Page 16 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

INTRODUCTION 3
Goodman argues that, based on his survey group, the nuclear family is the engine of
growth in the private sector in Shanxi Province—specifically, the husband and wife team.
The wives were of roughly comparable educational background to the husbands. Many
had received higher education, although more men were university graduates. Many ‘new
rich’ couples had met for the first time in the classroom (some had met in kindergarten)
and they worked closely together in their enterprise. The wives of the ‘new rich’ are often
very ‘professionally active’ and the majority had professional or white-collar work. Of the
small band of women entrepreneurs in the survey, all were members of the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) or had parents who were. Half of their number had a husband
who was a leading CCP cadre. For Goodman, this suggests the ‘centrality’ of the Party in
the national reform process. Goodman also points to the intense ‘parochialism’ of family
connections in Shanxi and close connection between new-rich elites and the party-state as
a factor in the emergence of married couple enterprises.
Another finding is that these elite families had a slightly larger number of children than
the average in the region. The ‘one-child policy’ established after 1979 appears to have
had little impact among this group. Women entrepreneurs were all mothers, and some
had relatively large families. Having children did not appear to have been an impediment
to their careers. Most of the marriages were not exogamous—that is, the couple came
from the same region in contrast to the traditional practice for women to marry out of their
native place. He hypothesises that women who married within their home town or village
had occupational advantages in terms of networking and local knowledge.
The reform period has thrown up new definitions of work among the elite in Shanxi.
For example, a distinction is made between a ‘wife who does not work’ (because the husband
is rich) and a so-called ‘housewife’. Women in these two categories do not engage in
remunerated work. However, the former is regarded as the privileged wife of a member
of the ‘elite’ or ‘new rich’, and the latter as a woman of low skills who cannot find
employment.
Goodman demonstrates that women who work with their husband as his ‘business
manager’ play a significant but largely unacknowledged role in the success of these
enterprises. He notes these findings may not hold as well for other regions that are less
parochial in nature than Shanxi. He concludes that ‘the family is potentially a most
important source of social power and influence for women’ and the family itself now
exercises important power both economically and politically
Clodagh Wylie takes us deeper into the issues of women’s adaptation to the world of
the entrepreneur, this time in an urban milieu. Goodman notes the relative ‘invisibility’
of women when working with their husbands. What happens when women are not
working in household enterprises, but in major companies and joint ventures? In her
micro-study of women in Beijing and Shanghai, Wylie hypothesises that women in this
sector might well suffer from the traditional stereotype that management and
entrepreneurship are perceived as ‘male’ domains and might feel uncomfortable with
positions of leadership or authority. They might also experience problems in their ability
to network, a skill of fundamental importance in business.
Goodman’s study relies heavily on husbands’ perceptions of their wives. Wylie’s study,
by contrast, focuses on the women’s self-perceptions. She carried out a qualitative survey