“A Woman has to struggle to get what she wants”: Gender and Power

Abstract

The lives of migrant women in Dalian reflect the challenges they face from two inequalities in which they are situated: their rural and migrant status, on the one hand ( Chap. 3) and their position as women ( Chap. 4). These two structures exert a powerful force in these women’s lives. Nevertheless, Dalian migrants report general satisfaction about their lives. I argue that one of the major reasons for this satisfaction is that, as married women and mothers, they have been able to navigate through challenges and potential roadblocks to achieve their goals. Examining their strategies takes us to an examination of power. In this chapter, I examine women’s power, attempting to explicate issues of power in a general sense and to understand the role of power in the lives of women in Dalian. In my approach I will be trying to balance at least two different levels of power—those that occur on the individual level and those that are better measured at the wider, community or societal level. I will demonstrate that keeping both of these levels of interaction and influence in mind are key to understanding how women negotiate and strategize with those around them. For most of this chapter, I will focus on power of women as women. But as is clear, these women, as all women, are involved in criss-crossing structures of power and inequality. As we have already seen, rural/urban inequalities and class structure are both important in these women’s lives. I take up these issues and their interactions at the end of the chapter and explore it further in the next.