A Puzzle: Women’s Growing Domestic-Role Orientation in Urban China
My research on work and family relations in urban China began with my observations in the post-Mao reform era over two decades ago. In 1986 I left my home city of Beijing to study sociology in the USA, and it was on a return visit there in the winter of 1996 that I met up with Dongdong, a close friend from junior high. Dongdong and I had not seen each other for 18 years. She told me that she had gained a degree in political science and had been a professor in a vocational college (zhi gong da xue)—an amazing achievement for anyone of our generation whose opportunity to complete high school was dashed by the Cultural Revolution. In 1983, she married an engineer and a year later her son was born. As we touched on the subject of women’s careers, Dongdong stunned me by saying: “[to a woman] doing your job well is not as good as marrying well” (gan de hao bu ru jia de hao). I could not believe that this long-abandoned phrase of our childhood had come out of the mouth of an educated career woman from the generation who were socialized to believe that women could “hold up half of the sky.” During that era, a young woman would be perceived by society as “lacking a broad revolutionary ideal” (que fa yuan da ge ming li xiang) and would be looked down upon if her lifetime goal was merely to marry Mr. Right.
But Dongdong was far from exceptional. On another visit to Beijing in May 1998, a copy of Hope (Xi Wang), a popular Chinese women’s magazine, caught my eye at a news-stand. This issue was devoted to “Mother’s Day”—a cultural borrowing from the USA. On the front page, there was a picture of a beautiful young woman with the caption: “Quan zhi tai tai (full-time stay-at-home married women) as a new fashion”—the topic of a forum in this issue. I bought the magazine and began to read. Interestingly, stay-at-home married women used to be called “housewives” (jia ting fu nü)—a term primarily associated with the illiteracy and backwardness of urban married women in the Mao era. In the post-Mao period, however, the same concept, expressed as quan zhi tai tai (QZTT), entails admirable qualities such as good education, wealth, autonomy, leisure, and nobility. The results of an online survey of urban women on this subject (conducted in December 1997) were published in the same issue of Hope:
First respondent’s profile: Gao Lin, from the city of Dalian, female, age 26, office worker with a college degree.
Question #1: | What would be the greatest advantage of being a QZTT? |
Answer: | Not having to be led by a leader, making decisions of my own, doing whatever I enjoy. |
Question #2: | What would make you worry the most about becoming a QZTT? How would you deal with it? |
Answer: | I’d worry about falling behind in terms of knowledge, social awareness, vision, and elegance. To prevent this from happening, I would keep up my reading and take an active role in society. |
Question #3: | What qualifies someone to be a QZTT? |
Answer: | Having a loving husband with a monthly income of around 5000 yuan, a child between 3 months and 5 years old, and belonging to a network of other QZTTs. |
Question #4: | What would be your plan as a QZTT? |
Answer: | I would do more reading, listen to music, do aerobics, travel, and look after the home. |
Unsurprisingly, almost all 31 female respondents had a college degree since this was an online survey which was not accessible to the majority of lower-educated urbanites in 1998, but surprisingly, 23 of them were interested in being a QZTT for similar reasons to Gao. The survey report was followed by brief essays written by QZTTs. Most of them claimed its legitimacy by calling it an “occupation”: one that offered autonomy, freedom, and meaning. A few were bored, isolated, and inclined to be irritable.
In addition to this anecdotal evidence, there were quantitative data pointing in the same direction. As I compared the results of the nationwide survey on the social status of Chinese women conducted in 2000 with that of 1990 conducted by the Women’s Studies Institute of China (Jiang 2006; Tao and Jiang 1995), I noted that during this ten-year period, Chinese urban women’s employment rate had declined from 76.3 % to 63.5 %. By contrast, the percentage of women who supported the separate-sphere ideology (i.e., men work mainly outside the home and women work within it) had risen from 44.8 % to 50.4 %; the amount of time women spent on domestic tasks compared with their husbands had gone up from 1.74 to 2.79 times greater. Of all the non-employed urban women aged 24 to 49 in 2000, 40.3 % were not working for domestic reasons, doubling the percentage (19.8) in 1990. The trend seemed to continue through another decade. According to the Third National Survey on Women’s Status in China (Ding 2013) conducted in 2010, more women and men identified themselves with traditional gender roles than their counterparts in the previous surveys. For example, 44.4 % of urban women and 52.9 % of men believed that men should devote themselves more to a breadwinner role and women to family work, an 8.7 % and 11.8 % increase for women and men respectively since 2000. Similarly, 48 % of women and 40.7 % of men agreed that women were less successful in their careers than in their marriages; the numbers rose 10.7 percentage points for women and 10.5 for men, compared to the 2000 survey.
This trend is perplexing, given the near-equality with men in education and employment achieved by urban women, not to mention decades of socialization under the socialist state that had molded women more into non-gendered “state persons” than feminized “wives” and “mothers” (Chen 2003; Zuo 2013). What amazed me even more was that China was not alone; other former socialist countries were experiencing a similar trend (e.g. Fondor 2003; Funk 1993; Kotzeva 1999; Rudd 2003).
What Has Happened and What to Study?
In my earlier fieldwork (Zuo 2003; Zuo and Bian 2001), I attributed this trend mainly to the persistence of the traditional Chinese culture of “separate spheres” that can be seen in the interactions of marriage. I concluded that the traditional gender culture of working in the home in exchange for greater economic security with their husbands had more to offer women than paid work (and the reverse was true for men). Other studies tend to attribute women’s growing domestic-role orientation in urban China primarily to labor-market discrimination (Jiang 2006), women’s childcare responsibilities (Parish and Busse 2000), or excessive top-down “women’s liberation” and “gender equality” campaigns in the state-socialist period (1949–1978). It could also be argued that growing social acceptance of their domestic orientation gives women greater freedom to balance work and family. But these explanations proved inadequate when I later conducted an oral history of women of the revolutionary generation who had come of age at the dawn of the 1949 revolution. Compared with younger cohorts, an overwhelming majority of urban women, rich and poor alike, did not work outside the home prior to the revolution, mainly due to the age-old influence of traditional gender culture and the unavailability of jobs for urban women. In my interviews with a group of ever-married women and men of the revolutionary generation from various socioeconomic backgrounds, I noted most women’s enthusiasm for paid work and their shared provider role after 1949 (Zuo 2013), despite the persistence of traditional gender culture and job discrimination against women that is documented in many studies (e.g. Andores 1983; Croll 1995; Johnson 1983; Wolf 1985). I learned that women’s enjoyment of paid work partly stemmed from the changing meaning of work arising from the integration of state and family, and class and gender transformations, rather than merely from economic gains. I then realized that to understand gender configuration and change in the post-Mao period, I needed to move beyond cultural, familial, and labor-market dimensions to take into account the historical processes that have shaped women’s varying work–family experiences within and between generations.
Placing the Chinese case in the theoretical context of Marxism and feminism, we see that China’s recent reform has been undergoing a rapid transition from state socialism to market capitalism amid unprecedented globalization (Hart-Landsberg and Burkett 2005). While Marxist class-first and feminist patriarchy-first theorizing on women’s subordination and liberation are largely based on women of the Western bourgeoisie facing many sexist barriers to full employment in capitalist societies, in reformed China the opposite holds true. In fact, Chinese women’s domestic-role orientation is happening at a time when female employment has been the norm but the workplace has increasingly become a site for market production (Zuo 2014a). That said, I note the historical parallel between the “separate-sphere” revival in transitional China and the “cult of domesticity” in the nineteenth-century development of capitalist markets in the industrial West, where the “separate-sphere” ideal developed similarly, first among (white) middle-class women and then among working-class women (Coontz 1988). This interesting parallel has prompted my interest in examining the relationship between market and family in the cult of domesticity in China. Still, unlike Western societies, China’s present-day gendered marital division of labor in urban areas has been formulated in response to the disaggregation of the socialist state and families through the abolition of all-encompassing work units (danwei) rather than due to the collapse of the corporate family system in the West. China’s unique historical contours call for an analysis of the three-way interaction between the state (workplace), the market, and the family that has largely shaped women’s work and family roles during the socialist and post-socialist transitions.
This book therefore explores the workplace-engendering processes by which urban women have constructed their work and family roles at varying historical moments. During the Mao era, families and the state/workplace were highly integrated, as indicated by their shared moral values of class and gender equality, and their similar power structures of generation-based patriarchy, as well as their mutual embeddedness, with the latter perceived as an enlarged family and the former as basic cells of the state. Under this arrangement, the workplace, on one hand, performed most welfare functions on behalf of the state, such as providing job security, health care, housing, and free education in urban areas (Bian 1994). On the other hand, it also penetrated family life in every possible way, including aligning family values with those of the state and limiting personal freedom.
While state reform strategies of decentralization, privatization, the smashing of the “iron rice bowl” (lifetime employment) and of “eating from the communal pot” (egalitarian redistribution), and open-door policies are intended to provide individuals with incentives and opportunities to improve their livelihood through competition, the reform processes are often fraught with paradoxes, producing mixed and, sometimes, devastating results for workers, who become increasingly vulnerable to labor denigration and work–family conflict (Zuo 2014; Zuo and Jiang 2012). By labor denigration, I mean that labor is no longer valued as a resource for human existence but is treated as a commodity for capital accumulation; working-class people lose dignity and humanitarian conditions and are subject to degradation and exploitation through market competition (Marx 1978, Polanyi [1944] 2001). Work–family conflict refers to the situation in which the demands of work make it difficult to fulfil family responsibilities (Voydanoff 2005). More fundamentally, work–family conflict may stem from the inherent contradiction between unrestrained market-based private desires and the need for development for the common good (Polanyi [1944] 2001). In the case of transitional China, it also means the disappearance of family welfare...