Gender and Work in Urban China - Women Workers in Urban China

摘要

Sociologist Liu Jieyu's book offers an intimate, insightful retelling of gender evolution in China over the last 50 years of the twentieth century. Jieyu's approach to Chinese women's history uses a focused personal lens to project a wider cultural picture. She constructs this view by layering three insightful approaches. First, Jieyu uses qualitative personal interviews to draw out reflective narratives from "ordinary" Chinese women who modestly assume that they have nothing worthwhile to share. Next, she places women of the "unlucky generation" at the centre of the story to compare and contrast the gender expectations placed on these women versus their mothers and their daughters. Finally, Jieyu challenges the reader, particularly academics and feminists, to reconsider everything we think we know about gender parity in socialist China at the end of the century.