Work empowers women, eases burdens

Rural housewives find stable jobs, become financially independent and lead dignified lives

YINCHUAN — Sewing machines whirring and thread cones spinning, Zhang Qiuli, 34, strides around the buzzing workshop keeping everything in check.

Three years ago, she was a rural housewife, living on the wages of her husband who left for work in a city. Today, she manages a group of around 40 workers in her hometown.

“Instead of asking my husband for money, I earn it myself,” said Zhang.

Zhang lives in Siyuan village in Guyuan city of Northwest China’s Ningxia Hui autonomous region. The village is located in the Xihaigu area, which, for many years, was deemed “uninhabitable”.

For a long time, women in Xihaigu stayed at home taking care of the children, cattle and crops, while men sought work to support the family. Local housewives, with few sources of income, had to ask their husbands for household spending money, scrimping and saving to get by.

He Wenhua, 46, from Hongya village in Xihaigu, recalled that her grandmother rarely spent any money on dressing herself up because of the family’s tight finances, something which was common in the village.

“Rural women like grandma could only rely on their husbands for money and how much they could get often depended on the men’s mood,” said He.

Women of her generation in Xihaigu are eager to secure an income of their own.

In Zhang’s case, she left the village several times to find casual work, but after having a second baby in 2012, she had to quit her job and return home to take care of the children.

Life in the village has changed in recent years, as China achieved its goal of eliminating extreme poverty in late 2020.

Many factories have been established in and around the village, including Ningxia Quanxiang, a manufacturer of outdoor goods, where Zhang now has a stable job for the first time.

According to Huang Shuihai, the general manager of the company, more than 90 percent of its approximately 500 employees are local rural housewives.

Some, like Zhang, have worked their way up to become management. Zhang is now a workshop manager at the factory and earns a monthly salary of around 4,000 yuan ($629).

“It didn’t feel good to ask for money from someone else,” said Zhang. “Now that we are breadwinners ourselves, we have become more confident in spending the money.”

According to the report monitoring the results of the Outline for the Development of Chinese Women (2011-2020), released by the National Bureau of Statistics in December 2021, women accounted for 43.5 percent of China’s total working population, thanks to employment and entrepreneurship policies introduced over the past decade.

He, the woman from Hongya village, became a paraplegic following a car accident. With government support, she learned to knit hats and shoes and the products sell well across the country, earning her about 30,000 yuan annually.

In order to develop the business, she began to livestream her handiwork, and teaches more than 20 fellow villagers to knit so they can also create better lives for themselves.

“I’m disabled but I feel more confident and free now,” she said. “I hope more rural women can become financially independent and lead a dignified life.”

With more rural women in the Xihaigu area joining the workforce, they have a bigger role in the family.

Zhang said, sometimes, when her daughter asks her husband for pocket money, he says “go get that from your mom”.

At work, she also encourages other newly recruited female workers, because getting the job relieves some financial burden from their families.

“Moreover, a job helps you live for yourself, instead of life just revolving around your husband and children,” she said.