Abstract
Analysis of narratives created by Hong Kong university-educated women shows that “marriage-stories” develop from a state of setting conditions for the acceptance of a partner, to bargaining for the kind of marriage individual women wish to have over time. Depending on the type of career strategy they adopt, women will set specific conditions for marriage and attempt to have them met. These conditions not only permit the university-educated to pursue the kind of marriage and family they wish, but also to carry on an occupation and employment pattern in which they feel most comfortable. Hong Kong women now look for intimacy in marriage in ways they did not previously; however, increased intensification of work in employment makes that intimacy difficult to achieve. Consequently, questions must be asked about whether such intensification now discourages marriage and family life, and if so, what should be done about it.
Presented to “Doing Families in Hong Kong”
November 11, 2006
Revised 2007
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Notes
- 1.
Alfred Adler (1870–1937) seems to have been the first modern social thinker to observe that in order to function in society, individuals created what he called “personal fictions,” stories about the self and others from social materials available that permitted and justified action. Despite George Herbert Mead’s (1863–1931) complementary interest in the “looking glass self,” this insight was largely let drop by sociologists until the 1960s. Then social theorists took what Richard Rorty has called “the linguistic turn,” and feminists in particular have taken a strong interest in the constitutive role of language, and in how stories are created and used in the lives of women.
- 2.
The literature in this area is now vast. Some publications relevant here are: (1) Ruthellen Jossellson and Amia Lieblich, eds. (1995), Interpreting Experience: The Narrative Study of Lives; (2) Sara Mills (2004), Discourses; and (3) Nancy Naples (2003), Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis and Activist Research.
- 3.
Max Weber’s Economy and Society (1964) represents this thesis in its discussions of how families seek to build and maintain status.
- 4.
Other constituents of women’s career strategies consisted in their relationships with mothers in families of origin, as well as with teachers and peers in educational institutions, and conditions of work in occupations and employment. In association with specific types of career strategy and career development, each constituent tended to make for particular kinds of story-making. See Partridge (1996).
- 5.
As such, mother-stories add another dimension here to the kind of historical sociology enabled by narrative research. But these stories are not just about marriage; they are also about education, employment, child care, social life and work generally. They are foundational, multi-dimensional stories with which daughters must come to terms as they forge their own life accounts.
- 6.
My approach to narrative research has developed through experience with comparing topics, such as relationships with mothers, and their relative weights of significance across various groups of accounts, and finding that certain meanings, associated with particular topics, emerge strongly in some groups and not in others. The inherently chronological nature of accounts concerned with career development has, in turn, pushed forward the possibility of comparing such themes longitudinally.
- 7.
A typical comment illustrating these young women’s awareness of their potential value to a husband looking for a mate with good prospects, among the many from the student participants in 1991: “And also I think a man would require his wife to have been superior in some respects, who can also provide herself security. I think when a man comes to be married with a woman he requires that this woman can also contribute something to the family.”
- 8.
In 1991–1992, the original research group was composed of University of Hong Kong students about to graduate, as well as of graduates then a decade out into the labor force. Thus I was able to re-interview in 1999 and 2000 those who had been students at the time of the earlier study and who might still be considering marriage, in addition to graduates approaching middle age who were then taking stock of partnerships formed earlier.
- 9.
I coined the term “mother-story” first to describe the similar stories I was hearing from university-educated women in British Columbia and Hong Kong about their mothers’ accounts of marital experience. For example, women tending to career strategies of accommodation most often told a mother-story of a female parent who was the emotional center of her family and who had faced great difficulty in keeping her family together and caring for her children. Such a parent often presented her daughter with a certain kind of marriage as an ideal within which one could then do a proper job of raising children.
- 10.
But if she must continue in her present job to help support the family, she would like her mother or mother-in-law to care for the children, rather than a maid. This preference for childcare within the extended family remains an ideal among many of the unmarried participants in this research. Such a preference may contribute to the general lack of pressure for an accessible, publicly funded early childhood system which integrates both education and daily care.
- 11.
One of the most powerful stories about Hong Kong reiterates over and over the morality of hard work, how its people deserve their success because of their willingness to work in conditions of incredible difficulty. This story is never questioned officially, even now, when survival is no longer an issue, because it has proven so useful a means of social control. As a consequence, many individuals call the cumulative exhaustion built up through years of long hours and tight deadlines mere laziness on their parts, rather than a signal of acute distress.
- 12.
Ting Yee’s marriage-story is under severe siege. If she clings to her condition for marriage, she may never marry; on the other hand, if she relinquishes it, she seems almost certain to be resentful. Perhaps she will revert to a version of the story I first heard from the older, unmarried graduate accommodators in 1992. In those cases, if they were Christian, they explained their condition for marriage as needing a Christian man and were accepting of spinsterhood in their communities. But, if like Ting Yee, they were non-believers, they often expressed regret at having not seized their opportunities, imperfect as they seemed at the time.
- 13.
A partner’s financial ability to help hire domestic help appears to be a critical component of university-educated women’s career development at present. By 2000, lower-earning women with lower-earning spouses in this research were finding themselves in the trap of needing to share fully in the payments for housing and general family support, but having no access to extra income to pay for household help. Thus they could neither take on the extra responsibilities or additional education to win the promotions they needed.
- 14.
She now needs to spend all day in the office Saturday, but she will bring her children in the afternoon to do their homework. Sundays are devoted to the extended family of parents and grandparents.
- 15.
Married negotiators in 1991–1992 tended to want their partners to assume what they saw as a fair division of responsibility for “free” time spent with children and to be satisfied with their marriages when that division occurred. When it did not, they were more likely to be resentful of their spouses and seeking a way out of present employment into more flexible lines of work. By 2000, some who could afford to do so were leaving the work place and seeking a redefinition of work in their lives.
- 16.
The common thread of a societal discourse I have called “moral motherhood” ran through the accounts of many of my Hong Kong participants, particularly students and those tending towards a career strategy of accommodation. Briefly, moral motherhood can be summarized as the obligation of women to become mothers only if they can meet certain conditions. These conditions have much more to do now with the provision of emotional nurturance, education and morality than with earlier requirements for food, clothing and shelter. While the scope of this paper does not permit a full exploration of moral motherhood here, it is a powerful discourse for women in Hong Kong and is invoked to explain many fertility decisions. For example, see Partridge (2006).
- 17.
Such Western discourses may particularly affect Hong Kong students Western during their emerging accounts of marriage and family, and an exploration of attitudes before and after such courses could tell us much about their influence.
- 18.
Soon after our talk, she wrote to let me know that she had been admitted.
- 19.
See earlier brief description of moral motherhood. Those who initiated the constitution of their career strategies with this account of mothering could actually make a later decision against child-bearing based on what for them were unassailable grounds: unless a woman is prepared to sacrifice her education and employment, she should not have children. In turn, women who want careers in employment must be prepared to sacrifice the pleasures of family. That is how they can remain moral women.
- 20.
For example, that of En Tze, who I first met as the assistant manager of a large garment factory in 1992. She had a boyfriend at the time, but seemed headed towards the avoidance of marriage and children, invoking the version of moral motherhood noted above. In 1999, still unmarried, she said she had no time for the kind of relationship marriage would involve and was intensely weary with the non-stop nature of her employment (now in computer sales).
- 21.
Arlie Hochschild (2001).
- 22.
Most often, social commentators and others view domestic helpers as the answer to women’s difficulties at home. But among the women I interviewed, they were not, because domestic helpers either could not, or were not seen as able to, take on the kind of emotion work being a parent involves. That work takes time as well, and they looked to their husbands to share the burden. When a husband would not, or could not, share in this way, no amount of domestic help, even if available, was seen as enough.
- 23.
See Arlie Hochschild (1975), The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, for the initial analysis of how emotions are constructed for gendered behavior in the workplace.
- 24.
Perhaps the clearest portrayals of these developments can be found in the literary works of Charles Dickens, but Scott and Tilley’s ground-breaking paper “Women’s Work and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe,” in Alice Amsden, ed. (1980), The Economics of Women and Work, is among the best in social science.
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Partridge, M. (2013). Setting Out Conditions, Striking Bargains: Marriage-Stories and Career Development Among University-Educated Women in Hong Kong. In: Kwok-bun, C. (eds) International Handbook of Chinese Families. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0266-4_29
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