Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/05/leftover-women-gender-inequality-china
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China – review
Leta Hong Fincher has written a shocking account of the way women are treated in the People's Republic
Julia Lovell
The Guardian, Thursday 5 June 2014

Leftover Women should carry a health warning: this book will severely raise your blood pressure. Leta Hong Fincher's subject – researched through statistical analysis, sociological surveys and extensive first-hand interviewing – is the toxic vitality of sexism in China today.

The book's title is drawn from a vile state-sponsored media campaign of the same name, which is designed to browbeat educated, professional women into early marriages in the interests of safeguarding social stability. Since at least 2007, newspapers, magazines, websites and – perhaps most troublingly of all – the All-China Women's Federation (a government organisation founded in 1949 supposedly to defend women's rights) have aggressively pushed the idea that unmarried urban females over 27 are "leftover women". These women may have university degrees and thriving careers but in the eyes of much of the state-controlled media they are essentially worthless without husbands and children. "Do leftover women really deserve our sympathy?" asked one article on the Women's Federation website. "Girls with an average or ugly appearance … hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is they don't realise that, as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls."

Although the Chinese media makes much noise about the country's epidemic of "leftover" single women, there are in fact far more "leftover" Chinese men, due to a traditional preference for sons and sex-selective abortions. By 2012, there were 117.7 boys to every 100 girls. "The continual accumulation of unmarried men of legal marrying age," admits the Communist party's mouthpiece, the People's Daily, "greatly increases the risk of social instability and insecurity." In this context, Hong Fincher writes, single, educated women "threaten the moral fabric … for being free agents, unnatural in failing to perform their duty to give birth to a child and tame a restless man". The openly eugenicist Chinese state is particularly anxious to see educated, "high-quality" women marry, "to produce children with 'superior' genetic makeup".

The social coercion of women into marriage has troubling economic consequences. Because urban women in their mid-20s are indoctrinated to feel already almost on the shelf, they often marry hastily and do not press for economic equality within their marriages. The urban Chinese today are preoccupied with buying a home. In cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, prices have skyrocketed in recent years, resulting in an extraordinary appreciation in real-estate wealth. Working women often contribute their life savings to securing a marital apartment, and siphon their salaries into mortgage repayments. Yet although more than 70% of women help finance the purchase of a marital home, only 30% of such deeds include the wife's name, and their contributions to mortgages are frequently not officially acknowledged. Hong Fincher's research suggests that husbands and inlaws often make women who request property rights within a marriage feel grasping and unreasonable. Consequently, women tend to back down, for fear of scaring off a potential spouse. Sole ownership of the marital property inevitably gives a husband greater power in the relationship, and weakens the woman's bargaining position on financial and domestic issues. At the same time as women have been left out of China's property boom, employment rates for urban women have fallen in the past two decades, from 77.4% to 60.8%. One female graduate whom Hong Fincher interviewed deliberately dropped out of employment in order make herself "less intimidating to suitors"....

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