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

Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration and Social Change, NY, M. E. Sharpe, 2005, 344 pp.hina's "urban revolution" has become the focus of a large body of literature in recent years. But while much of the new urbanisation literature builds on earlier research into the roles played by rural-urban migration in propelling urban population growth, challenging urban governance institutions and practices, and diversifying urban cultures, there has been relatively little attention given to the gender analysis agenda that undergirded and enriched some of the best studies of rural-urban migration. Those studies clearly demonstrated that migration is gender-specific and has gender outcomes. For example, compared to urbanites of both sexes and rural men, rural women tend to have fewer years of education. They therefore are considered to be not only "less competitive" in urban labour markets, but also significantly more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Biological assumptions underpin different moral and behavioural standards for migrant men and women. Likewise, as married women are presumed to bear responsibility for social reproduction and care, they manage most of the physical, social, and emotional logistics necessitated by the dispersal of household members.Thus, it seems timely to reconsider how one of the major studies of rural women's experience of migration advanced our understanding of not only women's migration, but also how women's migration reconfigures gender in China's growing cities. Tamara Jacka's Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration and Social Change was one of the first and remains one of the most insightful examinations of migrant women in contemporary urban space. The book is prefaced by an examination of how images of "rural idiocy" continue to be counterposed to projections of "urban moder- nity" in state policy rhetoric and media reports on migration. Although pointing to the progressivist functions served by these tropes, Jacka also shows how they feed anxieties and ambivalent desires among the gendered subject category of "rural migrant women. "In the substantive chapters that follow, conversations with migrant women in Hangzhou in 1995 and interviews, observation, and a small survey conducted in Beijing between 2001 and 2002 provide the empirical material with which Jacka produces a nuanced, sympathetic depiction of migrant women's multi-faceted public image and discursive positioning over time, relational space, and place.The analysis in Chapter Two of whether the Migrant Women's Club in Beijing constitutes '"a subaltern counter-public' - a space where migrant women assemble and perform oppositional interpretations of their identities and interests - or whether they have merely reproduced the hierarchies of dominant discourses" is one of the most interesting sections of the book. Created in 1996 under the aegis of the All-China Women's Federation, the club on the one hand pioneered efforts to articulate and further the interests of women as migrants. On the other hand, it is clear that the club's objectives, campaigns, and activities were underpinned and hence limited in their effectiveness by rural-urban and gender hierarchies. The primary discourse around which the Club initially "assembled" migrant women was that these women were the vulnerable but malleable subjects of urban agents and their modernist, civilising projects. …