Questioning Norms: Single Professional Women in Shanghai in the 2010s

Despite the profound social transformations that have taken place in China since the reform and opening up in 1978, marriage has remained universal. Since the 2000s, there has been a trend of delaying marriage among urban, educated young women, particularly in major metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai. This has engendered great public confusion and anxiety. Single professional women in their thirties or even still in their twenties are stigmatized as the “leftover women,” who have three “highs,” namely high education, high income, and high quality, but no marriage. They face enormous pressure to marry, to conform to normative femininity defined by wifehood and motherhood. At the same time, their high socioeconomic status often proves to be an obstacle in the highly patriarchal marriage market, where women are expected to be the less capable and less assertive party in a relationship in order to maintain male dominance. Based on extensive ethnographic research in Shanghai between 2014 and 2018, I argue that single professional women do not easily succumb to the immense pressure to marry. Instead, these women strive to carve out new femininities inside and outside of marriage; they envision companionate and equal marriages or prolonged singlehood. Their imagining and reimagining of marriage becomes a key site for them to question and negotiate gender norms. Moreover, new femininities and subjectivities emerge as these women imagine and experiment with a prolonged single life when and if marriage and reproduction do not occur. Being a single woman involves not only a reconceptualization of marriage and women’s family roles, but also a reorganization of a woman’s life course. This often leads single women to explore the meaning of life in other areas, such as work and civic engagement. These explorations could lead to more and broader social changes. These single professional women adopt an individualistic approach to life, prioritizing personal happiness. They believe that they have the freedom to choose the kind of life they want to live. They espouse the belief in the power of the self and the privatization of responsibilities for taking care of one’s life. The state is conspicuously absent in their self-narratives. However, they do not live free from the state. In this dissertation, I also examine how the post-socialist Chinese state structures women’s life course through the regulation of marriage, fertility, social welfare provision, social movements, and etc. By analyzing the subjective experiences and narratives of this specific group of women, I endeavor to illustrate how the relationships between the individual and the state are evolving in China and to explore the potential and prospects for feminist activism.