Author: Mo Xiaobei
The intuitive way we understand women is through statistics. The "Men and Women in Chinese Society - Facts and Figures (2019)" released by the Department of Social Science, Technology and Cultural Industry Statistics of the National Bureau of Statistics shows that female heads of household account for only 18%, the heads of units are more than twice as many as women, female deputies and female committee members are still significantly less than men, women in the field of science and technology need more encouragement, the number of female prosecutors and judges is far less than that of men, and women's housework time is more than twice that of men, etc. (quoted from the WeChat public account "Female Spring").
Although statistics tell us the unquestionable fact of inequality between men and women, around this author, it is rare to see women's self-consciousness and reflection on the trapped situation, on the contrary, they are more content with women's identity, even if they are aware of some differences between men and women. It is worth exploring why the imagination of gender folds its wings in reality, and how does this "gender blindness" of women appear? The author believes that in addition to external conditions such as region, age, position, and marital status, there are three important subjective and objective interpenetration mechanisms that have caused this phenomenon. It should be noted that because family contributions remain important variables in explaining gender inequality and high female family participation, the three mechanisms explored here are all developed from the perspective of the influence of families on work.
One is child-centrism. Although the times and their mainstream discourse have changed several times, the importance of children to families has subtly continued. In the trajectory of women's lives, whether it is "mother is rigid" or "hot mother" or "tiger mother", it shows the key of the role of mother to female "social adult".
The birth system highlights the role of children in stabilizing the family triangle in "public institutions". Today, as families enter the post-family era, selective intimacy becomes a central trait that defines family life. However, couples can gather and disperse freely, but the private mode of reproduction still has the meaning of blood ties, emotional sustenance, expectations after paying for the growth of children, and symbols of family face with children's achievements, so even young women immersed in the neoliberal context will consciously or unconsciously shift the focus of their lives to their children, thereby narrowing their social participation space.
In the case of mother-child relationships, studies have pointed out that "mother" as a synonym for "traditional housewife" is rejected by most women. The author believes that the key to how the role of mother is treated is not the connotation of "mother", but the value of "mother". Manipulated by state policy, market economy, consumer culture, individuation, and familyism, the "mother" has been given the labels of romanticization, functionality, and science, whether intensive or loose, (interestingly, the sacred and secular sides of the "mother" are one and the same, and its practical efficacy is whitewashed as a natural ethic), thus pushing the "mother" onto the production line of self-realization, self-achievement, and self-satisfaction, and such a mother image is widely recognized and affirmed in the child-centrist narrative.
In child-centrism, the definition of "mother" starts from the family, "goes out" to the market and the state, and through the shaping of external forces, it turns back to the family. In other words, motherhood is not private, but a practice of exercise defined by public power, and this pattern of covert operation creates a mechanical myth about "mother", imprisoning the imagination of women's self-identity and the possibility of transcending family space.
Second, the gendering strategy in two shifts. According to Hochhilde's findings, although wives have promoted family reform around work-family shifts, even if couples share household chores, there are more flexible time, more "large" tasks, and more masculine attributes (such as car cleaning, weeding) of male housework. This difference in division of labor can continue, which is related to the gender stereotype within the male and female protagonists, so most of the time, only women face the entanglement of two shifts.
As a result, the traditional discourse and imagination of gender division of labor distort women's expectations and evaluations of male housework, such as men cooking meals, wiping the floor, and bringing children are rare and sufficient, while women unconsciously ignore their own housework efforts, thus squeezing their social participation space.
Interestingly, when the phenomenon of two shifts appeared in China, women's housework burden had the potential to shift upwards, that is, the previous generation helped to take care of the family (another possibility may be extrapolated, that is, lower-class women to sell maternal jobs to middle- and upper-class women for financial reasons. Such hierarchical exploitation can burden women with guilt accused of disregarding their homes.) As far as the author sees, in the face of heavy care loads, there is a clear contradiction between small families, especially women, when requisitioning family network resources: if it is the mother-in-law who helps the mother-in-law, then women are more likely to share the housework with their parents, and if it is the in-laws, women are more likely not to participate. In the case that it is not yet possible to determine the universality of this phenomenon, the author finds that the reason is that the boundary between women and their parents is blurred or fluid, so housework is both cooperative and emotional expression and interaction, while the distance between them and in-laws is strange and immutable, so the sharing of housework has become rigid. The closeness with the mother's family reflects the reality of the feminization of family care, while at the same time, regardless of the mother-in-law, at least the parenting responsibility of the mother is still a restriction on the space for women's activities.
In a nutshell, the two shifts emphasize women's dedication to the family rather than work, resulting in an unbalanced life experience in which women have one head (family) and one big head (work) small. Even as care activities become elderly, women still pay more for the family, thus constructing a chain that suppresses activities outside the home through in-home labor.
Third, the public and private are rationalized identity constructions. The imbalance between women's public and private participation is mutually causal and interactive. The public sphere such as the glass ceiling effect limits the possibility and opportunity for women's social participation, making it an "inferior" cheap labor force, constituting a thrust on the female-leaning family, and the creation of the female image of "virtuous wife and mother" (even if it is wrapped in the popular code of the middle class and the class symbol of the "noblewoman" by ideologies such as consumption), and becomes the pull of women to the family, when women are "dragged" back to the family, their affinity with the family in turn shackles their public activity field, This constitutes a closed chain that binds and oppresses women.
The macro context in which women prefer the family is that the choice of state policy and the infiltration of neoliberalism have led to excessive caregiving work in the family, and from the past to the present, "the deliberate retention of women's responsibilities within the family" has made women closely linked to the family, and this has been endorsed by traditional gender concepts. The feminization of family management is both institutional and practical, and is the result of the intertwining of the external environment and subjective consciousness.
In this way, women's life trajectories are getting thicker and thicker on the side of the family and thinner and thinner on the other side of society, and this two-way spiral obscures women's critical perspectives on gender power hierarchies and shapes their compromises with unequal reality.
In addition to the above three mechanisms, there are many explicit or implicit prescriptive factors, such as the publicization of patriarchy, the remnants of gender "common sense", the strengthening of the family unit by risk society (thus giving importance to women's family status), consumerism and individualization, which lead to the myth of personal power occupation (such as women gaining a sense of control over the role of mothers through the "brokering of the mother's job").
As the focus of feminism, the reality and influencing factors of gender inequality have received too much attention. The above analysis inspires us that both external and internal practice patterns cannot be ignored, otherwise, even if the proportion of women's public participation is increased, it does not open the pipeline to activate the consciousness of the whole society, especially women's gender consciousness- "give" but not "can", "fish" but not "fish", "transfusion" without "hematopoiesis", and ultimately may not help. This is particularly necessary in the localities where the two sexes passively experience de-genderization or genderization through the forces of the state, markets and traditions.