Out to Work : Migration, Gender, and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China

__Out to Work__ is a fresh, engaging account of the lives of a group of migrant women who, while in their teens, moved from rural towns to Beijing to take up work as maids, office cleaners, hotel chambermaids, and migrant schoolteachers. Part of the vanguard of China's great rural-urban migration in the 1990s, these women were deprived of an education because their parents were unable to pay school fees for both sons and daughters. They also faced strong objections from parents, who feared for their daughters' safety and reputations. Gaetano kept in touch with several women for over a decade, and her longitudinal perspective and biographical focus provide a rich empirical basis for her analysis. Through sustained and close contact, she learned about the women's employment searches and interviews, first jobs, promotions and job changes, shopping and leisure activities, self-study efforts, illnesses, romantic relationships, and marriage and motherhood. By accompanying them to visit their rural families at festival time, and meeting their coworkers, friends, employers, and eventually even their in-laws, she obtained fascinating insights about their lives. Gaetano shows that the structural constraints the women experienced stem from ideological barriers and discriminatory practices associated with gender and rural-urban hierarchies. To some extent the women themselves accepted prevailing ideas about gendered obligations and propriety and internalized prevailing ideas about rurality's inferior status. However, they sought to transform themselves and realize their aspirations by cultivating social networks that connected them to more desirable jobs and marriage prospects; by careful selection of a future spouse who shared their vision of social mobility; and through smart economic and emotional investments in their spouses, children, and affines. This multifaceted exploration of migrant women's lives demonstrates how the intersection of gendered norms and rural-urban inequalities shaped the women's identities and desires and makes clear the palpable material consequences the decision to migrate made in their lives. Overall, the book convincingly shows that migration for work advances rural women's gender equality and increases their ability to exercise agency and thus their chances to achieve success and build better lives for themselves. But it also makes clear that the socioeconomic mobility they find is inadequate to completely dismantle the wider gender and rural-urban inequalities that have made these women's journeys so difficult.

This is for readers seeking an excursion deep into little-known terrain but allergic to the wide-eyed superficiality of ordinary travel literature. The author savors the sometimes gritty romance of his travels to an island village far from roads, electricity, telephone service, and the Internet, but puts to rest the cliché of "Stone Age" Papua New Guinea. He also gives the lie to stereotypes of anthropologists as either machete-wielding swashbucklers or detached observers turning real people into abstractions. Smith uses his anthropological expertise subtly, to illuminate Papua New Guinean lives, to nudge readers to look more closely at ideas they take for granted, and to take a wry look at his own experiences as an anthropologist.

Although Smith first went to Papua New Guinea in 1973, in 2008 it had been ten years since he had been back. He came not only to see people he had known for decades, but also to find out if his desire to return was more than an urge to flee the bureaucracy and recycled indoor air of his job. Smith finds in Kragur many things he remembered fondly, including a life immersed in nature and freedom from 9-5 tyranny. And he again encounters the stifling midday heat, the wet tropical sores, and the sometimes excruciating intensity of village social life that he had somehow managed to forget.

A Faraway Familiar Place provides practical wisdom for anyone leaving well-traveled roads for muddy forest tracks and landings on obscure beaches, as well as asking important questions about wealth and poverty, democracy, and being "modern."

Out to Work is a fresh, engaging account of the lives of a group of rural Chinese women who, while still in their teens, moved from villages to Beijing to take up work as maids, office cleaners, hotel chambermaids, and schoolteachers. By pursuing new opportunities afford by migration and strategically applying accumulated knowledge and resources, these women were able to forge better lives for themselves and their families. But as this book also makes clear, broader social inequalities persist to make these women's futures precarious. Book jacket Contents Acknowledgments Introduction: A New Beginning Chapter One: Rural Women and Migration under Market Socialism Chapter Two: Dutiful Daughters and Migration Desires Chapter Three: Gendered Social Networks and Migration Pathways Chapter Four: Menial Women and Model Workers Chapter Five: From Country Bumpkins to Urban Sophisticates Chapter Six: Migrant Working Wives and Mothers Conclusion: The Changing Lives of Rural Women Notes Works Cited Index