Women, work, and marriage: Challenges of gendered mobility in urban China

Abstract

Policies of the Chinese state during the post-socialist era have engendered demographic and socioeconomic changes that intersect with gender and class to both enable and restrict women's social mobility, autonomy, and independence. This chapter evaluates the impact of these changes on the social mobility of women in China's cities, drawing upon relevant literature and my own ethnographic studies of rural migrant women workers in Beijing and educated career women in Shanghai. My contribution illuminates the material and discursive constraints that obstruct these women's achievement of personal goals under conditions of structural inequality as China urbanizes.