ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the young women negotiated womanhood in comparison with their mothers and grandmothers. They assumed two seemingly contradictory subject positions: the ‘autonomous modern female’ and the ‘dependent modern female’ as they simultaneously degendered and (re)gendered themselves in their narratives, showing a desire to have ‘the best of both worlds’ or ‘to have it all’. Just as the chenggong male ideal allowed the young men to simultaneously assume their subject position as the aspiring individual and fit into the gender order, this female ideal served the same purpose for the young women. Not every young woman could be expected to eventually enact this ideal. Nevertheless, it was widely endorsed by them and supported by their parents, despite variations in family background, school performance and individual biographical factors. This new ‘double ideal’ was only marginally accessible to their mothers as young women. It was totally inaccessible and irrelevant to their grandmothers, whose narratives about their young womanhood were mainly about self-sacrifice and self-denial for the interests of the family and/or socialist collectivities, in contrast to the younger generations’ growing individualistic sense of the female self.
