Rural 80 Mobile Young Women Marriage And Family Concept Study

The rural Chinese women who were born in 1980s are the special groups under the rapid social mobility and social change in contemporary China. Moving from rural China to urban China shaped their life chances and life experiences, including significant changes in their marriage and family lives.This paper studies on the rural migrant women born in the 1980s, taking a village of Tianmen City, Hubei Province as the study place where there are a large number of rural migrant women born in the 1980s, getting plenty of original information through the research methods:in-depth interviews and participant observation. As a fragment of ethnography from a village, the study aims to focus on the marriage and family outlook of the rural women born in the 1980s.This paper is based on the marriage power resource theory, romantic love and modern relations theory as well as gender theory to survey and study on the marriage and family views of the rural migrant women born in the 1980s, the detail analysis and conclusions expand from the four dimensions which are marriage, childbirth, ethics view and family values, which reveal the impact on the marriage and family views of the rural migrant women born in the 1980s from their mobility experiences and the changing times.Research found that from the side of marriage view for rural migrant women born in the 1980s, because of the social mobility and changing times, their whole view point on marriage become more modern, autonomy, individualistic and romantic. The marriage among these rural women therefore experienced the transformation from institution to companionship. Mate selection standard had changed from family background in traditional rural culture to individual qualifications such as personal skills or education levels.As for childbirth, their attitudes and the preference of rural migrant women born in the 1980s are between tradition and modern. Their viewpoints are heavily impacted by the mainstream of city culture, but they still remain the conservative traditional childbearing attitudes. They think that being a mother is very important for "integrity" of womanhood, which means giving birth to a child is the institutional arrangements a woman must go through, rather than an optional personal choice. These young rural women have no particular preference in terms of the sex of the child (children), therefore we can see that the traditional patriarchal ideology is gradually weakened, but they had to withstand the pressure of gender preference from their parents, elders and other villagers.From the family/marriage ethics perspective, the rural migrant women born in the 1980s show their understanding and tolerance in premarital sex, divorce and other aspects; but this kind of tolerance is usually for others, not for themselves. Compared to their mothers'generation, the young rural women expressed more liberal attitudes towards pre-marital sex and divorce. According to them, pre-marital sex is acceptable if it happens within a stable relationship that will lead to marriage and under the agreement of a man and a woman who are involved. The young rural women also have more individual choices and power when it comes to dealing with husbands' extra-marital sex.The fourth dimension is to examine two major family relationships: husband-wife relationship and the relationship between daughter-in-law and the mother-in-law. For the rural women born in the 1980s, their relationship with husband takes romantic love and children as the main link, while their relationship with mother-in-law shows the rise of young women's rights in rural China. This generation of young rural women in the family has significantly improved their power and status, and some woman may have more decision-making power than the man in the family. However in general, women feel they are willing to have husband as joint decision-maker. Based on this research, traditional gender ideologies have become more and more weakened to have impact on the rural women who were born in 1980s. Meanwhile, the new ideology of gender equality (the ideology of gender equality) gradually penetrated into their language use and everyday practice in the family.Through the analysis of marriage and family views of the rural women born in the 1980s, this paper further argue that the social basis to explain the rise of women power includes the following aspects:their working experience from rural place to city, gender equality ideology of Chinese society, social change of urbanization and industrialization, and the women's independent economic capacity because of their jobs outside of home. Meanwhile, there are some limitations in the progress which are reflected in their lower level of education, their marginal working conditions in cities, their separation from their children who are in rural, and so on. The paper also raises some questions worthy of further research and pondering which include the following ones:it's difficult for the rural migrant women born in the 1980s to balance work and family, the children safety and educational problem is serious, the burden of senior villagers working in agriculture, etc. this paper put forward some countermeasures and recommendations about the possible solutions of the above problems.In conclusion, the village studied provides a small window to reflect the large social change happening in China today, among which many detailed and subtle social and cultural phenomena are analyzed. We have seen evidences that big progress has been made but the progress co-exists with the traditional gender ideology.