ABSTRACT
I embarked on this research in the hope of learning more about the lives of women like my mother, a redundant woman worker in urban China. My mother’s generation lived through great social-political upheaval as China moved from the egalitarian collectivism promoted in the Mao-era to a market economy with widespread unemployment and increasing inequality. In this book I have discussed the dramatic past of these women, highlighting their social disadvantages within contemporary China, and explored how and why they came to lose out during the economic restructuring, despite the claim that gender equality had been achieved in socialist China. Although my journey of enquiry was complicated by the culture of caution, interviewees’ unfamiliarity with qualitative research and the SARS epidemic, I gained access to ordinary women’s accounts of their eventful, but previously unrecorded, lives.
