Negotiating harmony: Women, work and family in Taiwan

My dissertation examines the effects of globalization on gender relationships and family in a society that has undergone rapid changes. Unlike much of the previous literature on Taiwanese peasant and factory women, my study focuses on women who have experienced the tremendous shifts in the Taiwanese society during the past thirty years that brought increasing urbanization and growing industrial and service sectors. My fieldwork was centered in Taipei where I studied women and their families who utilized preschools from three different sectors of the middle class: upper middle, middle, and lower middle. Through my investigation I argue that women were active agents in shaping family dynamics in which they used strategies to gain personal fulfillment within the social structure that is centered on concepts of family obligations such as xiao (filial piety) and lien (face). I found that the relative success of women in negotiating decisions depended upon the economic and social capital they brought to the family. In addition to acquiescing to or resisting the demands of parents, in-laws, and husbands, many women employed techniques that bent the rules so that they were able to fulfill their needs as workers and yet maintain family harmony. Rather than being subordinate to their husbands and mothers-in-law as was the case in the past, women were negotiating decisions with their husbands, relied on sympathetic mothers-in-law who themselves were working women, and more freely called on their own mothers for childcare.; I developed a nuanced framework for analyzing my data that looked at intentionality behind behavior to understand the complex lives of the women I studied. I found that in addition to acquiescing to or resisting the demands of parents, in-laws, and husbands, many women employed techniques that bent the rules so that they were able to fulfill their needs as workers and yet maintain family harmony. In addition, although women sometimes acquiesced to their husbands, parents or in-laws, the acquiescence was not simple submission.; While the women were not seeking autonomy in an individualized sense, neither were they reproducing a somewhat mythical, idealized Chinese family. They were working to create something different: a family that is the central structure of society, one from where the Chinese/Taiwanese sense of self originates but at the same time, a family in which they have some freedom in decision making.