Although zhifu is a term more closely associated with men’s wear than with women’s, women’s work in the Mao years did include making zhifu. Chapter Four documents the proliferation of sewing schools for women in the 1950s, showing that they were a route by which women entered the paid workforce. Women in various contexts – in factories, sewing co-ops, and especially in their homes – were significant agents in the production of the new national wardrobe. In much of rural China, women continued to spin the yarn, weave the cloth, and make the clothes and shoes for all the family members. In this way, they reproduced a material culture not too different from that of preceding generations (although not entirely the same, either). In the towns, however, a new material culture was created, much of it at the hands of women.

Chapter 4 recovers what girls in apprenticeships learned, the range of trades they practiced and how they were taught. Treating apprenticeship as a training system, operating in parallel to that of boys, this chapter uses the mass of information in legal disputes to reconstruct tasks like starching, binding petticoats, using patterns and making lace; keeping shop; and the wider world of training in housewifery, literacy and working in schools. Gentry apprentices were particularly concerned with learning the right level of skills and avoiding ‘drudgery’, aiming at running their own shops and pressing for independence, while apprentices through the rest of the social spectrum followed a highly differentiated set of occupations making textiles and clothes, very few of which were entirely sex-specific. Training involved watching and copying, but also included a keen regulation of appearance and the risk of physical correction.