“Good Mothers Work”: How Maternal Employment Shapes Women’s Expectation of Work and Family in Contemporary Urban China

Drawing on 70 in‐depth interviews, I investigated how maternal employment shapes urban young Chinese women’s work–family expectation in a context of rapid social change. These interviews indicated that respondents attached strong moral meaning to mothers’ wage work, regarding it as integral to a “good” mother and an “ideal” woman. This moralization of maternal employment, in turn, led contemporary young Chinese women to view wage work as a taken‐for‐granted choice. Yet different from their own mothers, these young women were confronted with profound transformation across various domains of the postreform Chinese society. The normative expectation of women’s wage work, coupled with slow‐to‐change expectations about women’s roles at home and in a changing labor market, intensified young women’s burden of “doing it all.” This research highlights the importance of bringing the macro‐level context back into the mother–daughter dyad to understand the intergenerational transmission of gender beliefs and behavior.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162814/2/josi12389_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162814/1/josi12389.pd

Introduction

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67161/2/10.1177_0308275X9301300401.pd

Relating self and other in Chinese and Western thought

Recent debates in International Relations seek to decolonise the discipline by focusing on relationality between self and other. This article examines the possibilities for preserving a particular type of otherness: ‘radical otherness’ or ‘alterity’. Such otherness can provide a bulwark against domination and colonialism: there is always something truly other which cannot be assimilated. However, two problems arise. First, if otherness is truly inaccessible, how can self relate to it? Does otherness undermine relationality? Second, can we talk about otherness without making it the same? Is the very naming of otherness a new form of domination? This article draws out and explores the possibilities for radical otherness in Sinophone and Anglophone relational theorising. It addresses the difficulties presented by the need for a sense of radical otherness on the one hand, and the seeming impossibility of either detecting it, or relating to it, on the other. By constructing a typology of four accounts of otherness, it finds that the identification and preservation of radical otherness poses significant problems for relationality. Radical otherness makes relationality between self and other impossible, but without radical otherness there is a danger of domination and assimilation. This is common to both Sinophone and Anglophone endeavours

The impact of women's social position on fertility in developing countries

This paper examines ideas about possible ways in which the extent of women's autonomy, women's economic dependency, and other aspects of their position vis-à-vis men influence fertility in Third World populations. Women's position or “status” seems likely to be related to the supply of children because of its links with age at marriage. Women's position may also affect the demand for children and the costs of fertility regulation, though some connections suggested in the literature are implausible. The paper ends with suggestions for future research.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45660/1/11206_2005_Article_BF01124382.pd

women and the Family in Rural taiwan

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