Rural women migrants in the Pearl River Delta: analysis of migration motivations at the household scale

Abstract

Most previous studies conclude that rural women's migration is motivated to maximize their household economic income and their migration is largely decided by their parents or husbands. But the picture of rural women's migration in China is more complicated. This paper aims to explore why rural women in China migrate to cities to seek off-farm employment at the household scale. We emphasize intra-household relationships in analysis and employ rural women's narratives about migration and their families to reveal their migration motivation. Models of filial daughters, liberal daughters and ambivalent mothers are presented to interpret the diversity and complexity of rural women's departure from the countryside: (1) filial daughters whose migration is a part of household economic strategies, (2) liberal daughters whose migration is for individual welfare and (3) ambivalent factory mothers whose migration is the result of negotiations among accompanying husbands, childcare and paid work. Moreover, we have placed rural women migration in the particular background of regional development in China and find that there are many more liberal daughters than filial daughters, which are caused by rural development, their parents' increasing earning power and lower fertility in the countryside. We argue that both maiden workers and factory mothers play an active role in their migratory decision-making.

Keywords:

• rural women migrants
• migration motivation
• gender
• household
• the Pearl River Delta

Acknowledgements

The authors also thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions and comments on the paper.

Funding

The work described in this paper was supported by a Research Grant from Research Grants Council of Hong Kong SAR [RGC Project No. 450107] and Postgraduate Studentship of The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Notes

1. Rural/factory maidens are the young women who are not married, to which filial daughters and liberal daughters belong.

2. Rural/factory matrons are the married women who usually have child(ren), to which ambivalent mothers belong.

3. It's a nuclear family that there are parents and two children.