Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China (review)

This volume is a result of the conference "Gender, Households, and the Boundaries of Work in Contemporary China" held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1996. It consists of a total of eighteen chapters contributed by twenty-seven scholars. The majority of the contributors are sociologists, and the rest are demographers, anthropologists, historians, and health specialists. The volume is organized into four sections, following the four topics addressed at the conference: (1) perspectives on work, (2) recent trends in gender and inequality, (3) gender and migration, and (4) households and work. An introductory chapter and a concluding chapter by the editors outline and summarize the themes, emphases, and findings of the book.

As hinted by the title, there is a heavy emphasis on boundaries in Chinese society. The editors make the insightful observation that boundaries and divisions between groups of people have always been given importance throughout Chinese history. The boundaries that this book deals with are those related to gender, the household, and labor. In particular, the contributors examine the boundaries of work, space, and status between men and women both inside and outside the household. They are especially interested in whether and how these boundaries have become more fluid and have shifted in the reform era.

Emphases on boundaries logically call for a careful treatment of definitions, especially those dealing with work and the household. Indeed, the four chapters in the first section address the question "what is work?" They examine historical, contemporary, and comparative perspectives on work and illustrate that the notion of gongzuo (work) is complex, that defining work is difficult, and that the definitions have shifted. In particular, they underscore how diversification in the reform era necessitates a rethinking of conventional boundaries between work in formal work units and informal economic activities, household-based farm work and nonfarm work, women's work and men's work, and so forth.

The second and third sections are concerned, respectively, with changes in gender inequality in work and the role of migration in affecting interrelationships among households, gender, and work. The last section addresses how households influence and are influenced by the organization of work. Rather than reviewing the pertinent chapters as they are organized, I shall highlight three dominant themes of the book: the household, the inside-outside dichotomy, and the position of women.

The importance of the household for examining work and gender is a common denominator of many chapters throughout the volume. One set of issues deals again with definitions. For example, Rachel A. Ronsenfeld calls attention to the differences between "households" and "families" (p. 63). Li Zhang shows that households of rural-urban migrants straddle between rural villages and urban settlements (p. 175). Contributors also emphasize the household as a unit for observing how work is strategized (Entwisle et al., p. 268) and remunerated (Ronsenfeld, p. 52) and as a social location that is negotiated and conflict-charged (Li Zhang, p. 176; Deborah S. Davis, p. 245). Such discussions not only resonate with Susan Mann's comment that "the boundaries of the household as a production unit appear to be the strongest and the most difficult to penetrate of all the structures of work inherited from the past" (p. 29) but also challenge the assumption that households are stable entities.

Perhaps the most widely used and discussed framework in the book is the inside- outside dichotomy in relation to gendered work and spaces. As the editors summarize (p. 298), Chinese households traditionally distinguish "inside" work from "outside" work and women's work from men's work. These divisions are not only physical but also social, as wives are understood to be "inside" persons in charge of "private" activities and spaces whereas the "outside" and "public" belong to the husbands. In this regard, the inside-outside dichotomy is also one between feminine and masculine, proper and...