Divided Motherhood: Rural-To-Urban Migration of Married Women in Contemporary China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on qualitative data collected from interviews and observation in both sending and receiving areas, this study examines the rural-to-urban migration of married women in contemporary China. Bringing motherhood into the analysis, we found that having children plays an ambiguous and even contradictory role in women’s migration decisions. On the one hand, it may confine women’s mobility inasmuch as they are still expected to act as primary caregivers in the rural household; on the other hand, motherhood may facilitate women leaving their natal communities for urban employment, especially if such decisions are seen in connection with the costs of their children’s education. Owing both to chronic labor shortages and to their perceived docility and relative disposability, married women have been recruited in great numbers in recent years, especially into the garment factories of China’s mushrooming coastal cities. Yet because of barriers to family resettlement—the oppressive “household registration” or hukou system—most of the women in this study migrated alone or with their husbands, leaving their children behind in the care of grandparents, or in even less stable arrangements. That this geographic separation between childrearing and work creates a profound dilemma for these women, requiring them to alter both their mothering practices and their identities as maternal caregivers, is the central focus of the analysis. In this connection, divided motherhood in China can usefully be compared and contrasted with the phenomenon of transnational motherhood happening in other migration contexts around the globe.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".