Out to work: migration, gender, and the changing lives of rural women in contemporary China

Abstract

Arianne Gaetano, Out to Work: Migration, Gender and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China, Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press, 2015, 232 pp.In this volume, by looking at domestic labour and service work in offices and hotels the author sets out to study what kinds of cultural, social, and political impact mobility brings to bear on the identity and agency of rural migrant women and how mobility shapes gender roles and relations. The book aims to shed light on whether and how migrant women's migration improves gender equality in post-Mao China. In her endeavour, Arianne Gaetano draws on multifaceted and longitudinal methods that enable her to explore the complex and changing interplay of structure and agency by considering rather long periods over the course of her informants' lives and by documenting how these people reflect differently at these various stages on their experience of migration. The ethnographic study was conducted through fieldwork carried out in Beijing and in each of the 11 key informants' hometowns from 1998 to 2000 and in 2002, and annual trips in 2006- 2010 and 2012, combined with frequent contact through email, cell-phones, airmail correspondence, and instant messages. Gaetano anchors her work upon a solid body of scientific literature in the field of migration and gender studies, as well as in social theory (structure/agency). This enables her to produce a fine-grained ethnography of the life trajectories of rural migrant women. She manages to simultaneously take into account the structuring role of three sets of forces: at the macro level, the historical transformations of gender norms and roles, the role of the Party-state in shaping gender relations in contemporary China, the ideological and institutional construction of rural-urban differences, etc.; at the meso level, forces such as the patrilineal-patrilocal family system or the gender-based division of labour; and micro forces such as the aspirations and goals embodied by migrant women themselves. Providing ample space the unfolding of the narrative of migrant women's experiences, she shows vividly how the measure through which migrant women are empowered is situational, contextual, and also temporal (p. 9).Chapter One (pp. 14-27) provides a broad and useful historical overview of the political-institutional as well as discursive structures that have both produced and legitimised the service sector and more particularly the domestic worker labour market in post-Mao China. The author highlights the excessive concentration of migrant women workers within the informal and unregulated sector of domestic services. Gaetano also points to the core role of the state-sponsored provision of a cheap and flexible female rural migrant labour force in guaranteeing economic growth: by the urban labour force, particularly urban working mothers, female rural migrants have contributed to maintaining high levels of urban consumption in the midst of state retreat from social welfare provisions (p. 25). While post-Mao economic reform and opening have provided rural migrant women with myriad possibilities for self-determination and wage she points out, the Party-state, neoliberal forces, and the rural patriarchal system have joined to strongly constrain the conditions realisation of self-determination (p. 27).Through a migrant-centred ethnography, Chapter Two (pp. 28-45) explores rural migrant women's complex mixture of aspirations pursuing a more independent and self-determined life outside the village and their willingness to conform to their gender duties within the family. Gaetano argues that the combination of urban-rural and gendered differences in post-Mao China provides room the empowerment of rural migrant women while also producing particular gendered patterns of migration that reflect and also perpetuate such difference and inequality (p. 29). This chapter also documents the process of devaluation of rural life and agricultural work, which is anchored within historical representations of modern China and also strengthened within the broad ideological and institutional patterns of post-Mao political economy. …