In the Middle of Two Separated Yet Overlapped Spheres: Rural Nannies in Shanghai

Abstract

This qualitative research expands previous conceptualization and theorizing of the separation and interaction between the public and private spheres in post-reform urban China to rural migrant women working in urban middle-class women’s private family. Collecting data from a domestic service company and eleven rural nannies in Shanghai, we develop a theoretical framework of separated yet overlapped two spheres for rural women in the urban care service sector. We found that, for these rural nannies, the separation of the two spheres is elongated compared to urban working women. Geographically, their urban work place is far away from their village home. The scientific and intensive care they provided for the urban babies challenged their past mothering experiences, induced guilty toward their own children as an absent mother, and urged them to provide better care for their grandchildren in the future. Further, working in other’s family and developing bond with urban babies, the boundary between work and family became blurred and difficult to handle sometimes. We further discuss the intersectionality between gender, and other social dimensions.

Notes

Beijing March 8 Service Center was established in 1983, affiliated to the Beijing Women’s Federation. For its history and services, please go to http://www.bjsanbajz.com/html/about/about.aspx.

Document 396 by the Ministry of Labor, 1995.

Document 6, the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, 2000, implemented on July 1, 2000.

Refer to Report of Chinese Domestic Service Section by All China Women’s Federation and International Labor Federation, July 2009.

We did not find any statistics from research centers, or universities, or government branches. We thus cite data retrieved from the Internet, by a marketing company, Beijing Liben Technology, Ltc. http://www.51report.com/research/197285.html.

We did not find any statistics from research centers, or universities, or government branches. We thus cite data retrieved from the Internet, by a marketing company, Beijing Liben Technology, Ltc. http://www.51report.com/research/197285.html.

The company name and all informants names are pseudo-names for the same of confidentiality.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Social Science Foundation of China [Grant number 15AZD080] and Program for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at the Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning [Grant number TP2015032].

Notes on contributors

Yihui Su

Yihui Su ([email protected]) is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics. She obtained her PhD in the Department of Sociology at Peking University in 2013. She has investigated precarious labor in domestic work in China. Currently, she is conducting two research projects: one aims to study migrant labor issue from a gender perspective, and the other investigates the defects of China’s vocational education and training system and the resultant upsurge in student workers’ collective actions.

Anni Ni

Anni Ni ([email protected]) is a graduate student from the program of Gender, Development, and Globalization, London School of Economics and Political Science. During her college study, she took part in two projects as an interviewer. One is a transnational project with a target of understanding the group of Chinese qualified youth in France and China. In this project she also joined in the writing group and finished one chapter in the book. The other investigates the identification of Chinese female labor and focuses on the emotional labor and the concept of motherhood connected with training processes of the domestic worker.

Yingchun Ji

Yingchun Ji ([email protected]) is the Eastern Scholar Professor in the School of Sociology and Political Science at the Shanghai University. Dr. Ji obtained her PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She served as Guest Editor for the Journal of Marriage and Family and Chinese Sociological Review. Her research interests include family sociology, social demography, gender studies, and quantitative and mixed methods. Much of her research is dedicated to family and gender issues in the East Asian institutional and cultural context. Through empirical studies, she further seeks to conceptualize and theorize family, gender, and population dynamics in transitional China. Currently, she is writing a book with Routledge on reinstitution of marriage in contemporary China.