Girl power: young women and the waning of patriarchy in rural North China

Abstract

Since the early 1950s, several generations of young women in rural north China have responded to social changes brought about by state policies and practices, gradually altering their position in the domestic sphere from statusless "outsiders" to new players in family affairs. While favorable conditions in larger social settings are necessary and important, equally important have been the agencies of young women who took advantage of the new opportunities to challenge the patriarchal order of family life. By focusing on individual young women, the previously marginalized members of the family, this article identifies and provides a better understanding of the most active driving force of family change from within. (Young women, agency, family change, China) ********** Although there are still many issues under debate among students of the Chinese family, it is widely agreed that the decline of parental authority and power is the most visible and significant change that has occurred in the domestic sphere in rural China since 1949. Such a trend began in the heyday of socialist transformation during the 1950s (Yang 1959) and continued in both the collective period (Parish and Whyte 1978) and the post-collective reform era (Davis and Harrell 1993; Bossen 2002). Thus far, most studies see the decline of parental power and authority as a result of a set of social changes occurring in larger social settings, such as the implementation of the new marriage law and other government policies, the state-sponsored attack on patrilineal ideology and kinship organization, and public ownership that disabled the family as a unit of production. The contribution of individual agency to the shifting power balance across generational line, especially the role played by young women, however, has been by and large underplayed, if not completely ignored. To balance the previous emphasis on external, social causes, this article explores the active role played by young women to redefine intergenerational power relations in particular and other dimensions of private life in general. Throughout this article the term "young women" is used to refer to rural women between the ages of 15 to 24, or as defined by social terms, those who are going through the transition period from a teenage daughter to a young daughterin-law. For a rural woman, this is the most difficult and important period in her life, full of changes and challenges (Wolf 1972). In the areas where this study was conducted, young women in this age group are referred to as guniang or yatou, which may be translated as "girls" in English. But guniang or yatou refer only to unmarried young women. Once a young woman marries, she is no longer a girl; but has been transformed into a daughter-in-law (xifu) and an adult woman. In a traditional family, young women were marginal outsiders with only a temporary position, as daughters married out and new daughters-in-law entered the domestic group under the rules of patrilineal exogamy and patrilocal post-marital residence. Thus, daughters were commonly regarded as a drain on family wealth and new daughters-in-law were seen as a potential threat to the existing family order. In comparison to their male siblings, girls were statusless, powerless, and somewhat dangerous; they could acquire a proper place in the domestic sphere only by becoming mothers (Baker 1979; Freedman 1966; Watson 1985, 1986; Wolf 1972; Bossen 2002). As a result of their anonymity in family life, young women have drawn little scholarly attention thus far and, admittedly, they also constitute the most difficult age group to study for a male researcher. Male informants are the usual sources when conducting fieldwork. When I tried to reach female informants, I found myself more often talking with older women, the supposedly more knowledgeable and certainly more powerful woman in a household, typically the mother (or mother-in-law) who manages the household budget. …