Review

"This is a very valuable and also highly readable study. The implications of its findings are serious, because they presage a future society in which women will slip back further towards the low status they occupied in premodern Chinese society." Labour/Travail, Diana Leary, University of Britis Columbia

Book Description

Since 1978, reform policies introduced in rural China have had a profound impact on women's work and gender divisions of labour. This book provides detailed information on the shifts in women's work patterns that have occurred. It explains how and why these shifts have come about, and how they relate to other aspects of women's position in society. While other aspects of reform in rural China have been analysed extensively, this is one of very few, and to date the most comprehensive, study of the effects of reform on rural women.