Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (review)

Reviewed by: Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change Emily Honig (bio) Tamara Jacka . Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006. Hardcover $72.95, ISBN 0-7656-0820-0. Paperback $29.95, ISBN 0-7656-0821-9. This is a study of rural Chinese women who have participated in the large-scale flow of migrants to urban centers in the context of the economic reforms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This so-called "floating population" includes some 80 to 120 million people. Of the 3.3 million migrants in Beijing in 2001, roughly 37 percent were women, the vast majority of whom were fifteen to thirty-five years of age. Contributing to a growing set of scholarly inquiries about China's "floating population," Jacka's is one of the first to focus extensively on women migrants. At first glance, one might imagine the story of rural migrants to be a predictable one about a movement from rural poverty to urban exploitation. The story Jacka tells, though, is far more nuanced and complex, continually resisting the notion (often perpetuated in the media) of a single, stereotypical migrant woman. This complexity is integral to, and also emerges from, the multifaceted nature of the research itself. This study draws primarily on interviews with and participant observation of (as well as a written survey distributed to) members of the Migrant Women's Club (dagongmei zhi jia) in Beijing in 2001-2002, and ethnographic research conducted in the migrant settlement in the Haidian district of Beijing in 2001. These are supplemented by interviews conducted with dagongmei in Hangzhou in 1995. While the dagongmei in both Beijing and Hangzhou were mostly young, single, and engaged in wage employment (as maids, factory workers, or clerical workers), the women in Haidian were older (in their mid-thirties) and married, and they either took care of children while their husbands earned an income, helped their husbands sell vegetables, or did home sewing for pay. [End Page 150] The complexity of Jacka's study is not simply related to the multiple types of women migrants she considers, but is instead a product of her framework of analysis. For example, rather than simply looking at migrants' places of origin, she focuses on "their evaluations and desires about place," aiming to "explain these different evaluations and desires in terms of the discourses and discursive positions from which they arise" (p. 119); instead of charting their "life course," she focuses on the "temporal aspects of finding a place in the world-that is, of the ways in which the countryside, the city, and the movement between the two fit into the life course." Although she draws on the migrant women's stories to challenge popular stereotypes, she is equally interested in the form and structure of their narratives. For example, the stories of the older, married women of Haidian mostly took the form of "migration as rural economic strategy"; the narratives of the young, single dagongmei of the early 1990s suggested "migration as interlude" (a chance for freedom before a future of marriage, domestic chores, and field work); while those of more contemporary dagongmei were structured around "migration as self-development" and, sometimes, "migration as escape." She also attends to the language invoked in narratives, such as "the language of human rights to protest the harshness of migrant experience in the city" (p. 275). Never taking the narratives at face value, Jacka scrutinizes their possible meanings. For example, in explanations of why these women left their villages, the often articulated phrase was "there was nothing to do." This statement, Jacka points out, "conceals more than it explains." In some cases, such as when farm work is being done by parents, parents-in-law, brothers or other male relatives, and domestic chores performed by an older woman relative, it might mean literally "nothing to do." More often, however, "the phrase 'nothing to do' connotes not just inactivity and the boredom that goes with it but also a sense of worthlessness" (p. 133). One of the most interesting aspects of Rural Women in Urban China is its analysis of...