This book is a longitudinal and multifaceted ethnographic study of rural Chinese women who, as youth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, migrated from their rural hometowns to Beijing to take up jobs in domestic service and hotel housekeeping, and as schoolteachers to the children of migrant workers. For over a decade, Gaetano sustained close contact with several individuals, interacting with their friends, coworkers and employers, visiting their village homes, and meeting their families and, eventually, in-laws and children. With engaging anecdotes and insightful testimonies, the book describe ... More

This book is a longitudinal and multifaceted ethnographic study of rural Chinese women who, as youth in the late 1990s and early 2000s, migrated from their rural hometowns to Beijing to take up jobs in domestic service and hotel housekeeping, and as schoolteachers to the children of migrant workers. For over a decade, Gaetano sustained close contact with several individuals, interacting with their friends, coworkers and employers, visiting their village homes, and meeting their families and, eventually, in-laws and children. With engaging anecdotes and insightful testimonies, the book describes aspects of migrant women’s changing lives: their motivations and aspirations, journeys to the city, employment searches, promotions and changes, work conditions and relationships, shopping and leisure pursuits, illnesses, self-improvement efforts, romance and courtship, and transitions to marriage and motherhood. The longitudinal and biographical perspective provides a rich empirical basis for analysis of structural constraints, rooted in ideologies and discriminatory practices associated with intersecting gender and rural-urban hierarchies, that shape desires and identities, and have deleterious material consequences. Nevertheless, by pursuing new opportunities afforded by migration, and strategically applying accumulated knowledge and resources, these women forged better lives for themselves and their families. Migration for work thus increases rural women’s choices and possibilities for exercising agency, and advances gender equality, even as broader social inequalities persist to make their futures precarious.