The issue of women and their status in Chinese society is not just about gender, but also a reflection of the goals and values of Chinese society and the Chinese state. During the CR, Chinese women were told they held "half the sky," but in reality, they were not allowed to display their womanhood. The erasure of the social display of gender differences, for the Communist Party, was in line with their policy to have all to put Communist rule before the individuals and the family. Under such policies, paradoxes abounded. Almost all women went to work, yet women often held more lower paid and less professional jobs. Professional women looked down on housework including child rearing and they were justified by the Soviet leader Lenin's argument that housework was the work of the slave. The traditional praise of a woman as "virtuous wife and good mother" has become an insult to the majority of urban girls, for whom the term is equivalent to wearing an outdated piece of clothing that belonged to one's grandmother.

More and more men have started to do household chores as their wives go to work and ascend the job ladder, although regional variations exist. Arguably southern Chinese men do more household work than northern ones, and the men from Shanghai, the largest metropolis in China, have especially a reputation for taking over a significant portion of household work, while handling full time jobs. On the other hand, all over China, rural, low income men seem to be the last to do household chores. This is to be put in the perspective that in rural China, arranged marriages are still often practiced, considering that as a practice they became illegal under the 1950 marriage law. The urban/rural gap continues to be reflected not only in income distribution but also in the treatment of women.

35 years have passed since Mao sent the educated urban youth en masse to the countryside partly as a way to address the urban/rural divide. Today, the divide still exists, and in some regions worse than before, because they have been adversely influenced by the growing market economy. In some regions it is better, partly because their young migrate to the city, take up temporary jobs, and send money back home. Young rural girls often serve as household servants in urban families. Prejudices against them from the cities show that not only is there a divide between the city and the country, but also one between urban women and rural women. The often educated urban women who are invariably the employers of rural domestic servants often look down upon the latter's low level of education and lack of manners, and could quite easily suspect rural girls as prostitutes or thieves. (c.f. Link, chap.5) The urban/rural gap of women is also the topic of Link, chap.3: urban women tend to condescend on rural women, even when the former want to help the latter out of their helpless situation: routine sufferings from "coercion, force, and violence" from their men who impose their will in "matters related to arrangement of marriages, household discipline, sexuality, and other sensitive areas." (Link, 60-61)

How rural women could be disadvantaged by the market economy:

The growth of commercial economy in China seems to enforce gender inequality that dated back to pre-Communist China. It is paradoxical that despite all the political movements to bring forth a new culture, Communist China has failed to stem certain traditional practices it set out to end, such as arranged marriages and patriarchal rule of the family in rural China. With commercial economy, more and more rural households find themselves money tight and use arranged marriages for their daughters to get cash from the bride money given by the groom family. Often women are married to far away places because their natal homes are poor and have not much choice in deciding where their daughters can marry to, which reinforces male dominance of the new wives as they do not have the support of their natal homes in their new environment. The household reponsibility system in the countryside: contracting state land to individual peasant households, has led to greater efficiency of farming and allowed many men to flock to work in the cities, leaving their women behind to take care of the land and the household. Men seeking extramarital affairs and harassing women who are left behind by their husbands in the village often go unpunished by law or village authority, while women committing adultery are often severely punished by their spouses which reflects the legacy of the taditional patriarchal society.(Link, chap.3)

Urban Chinese women and the economic reform

In contrast to their rural counterparts, young, educated urban women seem to have endless possibilities waiting for them, which they embrace with dreamy eyes as seen on p.138, the cover girl for the magazine The Young Generation. The urban woman is a far cry from the rural woman and from her predecessor, the reeducated girl high school graduate back in the 1960s-1970s (c.f. picture on p.142). Now revolutionary expectations are no longer there. Very few Chinese in their early twenties (born around 1980) know what the Cultural Revolution was. Both urban men and women have been educated through commercials via TV and other forms of mass media how to consume and build up an individual identity through the choices of material goods. Magazines are an important source to educate the young how to build up a new identity based on material consumption and to address their increasing quest to understand society and themselves. Numerous Western magazines such as Elle and Cosmopolitan are introduced with Chinese editions to offer the young Chinese consumers an international perspective. From these magazines young Chinese female professionals learn how to fashion their own images and how to manage their lives. (Link, chap.6)

The new life style of consumption in urban China is closely related to the economic reform: professional women who work in certain types of jobs now can earn significantly more money than in Maoist China because wages are no longer regulated by the state. Women and men can now have greater chances to exercise their abilities if they work hard enough and have the right opportunities, such as the story of the lawyer Liu Xiaohong (151-153). Sure, they may still face similar problems as their rural counterparts some times, such as spousal abuse (155) or sexual harrassment from male bosses or colleagues (156-157) but they are on the whole much more mobile than rural women and being literate and knowing their rights better, they are more likely to flee, resist or fight it out than their rural counterparts. On the whole, urban women gain considerably through the economic reform.