Abstract
What kinds of futures can urban Chinese mothers imagine for their toddler daughters? How do gender role expectations shape what they imagine? This paper addresses these questions by looking at how a high-income mother and a low-income mother in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, talked about their aspirations for their toddler daughters’ development of independence and excellence. We further examine the childrearing practices they used in the present and hoped to use in the future to cultivate these qualities. 2 Drawing on analysis of interviews, survey responses, and video recordings of mothers playing with their daughters, we examine the dilemmas that arise when Chinese mothers try to cultivate these qualities in their daughters while also trying to maximize their daughters’ current and future chances for happiness in a society where independence and excellence are sometimes considered less appropriate for females than for males.
The authors would like to thank Chen Chen, Lue Fang, Shixin Fang, Linying Ji, Wei Li, Shu Lin, Xue Qing, Wenjuan Qin, Xu Zhao, Shuyi Zhou, and Xiaoyan Ke for help with data collection, transcriptions, and analysis. The authors are also grateful for the support provided by the Harvard University China Fund, the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, the New York University Global Office, the New York University Institute of Human Development and Social Change, the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Programme for Introducing Talents of Disciplines to Universities (B08024), and the Chinese Ministry of Education’s Cultivation Fund for Key Scientific and Technical Innovation Projects (704025).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Allison, Anne. “Cyborg Violence: Bursting Borders and Bodies with Queer Machines.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 237–65.
Allison, Anne. Millenial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Anagnost, Ann. “Children and National Transcendence in China.” In Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics, edited by Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Shuen-fu Lin, and Ernest P. Young, 195–222. Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1997a.
Ann Arbor. National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997b.
Bronfenbrenner, Urie. “Contexts of Child Rearing: Problems and Prospects,” American Psychologist 34, no. 10 (1979): 844–50.
Bronfenbrenner, Urie. “Ecology of the Family as a Context for Human Development: Research Perspectives,” Developmental Psychology 22, no. 6 (1986): 723–42.
Chao, Ruth K. “Beyond Parental Control and Authoritarian Parenting Style: Understanding Chinese Parenting through the Cultural Notion of Training,” Child Development 65, no. 4 (1994): 1111–19.
Chen, Xinyin, with Qi Dong and Hong Zhou. “Authoritative and Authoritarian Parenting Practices and Social and School Performance in Chinese Children,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 21, no. 4 (1997): 855–74.
Chua, Amy. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. New York: The Penguin Press, 2011.
Croll, Elisabeth J. Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self-Perception in Twentieth-Century China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1995.
Davis, Deborah S. “Self-Employment in Shanghai: A Research Note,” The China Quarterly 157 (1999): 22–43.
Deci, Edward L. with Richard Koestner and Richard M. Ryan. “A Meta-Analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 6 (1999): 627–68.
Evans, Harriet. Women and Sexuality in China: Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949. New York: Continuum, 1997.
Evans, Harriet. “Past, Perfect or Imperfect and Future: Changing Images of the Ideal Wife.” In Chinese Femininities/Chinese Masculinities, A Reader, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Susan Brownell, 335–60. University of California Press, 2002.
Evans, Harriet. The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008.
Ewing, Katherine P. “The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency,” Ethos 18, no. 3 (1990): 251–71.
Ewing, Katherine P. “Crossing Borders and Transgressing Boundaries: Metaphors for Negotiating Multiple Identities,” Ethos 26, no. 2 (1998): 262–67.
Ewing, Katherine P.. “Revealing and Concealing: Interpersonal Dynamics and the Negotiation of Identity in the Interview,” Ethos 34, no. 1 (2006): 89–122.
Fong, Vanessa L. “China’s One-Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 4 (2002): 1098–109.
Fong, Vanessa L. Only Hope: Coming of Age under China’s One-Child Policy. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004b.
Fong, Vanessa L. “Parent-Child Communication Problems and the Perceived Inadequacies of Chinese Only Children,” Ethos 35, no.1 ( 2007 ): 85–127.
Fong, Vanessa L.. Paradise Redefined: Transnational Chinese Students and the Quest for Flexible Citizenship in the Developed World. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Hannum, Emily. “Market Transition, Educational Disparities, and Family Strategies in Rural China: New Evidence on Gender Stratification and Development,” Demography 42, no. 2 (2005): 275–99.
Hannum, Emily and Albert Park. Education and Reform in China. London: Routledge, 2006.
Hanser, Amy. “The Chinese Enterprising Self: Young, Educated Urbanites and the Search for Work.” In Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society, edited by E. Perry Link, Richard Madsen, and Paul Pickowicz, 189–206. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.
Hanser, Amy. “The Gendered Rice Bowl: The Sexual Politics of Service Work in Urban China,” Gender and Society 19, no. 5 (2005): 581–600.
Hanser, Amy. “A Tale of Two Sales Floors: Changing Service-work Regimes in China.” In Working in China: Ethnographies of labor and workplace transformation, edited by C. K. Lee, 77–98. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Hanser, Amy. Service Encounters: Class, Gender, and the Market for Social Distinction in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Hausmann, Ricardo with Laura D. Tyson and Saadia Zahidi. The Global Gender Gap Report. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum, 2008.
Hershatter, Gail. Women in China’s Long Twentieth Century. Global, Area, and International Archive: University of California Press, 2007.
Hoffman, Lisa. Patriotic Professionalism in Urban China: Fostering Talent. Pennsylvania: Temple University Press, 2008.
Holland, Dorothy. “The Woman Who Climbed up the House: Some Limitations of Schema Theory.” In New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, edited by Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine Lutz, 68–79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Hollos, Marida and Philip E. Leis. “Remodeling Concepts of the Self: An Ijo Example,” Ethos 29, no. 3 (2002): 371–87.
Honig, Emily and Gail Hershatter. Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980’s. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988.
Hooper, Beverley. “‘Flower Vase and Housewife’: Women and Consumerism in Post-Mao China.” In Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, edited by Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens, 167–93. New York: Routledge, 1998.
Iyengar, Sheena S. and Mark R. Lepper. “Rethinking the Value of Choice: A Cultural Perspective on Intrinsic Motivation,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 76, no. 3 (1999): 349–66.
Kim, Sung won, with Vanessa L. Fong, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Niobe Way, Xinyin Chen, Huihua Deng, and Zuhong Lu. “Income, Work Preferences, and Gender Roles among Parents of Infants in Urban China: A Mixed Method Study from Nanjing,” China Quarterly 204 (2010): 939–59. Republished in Gender in Flux: Agency and its Limits in Contemporary China, edited by Harriet Evans and Julia C. Strauss, 123–43. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Kipnis, Andrew. Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics, and Schooling in China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Kohlberg, Lawrence. The Meaning and Measurement of Moral Development. Worcester, MA: Clark University Press, 1981.
Kusserow, Adrie Suzanne. American Individualisms: Child Rearing and Social Class in Three Neighborhoods. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004.
Liu, Fengshu. “Boys as Only-Children and Girls as Only-Children— Parental Gendered Expectations of the Only-Child in the Nuclear Chinese Family in Present-Day China,” Gender and Education 18, no. 5 (2006): 491–506.
Liu, Mowei, with Xinyin Chen, Kenneth H Rubin, Shujie Zheng, Liying Cui, Den Li, Huichang Chen, and Li Wang. “Autonomy-vs. Connectedness-oriented Parenting Behaviour’s in Chinese and Canadian Mothers,” International Journal of Behavioral Development 29 (2005): 489–95.
Mahmood, Saba. “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36.
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Mesquita, B. and R. Walker. “Cultural Differences in Emotions: A Context for Interpreting Emotional Experiences,” Behaviour Research and Therapy 41, no. 7 (2003): 777–93.
Milwertz, Cecilia Nathansen. Accepting Population Control: Urban Chinese Women and the One-Child Family Policy, 150–82. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1997.
Nanjing Bureau of Statistics. “Nanjing Tongji Nianjian [Nanjing Statistical Yearbook],” Nanjing Shi Tongji Ju [Nanjing Bureau of Statistics], 2008. www.njtj.gov.cn/2004/2008/wujia/15–5.htm and http://www.njtj.gov.cn/2004/2008/wujia/15–7.htm, accessed on May 14, 2012.
National Bureau of Statistics of China. “Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian [China Statistical Yearbook],” Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe [China Statistics Press], 2008. www.stats.gov.cn/ accessed on May 14, 2012.
Ong, Aihwa and Li Zhang. Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Postiglione, Gerard A., ed. Education and Social Change in China: Inequality in a Market Economy. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 2007.
Pun, Ngai. Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Rofel, Lisa. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.
Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.
Ross, Andrew. “Outsourcing as a Way of Life? Knowledge Transfer in the Yangtze Delta.” In Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation, edited by C. K. Lee, 188–207. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Sen, Amartya. Inequality Reexamined. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Sen, Amartya. Development as Freedom. New York: Random House, 1999.
Shi, Lihong. “Little Quilted Vests to Warm Parents’ Hearts: Redefining the Gendered Practice of Filial Piety in Rural North-Eastern China,” China Quarterly 198 (2009): 348–63.
Stafford, Charles. The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang. Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology; 97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Strauss, Claudia. “Partly Fragmented, Partly Integrated: An Anthropological Examination of ‘Postmodern Fragmented Subjects.’” Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 3 (1997): 312–28.
Tamis-LeMonda, Catherine with Niobe Way, Diane Hughes, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Ronit Kahana Kalman, and Erika Y. Niwa. “Parents’ Goals for Children: The Dynamic Coexistence of Individualism and Collectivism in Cultures and Individuals,” Social Development 17, no. 1 (2008): 183–209.
Thakur, Ravni. Rewriting Gender: Reading Contemporary Chinese Women. London: Atlantic Highlands, 1997.
Thelen, Esther and Linda B. Smith. “Dynamic Systems Theories.” In Handbook of child psychology. Volume 1, edited by W. Damon, 563–634. New York: Plenum, 1998.
Wang, Wendy. “Son Preference and Educational Opportunities of Children in China—‘I Wish You Were a Boy!’” Gender Issues 22, no. 2 (2005): 3–30.
Wolf, Margery. Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China. California: Stanford University Press, 1985.
Woronov, Terry E. “Raising Quality, Fostering ‘Creativity’: Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2008): 401–22.
Yan, Fei. “State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China: The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched,” Asian Journal of Social Science 37, no. 6 (2009): 958–59.
Yan, Hairong. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Yan, Yunxiang. The Individualization of Chinese Society. English Edition Volume 77. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2009.
Yoshikawa, Hirokazu and JoAnn Hsueh. “Child development and public policy: Toward a dynamic systems perspective,” Child Development 72 (2001): 1887–903.
Zhang, Hong. “China’s New Rural Daughters Coming of Age: Downsizing the Family and Firing up Cash Earning Power in the New Economy,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 32, no. 3 (2007): 671–98.
Zhang, Yuping with Grace Kao and Emily Hannum. “Do Mothers in Rural China Practice Gender Equity in Educational Aspirations for Children?” Comparative Education Review 51, no. 2 (2007): 131–58.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2012 Andrew B. Kipnis
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fong, V.L. et al. (2012). Gender Role Expectations and Chinese Mothers’ Aspirations for their Toddler Daughters’ Future Independence and Excellence. In: Kipnis, A.B. (eds) Chinese Modernity and the Individual Psyche. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268969_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137268969_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-44369-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-26896-9
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)