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“Good Mothers Work”: How Maternal Employment Shapes Women’s Expectation of Work and Family in Contemporary Urban China
dc.contributor.authorZhou, Yun
dc.date.accessioned2020-10-01T23:32:59Z
dc.date.availableWITHHELD_12_MONTHS
dc.date.available2020-10-01T23:32:59Z
dc.date.issued2020-09
dc.identifier.citationZhou, Yun (2020). "“Good Mothers Work”: How Maternal Employment Shapes Women’s Expectation of Work and Family in Contemporary Urban China." Journal of Social Issues 76(3): 659-680.
dc.identifier.issn0022-4537
dc.identifier.issn1540-4560
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/162814
dc.description.abstractDrawing on 70 in‐depth interviews, I investigated how maternal employment shapes urban young Chinese women’s work–family expectation in a context of rapid social change. These interviews indicated that respondents attached strong moral meaning to mothers’ wage work, regarding it as integral to a “good” mother and an “ideal” woman. This moralization of maternal employment, in turn, led contemporary young Chinese women to view wage work as a taken‐for‐granted choice. Yet different from their own mothers, these young women were confronted with profound transformation across various domains of the postreform Chinese society. The normative expectation of women’s wage work, coupled with slow‐to‐change expectations about women’s roles at home and in a changing labor market, intensified young women’s burden of “doing it all.” This research highlights the importance of bringing the macro‐level context back into the mother–daughter dyad to understand the intergenerational transmission of gender beliefs and behavior.
dc.publisherWiley Periodicals, Inc.
dc.publisherPrentice Hall
dc.title“Good Mothers Work”: How Maternal Employment Shapes Women’s Expectation of Work and Family in Contemporary Urban China
dc.typeArticle
dc.rights.robotsIndexNoFollow
dc.subject.hlbsecondlevelSocial Work
dc.subject.hlbtoplevelSocial Sciences
dc.description.peerreviewedPeer Reviewed
dc.description.bitstreamurlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162814/2/josi12389_am.pdfen_US
dc.description.bitstreamurlhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162814/1/josi12389.pdfen_US
dc.identifier.doi10.1111/josi.12389
dc.identifier.sourceJournal of Social Issues
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