Understanding Married Women's Domestic Role Orientation in Urban China: The Role of The Changing Workplace
Urban women in China were well known for their high employment rates (over 90%) and strong identity with their workplaces under state socialism (1949-1978). However, this trend is somewhat reversed during the post-socialist era since market transition. That is, women re-embrace the gender "separate-sphere" ideology, identify more with their activities at home than at work, and devote a greater portion of their time to household tasks than to paid work compared with the past. What has happened to make the reversal possible? What is the role of the changing workplace in transforming meanings of work for women and impacting women's reconstruction of family roles? And what does it suggest about changing state-citizen relations? The PI' attempts to address the above questions in collaboration with Yongping Jiang, Senior researcher from Women's Studies Institute of China.
Using in-depth interviews and observations of urban women, the present study will try to understand women's family orientation formed in everyday life in large contexts of China's market reform and globalization. It will pay close attention to how women's gender ideology, identity, and deep feelings are affected by changes in state welfare/employment policies, work environment, and their interactions with workplace leaderships. It will also take the within-case, cross-case, and cross-generation approaches to compare the similarities and differences of women's experiences across historical period, work environment, and generation.
The PIs will recruit, in the city of Beijing, approximately 100 married women coming of age in the socialist and post-socialist eras, who either currently hold a job or had ever worked in the past but are under the official retirement ages. The sample will be drawn by the "maximizing range" technique through the PIs' broad personal and professional networks. The subsample size for the socialist and post-socialist cohorts will be equally divided. For the purpose of comparison, a supplemental sample of six to ten cases will also be drawn from Nanjiecun, Henan Province, in which the Maoist socialist system still prevails.
Data collection will involve in-depth interviews with urban women and, where appropriate, their spouses, and co-workers, to be conducted in the summer and fall of 2005. The questions will focus on how women form their gender ideologies, identities and divide family tasks, and how women's diverse/changing work experiences, together with other factors (e.g. persistence of traditional culture, marital happiness), have contributed to the congruence and incongruence of those ideology, identity and performance.
Some intended scholarly contributions include (1) enriching gender theories by placing women's domestic orientation in the nexus of manifold, interwoven historical, institutional, and global forces, (2) enhancing the validity of the qualitative data and measurement of variables in future quantitative research by employing multiple sources and temporal organization of data, by emphasizing historic, institutional, and global connectedness in data collection, and (3) providing points of comparison for future cross-cultural comparative studies and more globally integrated analyses on gender, class, and state-citizen relations by introducing a Chinese case.
It will have broad impacts on (1) higher education through the increased breath of theory and of methodology, disseminated through publications, teaching, and student training in research, (2) feminist movements which may incorporate diverse agendas for women facing various forms of oppression in varying situations and historical moments, (3) Chinese state policies on welfare in general and on women's employment in particular, (4) the public understanding, in the U.S. as well as in other parts of the world, of the evolvement of social justice systems regarding gender and class in state socialist countries like China, and of China's global connectedness.
