the household's finance, as Bray argues, and further reduced the status of women in the family from main tax contributor to merely a children's birth-giver and caretaker.It is a more insidious form of gender injustice than gender differentiation based on the level of physical demands, and similar power hierarchy in gender never ceased in the modern and contemporary sericultural industry in China either.
Moreover, the justification of gender segregation in sericulture presents a double suppression of women.Paradoxically, women were considered unsuitable for agronomy in college education as agrarian labour is too heavy; meanwhile, in practice, it was still mainly women who performed manual work in sericultural industry, including raising silkworms and processing silk products.Hence a large number of men trained in professional sericultural studies, have gained the opportunities to be managers, instructors, specialists and employers of these female workers.
Bray in her historical study of agricultural science and technology in ancient China notes that from the Ming and Qing dynasties onwards, the sericultural industry was dominated by men who held the means of production and occupational skills, while women were reduced to pure drudgery (1997, p. 184).Till today, in the Chinese sericulture industry, a field that has been entitled as feminine since ancient times, there has been no significant improvement in the skewing of both cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu, 1993) in favour of men over women.

IMPOSED GENDER BIAS: THE FATE OF FEMALE SILKWORMS IN SERICULTURE
If tentatively thinking from the perspective of silkworms, it is worth exploring whether sex would matter to those nonhuman cocoon-producers in a similar way to that in interpersonal communities.In silkworm husbandry in China, most worms spend their larval stage in farmers' farmhouses, having a designated domestic space regularly cleaned and disinfected by their human caretakers.Here silkworms won't be treated differently because of their sexes.First-instar silkworm ants and young larvae are almost impossible to distinguish between their sexes with humans' naked eye.By the time a worm reaches its fifth instar whose body is as thick as a human finger, its sex can be judged by observing its reproductive organ on the abdomen.Farmers, nevertheless, were not very interested in telling the sex of each silkworm, as it is an insignificant issue.The newly hatched first-instar larvae they bought from silkworm breeding companies are of mixed gender and the cocoons they sold to silk reeling factories for profit are, too, of both sexes.Many farmers in Yizhou County I've interviewed deemed there were no noticeable differences between the cocoons spun by male and female silkworms.Even Liang Shaoji, the artist who claimed himself very acute to visual forms, has not noticed any gender divergence in terms of the shape or quality of cocoons.In this sense, silkworms do the same silk-secreting job regardless of their sexes.
Cocoons transported to silk reeling factories were usually dried at a high temperature so as to be stored for a longer period of time.Only the cocoons which housed the future 'producers' of silkworm eggs will be sent to breeding stations for the pupae inside to perform their mating duties.It is a place where sexes do matter.Cocoons will be cut at one corner so that pupae can be poured out and separated by female human workers into two groups.One afternoon, at the Breeding Station of Yizhou County, a female worker Ms Fang sat in the open space in front of the mating room, processing cocoons at a rapid speed of almost one per second.Beside her, there was one bucket of fresh cocoons and one bucket of cut-up empty cocoon shells.Two round bamboo trays contained male and female pupae respectively.She explained to me the most accurate method to distinguish the sex of those pupae, that is, to 'observe the buttocks of a silkworm'.A female pupa has a larger and fatter abdomen with eggs inside and an 'X'-shaped gland in the centre; a male silkworm's abdomen is more pointed, with a small brown depressed dot at its end.In practice, however, a skilled worker did not need to turn the pupa over every time to make a judgement.A more efficient tip is to look at the back of a pupa.The dorsal line of a female pupa is paler as if smudged by water, and its abdominal segments are more widely spaced; a male's dorsal line, on the contrary, is relatively well defined.Fang elucidated the trick in extremely plain language: 'When teaching our children to help do this job, just tell them to pick out the bigger ones.Those bigger, fatter ones with brighter backs are females.Once you have handled enough pupae, you will be able to figure it out even by touching its body.'Those sexually segregated naked pupae will wait till moth to perform their role as fertility machines and eventually die.
Besides the employment of silkworms' reproductive capacity, the sex screening of silkworms occurs in some unexpected scenarios.Domestic silkworm, or Bombyx mori, has 28 pairs of chromosomes, of which 27 pairs of autosomes are the same in both sexes and one pair of sex chromosomes designate ZW for females and ZZ for males.Statistically, the sex ratio of silkworm eggs should be 1:1 in normal circumstances.Generally, energies obtained from eating mulberry leaves are used for silkworms' metabolism, development of their body organs and movements.For female silkworms, a large proportion of energies obtained from food will be used for the growth of eggs in addition to secreting silk filaments.In contrast, sperms ask for fewer nutrients from male pupae to develop than eggs from female pupae.A male silkworm thus can use more energy to produce silk than its female counterpart under the same conditions.For this reason, male silkworms have been regarded as more viable and productive for the sericulture industry, as males produce more silk, or they need to eat fewer mulberry leaves than females to spin the same amount of silk (Strunnikov, 1995).This became the motivation for some scientists' enthusiasm in working on the feasibility of raising male-only silkworms exclusively in practice.
The plot of the silkworm community contaminated by 'sexism' in human society began in the year 1975.The Soviet biologist Vladimir Strunnikov developed a strain from mutants with translocations of the X chromosome via radiation breeding.The sex-linked balanced lethal (SLBL) strain can give as many as 98% male offspring while the female eggs are eliminated in their embryonic period (1995).However, the surviving males of this strain can produce very few silk threads and are difficult to take care of, therefore the SLBL strain is hard to be widely applied in mass silkworm husbandry.
There exist other laser-induced or heat-induced silkworm mutations that can differentiate the sexes by egg colour, body marks at the larval stage or cocoon colour.These mutated strains with very low hatching and survival rates, nevertheless, can only serve the purpose of sex segregation and it is impossible to pragmatically use them for all-male silkworm rearing (Wang et al., 2016).The Soviet SLBT strain was imported to China in 1996 by Zhejiang Sericulture Research Centre, and after constant selection and crossbreeding, Chinese scientists developed more than sixty 'male strains' with better economic characteristics that meet the standard for putting into sericultural production (ibid.).The target consumers of these sexcontrolled all-male varieties, however, are not ordinary farmers and breeding stations.For silkworm egg companies, the cost of producing eggs of SLBT strains is theoretically four times higher than that of common varieties, although, in practice, scientists have endeavoured to reduce the cost to less than twice (Chen et al., 2004).Despite the benefit that a male silkworm produces more silk than a female under the same conditions, the high cost of breeding SLBT strains cannot be offset.
Then why researchers and commercial companies were still willing to commit to the objective of allmale variety cultivation?
Here it comes to another controversial advantage of male-only silkworm rearing other than higher productivity, that is, the higher quality of the silk spun by male silkworms.Silk thread spun by males is claimed to be stronger and purer with better elasticity and resistance to friction.Moreover, raw silk is divided into several grades from the lowest 1A to the highest 6A in China's national standard of silk quality inspection, while the processed malespun raw silk is more likely to achieve the '6A' grade.These 'masculine' raw silk aims to meet the demand for luxury silk products in the international market.Because of the relatively small share of such a high-end market and the high production costs, only a few companies in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong and Sichuan provinces in China are now engaged in the pioneering practice of male silkworm rearing.In the APEC Summit held in Beijing in 2014, costumes of traditional Chinese style designed for state leaders and political celebrities are all made of raw silk spun by the male silkworm, and also, the raw material of silk products under high fashion brands like LV and Chanel are all male-spun (Wang et al., 2016).When male silk is associated with keywords such as luxury, best quality and rarity, it has obtained higher economic value and social status in human society.When the female eggs laid by the same SLBT-strain female moth all died in embryo, the male silk lost its potential rival 'female silk' and monopolised the supply side of luxury silk products.
The plot of female silkworms in this story is familiar, as it perfectly resembles the fate of some female babies in those human communities with a history of female infanticide.Those unwanted female unborn babies, both human and silkworm, were considered inferior or less useful and therefore unworthy of the right to life.It remains contested whether male silk is genuinely better than female silk, as it might be a gender-biased result due to gender-biased testing processes.Nevertheless, as an affirmative conclusion, male silk possessing better quality has been widely acknowledged in the community of silkworm biologists, and moreover, packaged and sold to the consumer class who seek cultural and symbolic capitals from high-end luxury goods.Meanwhile, biologists have to admit that in many sericultural regions in China, the majority of quality testing facilities in use, instead of more sensitive equipment in laboratory conditions, are not sufficiently accurate to recognise the quality gap between premium 6A male silk and 6A female silk.The unrecognizability of male silk's quality advantage in large-scale silk-processing practice hence restricts the promotion and scaling-up of allmale silkworm rearing (Wang et al., 2016, p. 195).Moreover, the claimed superb quality of single-sex silk products is not outstanding enough to be distinguished by touch or by naked eyes of their human users.Thereby the paradoxes between the largely constructed gender advantage and its intangibility for sensing apparatus of both ordinary machines and human bodies can bring ethical challenges to the justification of developing the techniques to kill female silkworm embryos.

CONCLUSION: ON TRANS-SPECIES ETHICS
For domestic silkworms, sexism is intentionally copied and imposed into their interspecies communities, where some female silkworm embryos sacrificed their lives to human beings' pursuit of political and cultural capital.Female silkworms trapped in the web of human-silkworm relations suffer double oppression of sexism and anthropocentrism.Taking the polarised temporal scales between silkworms and humans into consideration, the negative impact of pregnancy and childbirth on the social value of females has been compacted to and drastically manifested in silkworms' short lifespan of around fifty days.Though animals' life experiences should not be reduced to mirrors or windows to observe human society, the case of acclaimed masculine silk is thought-provoking where patriarchal structure and ideology affects female bodies, rights and the social capitals they can gain not only in the human community but substantially penetrated into silkworms' social lives.
Moreover, in the above discussions on genetic suppression of females through radiation breeding and the marketing of male silk as superior, my use of the term 'sexism' can also be seen as contaminated by human ideology, as it just simply transfers humanist concepts such as the right to life (as in female infanticide) and gender equality (as in the gender division of labour in the sericultural industry) onto the sphere of silkworms.As feminist standpoint theory (e.g.Haraway, 1988;Harding, 2004) argues, the political power structures and biased discourses in knowledge production and transmission can transform knowledge itself, and hence scientific knowledge is always socially constructed and situated instead of objective and value-neutral.As for biological trials to achieve the objective of male-only offspring via laser-induced mutation, for example, it would be impossible for such research design to pass ethics review if treating silkworm participants as human beings entitled to the right to life and equality.However, many biology departments in universities today only require projects involving vertebrate animals to go through a research ethics review beforehand, manifesting the remains of evolutionary speciesism.The ethics and ethos for animal studies in this regard need to be updated with more awareness of oppression and should devote care, respect and commitment to marginalised and minoritarian humans and nonhumans under investigation, as Puig de la Bellacasa suggests who incorporate feminist care and standpoint theory into the framework of 'matters of care ' (2017, p. 95).
Meanwhile, it should be noted that extending the ethical schemas and identity politics in interpersonal societies to wider social relations with other animals and plants risks the danger of slipping into the trap of ignoring non-human living experiences as another form of anthropocentrism.The ethics of care offers an alternative pathway to speculate on this dilemma, which emphasises the contextual, relational and dependent essence of ethical concerns (e.g.Held, 2005;Adams and Donovan, 2007).It would be arrogant and reductive to formulate all-encompassing ethical codes for interactions between human and non-human entities in terms of care ethics; instead, the speculation would be more fruitful to examine the dependent relationship between humans and domestic silkworms and the situational controversies of male silk privilege rather than figuring out any decontextualized abstract rules.It becomes obvious that through such a lens the biological technique of breeding male-only silkworms cannot be ethically justified by the constructed advantages of male silk, and it is double oppression of female silkworms by the gender bias of their human caretakers.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Sericulture Step 11: Harvest the Cocoons, in 'Imperially Commissioned Illustrations of Agriculture and Sericulture'.Picture courtesy of Library of Congress.

Figure 3 :
Figure 3: Female breeders with masks and hoods assisting the silkworm moths' mating.Picture courtesy of Feixuan Xu.