Page 158 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE FAMILY 145
structural permutations in the course of their life (Cohen 1978; Ebrey and Watson 1991;
Davis and Harrell 1993). Notwithstanding the idealisation of several generations residing
under one roof, family division and the partition of property frequently occurred before,
rather than after, the father’s death (Wakefield 1998). Indeed, scholars like Margery Wolf
(1972) argued that neither the patrilineal household nor the lives of women were of one
piece. By emotionally bonding their sons to them, mothers effectively created their own
loyal sub-cell within the larger household unit. Household division often was instigated by
women’s efforts to secure a share of the household estate for what Wolf called their
‘uterine family’ (Wolf 1972:158–70). Hence, although women might enter their husbands’
households as subordinates, they certainly gained in stature, security and agency when
they became the mothers of sons.
Furthermore, scholars showed that whatever empirical accuracy the paradigm once
possessed was diminishing over time. In the first few decades of the twentieth century,
the average household had more than five members, with up to half of all households
comprising an extended family. In 1982, the average household held only 4.43 people. By
2000, this number had further declined to 3.4, and more than three-quarters of rural
domestic units contained a simple nuclear family (Benjamin et al. 2000:94–5; Du and Tu
2000:85; China Statistical Bureau 2001). Evidently, an increasing percentage of families
were dividing at, or shortly after, the marriage of a son. Family size and form were not
the only things to have changed. Many young people were choosing their own spouses.
Village and surname endogamy were no longer considered to be taboo, so marriage was
not inevitably associated with women’s removal from their natal settlement (Parish and
Whyte 1978).
Yet despite the transformation of marriage practices, the monetary value of marital
payments was escalating rapidly. In areas where eligible women were scarce and there
was strong competition for ‘good’ marriage partners, families were paying huge
brideprices, whilst in economically developed areas, parents keen to marry their
daughters into reputable families were providing them with lavish dowries. In both types
of transfer, most of the marital payments were passing directly to the young married couple
to allow them to purchase housing and furniture (Yan 1996).
Housing has long been one of the most important investments made by rural families,
and it also has played an important social semiotic function in their arrangement of
marriages (Knapp 1999). Martin Yang wrote that in Shandong in the 1940s, ‘a family may
have enough houses for all its members to live in, but they keep on buying and building
new ones and acquiring land for the future generations’ (Yang 1947:46). Yang also
observed that parents negotiating the marriage of a daughter judged the status and economic
standing of would-be spouses by the condition of their families’ homes. As an indicator of
a family’s situation, the size and condition of housing became of even greater significance
during the Maoist period, because land ownership, the wearing of jewellery and other
marks of distinction were disallowed (Gao 1983; Xin 2000). What changed in the 1980s
and 90s, though, was that marital payments, together with the savings from young men’s
wages, were being used to finance the construction of massive new mansions intended for
the occupation of newly-weds (Shi 1997: 143–4; Wang and Murie 1999:209; Murphy
2001).