Divided Motherhood: Rural-To-Urban Migration of Married Women in Contemporary China

Abstract

Based on qualitative data collected from interviews and observation in both sending and receiving areas, this study examines the rural-to-urban migration of married women in contemporary China. Bringing motherhood into the analysis, we found that having children plays an ambiguous and even contradictory role in women’s migration decisions. On the one hand, it may confine women’s mobility inasmuch as they are still expected to act as primary caregivers in the rural household; on the other hand, motherhood may facilitate women leaving their natal communities for urban employment, especially if such decisions are seen in connection with the costs of their children’s education. Owing both to chronic labor shortages and to their perceived docility and relative disposability, married women have been recruited in great numbers in recent years, especially into the garment factories of China’s mushrooming coastal cities. Yet because of barriers to family resettlement—the oppressive “household registration” or hukou system—most of the women in this study migrated alone or with their husbands, leaving their children behind in the care of grandparents, or in even less stable arrangements. That this geographic separation between childrearing and work creates a profound dilemma for these women, requiring them to alter both their mothering practices and their identities as maternal caregivers, is the central focus of the analysis. In this connection, divided motherhood in China can usefully be compared and contrasted with the phenomenon of transnational motherhood happening in other migration contexts around the globe.

Hukou system effects on migrant children’s education in China: Learning from past disparities

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The bright side of digitization: Assessing the impact of mobile phone domestication on left-behind children in China's rural migrant families

“…Most migrant workers are working in labor-intensive and/or low-wage sectors such as manufacturing, construction, wholesale and retail, and service sectors, sometimes with poor working conditions and long working hours (Mu and Hu, 2016 ). Though migrant workers living and working in cities, some for years, have become the major component of labor-intensive workforce in cities, they have been excluded from equal treatment as their urban counterparts because of Hukou -based social exclusions (Zhang et al, 2014 ; Liu and Erwin, 2015 ). Hukou , or Chinese household registration, “is a residence permit linked with political and economic rights” (Zhang et al, 2014 , p. 1441).…”

Why Migrant Workers in China Continue to Build Large Houses in Home Villages: A Case Study of a Migrant-Sending Village in Anhui

“…Public childcare is scarce, and the cost of private childcare is significant (Ji et al, 2017). Consequently, when migrant women—particularity those working in factories with a fixed schedule—become pregnant, they usually quit their jobs (Chuang, 2016; Liu and Erwin, 2015). Under the hukou system, it is necessary for most children to return to their hometowns to take the national college entrance exam 高考; while they prepare for this exam, most children live for several years in the place where they will take the exam (Ling, 2017).…”