ABSTRACT
My maternal grandmother was sold into her husband’s family at the age of nine. After the foundation of socialist China in 1949, she was mobilized into the workforce, but her working life was frequently interrupted by calls to participate in family labour and finally ended with an early retirement to care for me when I was born. By contrast, my mother grew up in socialist China, did not have an arranged marriage, and worked full-time almost uninterrupted for more than 20 years. The difference in experience between my grandmother and my mother, plus over a decade of Chinese education, made me once believe that socialism had raised women from the inferior position they held in traditional societies and Chinese women had indeed held up half the sky. However, during the economic reform of the 1990s, my mother was forced to make an involuntary exit from the workplace. She was angry but accepted that ‘all women at 45 had to go’. I was confused as to why women were singled out for redundancy since men and women were supposed to be equal. At university I encountered Western feminism and was intrigued by the ways in which feminists questioned everyday life from a gender perspective. I started reflecting upon my family’s experience and the role of gender in Chinese society; it was the apparent paradox between the rhetoric and reality of gender relations which initiated my pursuit of a study in this area and is ultimately why I wrote this book.
