Abstract
This chapter situates urban women’s domestic-role orientation since China’s market reform in their work environments which have been undergoing the processes of privatization or marketization. Data come from in-depth interviews with women of the Mao and post-Mao cohorts. It finds labor commodification, the undermining of egalitarian socialist redistributive justice, and fierce competition are the main causes of women’s alienation from their workplaces, which leads to their growing domestic-role orientation. In this sense, the author sees urban women’s greater devotion to their household responsibilities than to their market work as passive resistance to labor denigration.
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Notes
- 1.
Here, “workers” refer to all wage and salary earners who make a living by selling their labor as opposed to make a living by capital investment.
- 2.
In the same interview, I discovered from Tian that her factory leaders failed to live up to their promise.
- 3.
A type of life insurance that covers death, disability, or hospitalization due to accident.
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Zuo, J. (2016). Women’s Domestic-Role Orientation. In: Work and Family in Urban China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55465-9_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55465-9_6
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