Many things were behind Sincere’s efforts to hire saleswomen. There was a social and political commitment to expanding China’s labor force and allowing women to participate in it on more equal terms; there was the practical fact that they could pay women lower wages, since they had fewer employment options. But there was also the perception that the public presence of women workers helped create a certain kind of atmosphere in which shopping could be a pastime, for both men and women. Perhaps most fundamentally, the desire of department stores to hire women was inseparable from their desire to be comfortable places for female shoppers. That required physical changes you can see elsewhere in this exhibit, such as making stores bright, airy, and easy to get around; but it also required complex engagement with both old and new ideas about the proper role of Chinese women.
From very early times, we find some texts and pictures showing women in marketplaces, both as buyers and sellers. And from the beginning, we also find texts decrying this presence as improper, or excusing it only because certain kinds of women, such as widows, had no choice but to engage in public buying and selling. It was routine to praise women for contributing to their household’s income – by, for instance, weaving cloth for sale – but just as routine to insist that this should be done without the woman leaving her home.
Meanwhile, if shopping was mostly a matter of picking out a good quality example of a specific good you already knew you needed, and then negotiating against a crafty merchant over its price, there was little reason for a “respectable” woman to do this herself: much better to send a trusted male servant. A famous scroll like Along the River at Qingming Festival (ca. 1120) did indeed show women out shopping – but this was allowed because it was a special occasion, much like the religious pilgrimages that also allowed women to go out in public. And even then, all the women shown in the scroll – except for a few very poor ones -- were accompanied by men (mostly servants) from their households.
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Two scenes from the scroll Along the River at Qingming Festival
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By the early 20th century, there were some notable public advocates of a different approach. Notably, the reformist intellectual Liang Qichao (1873-1929) argued in his influential work A New People (Xinmin shuo), first published in 1902, that for China to survive in the competitive modern world, it needed more women in the workplace. But at the same time, Liang was bitterly critical of efforts to promote consumerism; he wanted his “new people” to be frugal, allowing China to reinvest as much of its output as possible in railroads, steamships, modern weapons and other “national” priorities.
This mix of attitudes persisted into the Republic. Progressives generally praised the so-called “new woman,” defined as an educated (and at least implicitly young and urban) woman with a profession that allowed her to support herself economically. However, they often joined with conservatives in attacking the “modern girl,” who was defined as somebody (also young and urban) more interested in fashion, and thus consumption, than in contributing to either family or nation.
A third vision, however, did imagine a certain type of woman consumer as a positive moral model, and allowed her a role that could continue into middle age. This was a vision of the good woman as middle class housewife: educated and glamorous enough to be an interesting companion for her modern husband, but not focused on a career for herself, or on looking good for its own sake. Instead, she used her brainpower to manage the home intelligently: choosing nutritionally valuable foods (including some that were not traditional in China, such as cow’s milk), creating a comfortable and culturally stimulating home that would restore her menfolk for the next day of work or school without drowning them in debt, and raising healthy children who would be free of superstition, politically aware, and eager to contribute to the nation. In short, her role as household manager was very much a role as her family’s purchasing manager, making thoughtful decisions about an expanded world of goods that would help make everyone proper modern citizens.
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Ads for Ovaltine and Horlick’s, two western brands of flavored milk. Both were new to China, and relatively expensive, and were promoted by claiming that they would make Chinese stronger, and better able to compete globally.
(Source: tbc)
While the goods associated with this lifestyle were often beyond the means of most actual women, and it is impossible to know how many women actually aspired to this role, it offered a model that reconciled expanding consumption and a moderate interest in fashion with both familial and patriotic virtue, and a sense of purpose rooted in contemporary Chinese realities with attention to what one’s peers in the West and Japan were buying and doing. For marketers, it was a powerful tool – and one that fit perfectly with the goals and needs of department stores like Sincere.
