The Library

Women's textile production was *even more important* in China than in western Eurasia, believe it or not. The saying "Men till, women weave" was the classic expression of the gendered division of labor for more than 2000 years. Since the time of the Han dynasty at least both men and women were subject to taxation. Depending on the dynasty, either the household had to provide both grain and textiles, or each adult male was assessed an amount of grain, each adult female, textiles.

The cash value of the grain & textile taxes tended to be roughly equal (see, e.g. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, p. 186), but it's rare to see either primary sources or scholars admit it: the life-or-death significance of the grain tax, and the grain harvest, absolutely dominates everyone's thinking. But (as Bray shows) up until the Single-Whip Tax reform of the late 16thC (after which all taxes were rolled into one, to be payed in silver) women's textile production wasn't just a foundation of the home, it was a foundation of the *state*.

As is usual for premodern technology, most of the technical innovations Dr Devereaux mentions above were invented in China several centuries (at least) before they appeared further west. Originally, Chinese tax textiles were hemp in the north, silk in the south. Cotton became important starting around the time of the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, and spread rapidly. I don't know enough about the workflow for hemp and cotton textile production to know how much of it went to spinning. The workflow for silk production is very different: silk is "reeled", because it comes off the cocoons as long threads, several of which need to be twisted together to make a workable floss.

The standard description of the demographic transition has a important counterexample. Birth rates in France started falling in the 18th century, before industrialization or a drop in infant mortality. Guillaume Blanc's 2023 paper, The Cultural Origins of the Demographic Transition in France, begins with a quote from Malthus, in fact. Blanc presents preliminary evidence that France's demographic transition was the result of secularization & anti-clericalism.

A reasonable level of birth control could be achieved using only materials found in the home (mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus--not to mention oral sex, sodomy, or the other thousand & one fun activities that are not PiV), once French people stopped worrying what God wanted them to do. The assumption that premodern people *had* to have as many offspring as possible is not supported by this evidence.

Faustine Perrin (2022) suggests that the Enlightenment/the Revolution/anticlericalism led to a rising level of felt equality for French women in marriages, so that they were better able to assert their desire to bear fewer children.

In the present day, this ties into the work of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Claudia Goldin, whose article on The Downside of Fertility I just read because she talked about Bujold's Vorkosigan series in an economics podcast. TLDR: Bearing & raising children is hard work, labor even, and women are reluctant to do it if they don't have help.