Burning Incense, Pledging Sisterhood: Communities of Women Workers in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949

Abstract

During the thirty years between the end of World War I and Liberation in 1949, it was comnmon for women who worked in the cotton mills of Shanghai to form sisterhood societies (jiemei hui). After working together for several years, six to ten women would formalize their relationship with one another by pledging sisterhood. Sometimes this simply involved going to a restaurant, eating a meal together, drinking a cup of one-heart wine, and toasting their loyalty to one another. Because large numbers of wonmen workers were Buddhists, it was more common for those forming sisterhoods to go to a Buddhist temple, burn incense before the statue of a deity, and pledge to be loyal to one another through life and death. Once they had formed a sisterhood, the members would call each other by kinship terms based on their age: the oldest was Big Sister, the next oldest Second Sister, and so forth. Often members of the sisterhoods contributed money to buv a cloth in order to make each member an