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China's One‐Child Policy and the Empowerment of Urban Daughters
Author(s) -
Fong Vanessa L.
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.2002.104.4.1098
Subject(s) - fertility , china , kinship , empowerment , incentive , one child policy , investment (military) , power (physics) , work (physics) , demographic economics , economic growth , sociology , gender studies , demography , political science , economics , family planning , population , law , mechanical engineering , physics , engineering , quantum mechanics , politics , anthropology , research methodology , microeconomics
Urban daughters have benefited from the demographic pattern produced by China's one–child policy. In the system of patrilineal kinship that has long characterized most of Chinese society, parents had little incentive to invest in their daughters. Singleton daughters, however, enjoy unprecedented parental support because they do not have to compete with brothers for parental investment. Low fertility enabled mothers to get paid work and, thus, gain the ability to demonstrate their filiality by providing their own parents with financial support. Because their mothers have already proven that daughters can provide their parents with old age support, and because singletons have no brothers for their parents to favor, daughters have more power than ever before to defy disadvantageous gender norms while using equivocal ones to their own advantage. [Keywords: gender, family, fertility, demography, China]