Gender, Agency and Social Change

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) The pace and extent of changes in China's economy, society, politics and cultural life in the past 20 years have fostered a spectacular expansion of scholarly interest in gender and gender difference in modern and contemporary China.1 Across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, students now have easy access to research publications on gender differences in practices and expectations of marriage, parenting and family life, education, labour and employment, migration and politics. While the Women's Federation cannot currently sell the kinds of images so popular on the cover of Women in China in the 1950s and 1960s, the Maoist past has left an ambiguous but significant legacy in its commitment - honoured more in the breach - to women's equality, to the fundamental idea that it was the state's responsibility to effect the kinds of social transformations that would lead to gender equality, and to the specific propaganda methods used to raise awareness and promote positive gender models. The fundamental source of such expectations lies in the traditionally hierarchical arrangements of the family and kin group, even though here too, historical evidence challenges ascriptions of a clear gender division of labour.5 The most influential critical accounts of Chinese family and kin relations in recent decades have been those of Maurice Freedman, whose "lineage paradigm" sought to explain the dominant structures of China's patrilineal system,6 and Myron Cohen, whose "corporate" model appears in Danning Wang's article.7 This familiar model defined the family first and foremost as a unit of economic organization, based on the sharing and allocation of budget and property, including the pooling of resources where necessary in the interests of its members. 4 LihongShi, 'Little quilted vests to warm parents' hearts, The China Quarterly, No. 198 (2009), pp. 348-63 , makes exactly this point with respect to her fieldsite in a north China village. 5 BrayFrancesca, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) ; EbreyPatricia Buckley, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) ; FurthCharlotte, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999) ; KoDorothy, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Cul