Page 157 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

144 SALLY SARGESON
markets. I illustrate Dirlik’s argument by showing how young women’s pursuit of housing
and family ideals is helping to embed Zhejiang villages in global markets. At the same
time, of course, the lives of rural women are being transformed by the very processes of
property accumulation and consumption that they are facilitating.
However, in representing women as agents of these changes, my argument clearly is at
odds with influential paradigms that have dominated scholarship on gender, marriage and
household formation in China. In those paradigms, the marriage of women was viewed,
first, as an exchange of productive labour and reproductive potential among patrilineal
households, then as a moment for demonstrating prestige, exchanging wealth and
transmitting property between generations. For this reason, it is instructive to begin this
study with a brief review of how theories of marriage, household formation and property
transmission have altered in response to changes in China. I then draw on my field
research into rural housing to show that the housing boom in Zhejiang Province is being
driven, in part, by women’s residential aspirations and preference for independent,
nuclear households. The following sections explore how young women’s demand for
mansions has encouraged labour migration and the earlier division of family wealth, and
altered the material culture and domestic life in villages.

Changing paradigms of marriage and property transmission
in China
The key features of the original paradigm of the ‘orthodox’ Han Chinese household are
well known. Virilocality (the bride marrying into the groom’s family), patrilineality
(inheritance through the father’s line) and patriarchy (male dominance) are the
cornerstones on which the household is founded. For much of the twentieth century,
Western scholars assumed that there was little variation in the means by which new
members were recruited. After parents concluded negotiating the payment of brideprice
and dowry and the performance of appropriate rituals, a bride would be taken to her
husband’s home. Initially as an ‘outsider’, then as a junior member of the subordinate sex
in his family’s household, she would contribute to patrilineal extension and the
accumulation of joint assets. Unless friction or poverty forced division of the domestic
group, the joint, extended household could be expected to endure until after the death of
the father, when his sons would inherit the family’s property (Fei 1983:26–8; Freedman
1966; Baker 1979). This paradigm of marriage and household formation reflected the
androcentric, functionalist assumption, commonly held by early British and French
anthropologists, that marriage primarily served to exchange the productive and
reproductive potential of women between property-owning patrilines (Watson 1982).
Women played no role in the transactions that created and sustained households.
In the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, the ‘typicality’ of some components of the paradigm
was called into question. Historians, anthropologists and sociologists demonstrated that in
many cases, brideprice and dowry were paid concurrently. The dowry remained the
property of the bride, while a component of the brideprice was retained by the couple as
conjugal property. Joint, extended families, stem families and simple conjugal units were
all common household forms, and many individuals would have experienced each of these