Between Tradition and Modernity: “Leftover” Women in Shanghai
| Date | 01 October 2015 |
| Author | Yingchun Ji |
| Published date | 01 October 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12220 |
Y J Shanghai University
Between Tradition and Modernity: “Leftover”
Women in Shanghai
In recent years, single, educated women who
are not yet married by their late 20s in China’s
major cities have been increasingly castigated
as “leftover” women. After more than 3 decades
of rapid socioeconomic development, marriage
remains near universal and early in China. In the
meantime, there has been a resurgence of patri-
archal traditions. Using semistructured inter-
views, in this qualitative research the author
sought to understand the motivations of these
women and their efforts to negotiate the con-
tradictions regarding marriage formation and
career development. Six themes emerged from
the women’s narratives: (a) parental pressure,
(b) a gender double standard of aging, (c) forced
socioeconomic hypergamy, (d) the importance
of compatible family backgrounds, (e) efforts
to balance women’s independence with support
for family and men, and (f) conicting gen-
der ideologies. The author contextualizes these
themes by analyzing how women weave tradi-
tional expectations with modern life in a tran-
sitioning China, where tradition and modernity
alternately clash and converge to constitute a
somewhat uneasy mosaic society.
Since the turn of the new millennium, sin-
gle, educated women in China’s major cities
School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai
University,Shanghai, China 200444
(yingchun_ji@163.com).
This article was edited by Kelly Raley.
Key Words: China, education, “leftover” women, marriage,
modernity, tradition.
have found themselves increasingly castigated
as “leftover” women (sheng nü) if they are not
yet married by their late 20s. Anxious parents
brave public embarrassment to gather in parks,
displaying photographs of their daughters and
listing their economic prospects in the hope of
nding them a husband. Popular discourse, how-
ever, frames these unmarried women as selsh,
picky, and only interested in men with nancial
resources. The issue of “leftover” women war-
rants headlines and feature stories in Chinese
newspapers, popular magazines, and TV real-
ity shows. International media such as the BBC
News, The New York Times,The Economist, and
CNN have also covered the issue.
Unfortunately, academics have yet to accord
the phenomenon much attention. Only a limited
amount of quantitative research has investigated
the effect of education on Chinese women’s
marriage timing, with only one study directly
examining the so-called “leftover” women
(Cai & Tian, 2013; Cai & Wang, 2011; Qian
2012; Tian, 2013; Yu & Xie, 2013). Qualitative
research investigating the issue is similarly
scarce (Fincher, 2014; Gaetano, 2010; To,
2013), but here too the few studies that exist
are largely descriptive or have focused on mate
choice strategy or the empowerment of the
single experience. Little is known about the
dynamics underlying these women’s marriage
decisions. It is thus urgent to investigate and
conceptualize these educated women’s con-
straints and struggles in regard to marriage
formation in the rapidly changing context of
China, which is understood by many of its
own citizens as transitioning from tradition to
modernity.
Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (October 2015): 1057–1073 1057
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12220
1058 Journal of Marriage and Family
Research indicates that marriage is still early
and nearly universal in China, in spite of three
decades of rapid industrialization, urbanization,
and expansion of mass education after the eco-
nomic reform initiated in the 1980s (Ji & Yeung,
2014; Jones & Gubhaju, 2009; Yeung & Hu,
2013). What is interesting is that the pace of
educated Chinese women delaying or for-
going marriage is actually much slower/lower
compared to equally educated Chinese men
and equally educated women in other Asian
societies. At the same time, alongside rapid
economic reformation and modernization,
China has witnessed a resurgence of patriarchal
Confucian tradition in recent years (Fincher,
2014; Ji & Yeung, 2014; Sun & Chen, 2014).
According to this tradition, women are valued
in terms of their roles as wives and mothers,
regardless of the impressive progress made
in terms of gender equality in China, with
women participating in the labor force en masse
since even the pre-reformation Maoist period
and receiving more and more education in the
post-reformation period. The return of patri-
archal tradition seems to be at least partially
accountable for the now-stalled, if not declining,
status of gender equality in China (P. N. Cohen
& Wang, 2008; Davis & Harrell, 1993; Fincher,
2014; Ji & Yeung, 2014; Sun & Chen, 2014;
Zuo & Bian, 2001).
In this research I investigated how China’s
so-called “leftover” women draw on and inte-
grate elements of both tradition and modernity
as they pursue their own ambitions and negotiate
various constraints vis-à-vis marriage and their
careers. In doing so, this study challenges the
linear narratives of progress and/or convergence
claimed by modernization theories, which would
predict that, through economic modernization,
the “traditional” family mode in non-Western
contexts will transition to the Western “modern”
family mode. I use the terms tradition and
modernity here in a deliberate but qualied
way in order not only to critique the natural-
ization of the concepts and their assumptions
but also to capture their resilient currency and
meaning in people’s everyday efforts to make
sense of a society undergoing rapid change.
In this study I conceptualized contemporary
China as an uneasy mosaic, with expectations
and elements deemed alternately modern and
traditional commingling in educated women’s
marriage motivations and behaviors. I also drew
on feminist insights to theorize how family
and gender relations shape these professional
women’s efforts to negotiate patriarchal tradi-
tions separating the public and private spheres.
In this study I used data from semistruc-
tured interviews conducted with 30 educated,
unmarried women in Shanghai in 2013. The
interviews place at the foreground women’s
narratives regarding their struggles between
modern and traditional expectations in regard
to marriage formation and career development.
The overarching framework emphasizing the
coexistence of modernity and tradition emerged
from the women’s own stories, as did the fol-
lowing six themes: (a) parental pressure, (b)
gender double standards of aging, (c) forced
socioeconomic hypergamy, (d) the importance
of compatible family background, (e) efforts to
balance women’s independence with support for
family and men, and (f) the conict of gender
ideologies. The women talked about how they
confront tradition, challenge gendered double
standards, develop new meanings out of tra-
dition, attempt to conne patriarchal tradition
to the private family, and criticize traditional
gender norms of male dominance.
In the following sections, I rst reviewthe his-
torical background necessary to understand the
marriage-versus-career struggles of single, edu-
cated women in China. Second, I outline the the-
oretical framework I used to make sense of the
coexistence of tradition and modernity in a tran-
sitioning China. Third, I review my methodol-
ogy and introduce the sample. I then present and
discuss the six themes that emerged regarding
these women’sconstraints and struggles. Finally,
I argue that despite the recent resurgence of
patriarchal traditions in the family and discrimi-
nation in the marriage market, China’s so-called
“leftover” women are actually innovative actors,
responding strategically and agentically to con-
straints and cultural disapprobation to construct
their blend of the modern and traditional in their
daily lives.
B
Universal, Early Marriage in China
Over the past several decades, many Western
as well as Asian societies have witnessed a
notable decline in marriage formation accom-
panied by impressive improvement in women’s
educational achievement and mass labor market
participation. Yet, despite experiencing similar
social changes and rapid economic development
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