Under China鈥檚 one-child policy, a generation of only daughters in the 1980s grew up with unprecedented access to university education and careers in high-paying fields. Often dubbed 鈥渓ittle princesses鈥�, these brotherless girls had the benefit of parental ambition and family wealth that traditionally went to boys. And yet, as Ye Liu reveals in Only Daughters, this cohort of educated and privileged women did not go on to smash the patriarchy; instead, they were tripped up by cultural expectations. Liu shows that the one-child policy forced these women to grapple with the dual burden of achieving success usually reserved for men while upholding the traditional female virtues. Empowered as girls, as women they struggled to reconcile inherited ideals of filial piety and the state-imposed demographic duty to bear children with their own aspirations for autonomy and success.
Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, Liu traces the life-course transitions of siblingless daughters, aligning them with key phases of China鈥檚 structural transformation. She shows that the momentum of their girlhood successes collided with a patriarchal backlash, which limited their choices in the labour market, marriage and motherhood. Liu finds that, having abandoned the ideology of meritocracy and acknowledged that the conditions of their empowerment were temporary, these women adopt strategies that blend neoliberal self-reliance with traditional cultural values. With this timely account, Liu sheds new light on the resilience and adaptability of women within patriarchal systems in China and beyond.
Ye Liu is reader in international development at King’s College London and the author of Higher Education, Meritocracy and Inequality in China.
“This book makes a significant original contribution to the fields of gender studies, anthropology and sociology. It makes very valuable innovations in the development of theoretical concepts like transactional dignity, meritocratic virtue and the virtue-talent binary. The research is rigorous, deep and based on rich original data.”—Vanessa L. Fong, Amherst College
“Only Daughters is an extraordinarily powerful book about the lives of China’s ‘siblingless women who were never meant to be ordinary.’ Liu charts the only daughters’ transitions from girlhood to adulthood, college to work, singlehood to marriage and to motherhood and their negotiations with parents, husbands, in-laws, employers and the state along the way. Empirically and conceptually rich, this fascinating monograph blazes a trail in sociology and demography. It will be appreciated widely by researchers and students of gender, China, population, the family, education and labour.”—Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford
“From the 1980s onward, China’s one-child policy set the stage for an unprecedented natural experiment in gender and family research, as generations of only daughters were made the sole heiresses to their family’s ambitions and various forms of capital. Would this signal the end of traditional patriarchal structures? Following the life course of siblingless women through highly innovative fieldwork, Liu describes the empowered education they received at home and at school, but also the obstacles they faced because of persistent misogyny in the workplace, marital power structures and state pronatalism. Only Daughters explores the unmaking and remaking of the gender order in neoliberal China, with important scientific and feminist lessons for the rest of the world.”—C茅line Bessi猫re, coauthor of The Gender of Capital
“In this fascinating book, Ye Liu traces the life-course transitions of brotherless daughters who get an empowering upbringing and excel in education and work only to find themselves trapped by patriarchal values in adulthood. These women are now expected to live up to traditional female virtues as wives and mothers while also facing gendered discrimination and misogyny in the work-place. The author unpacks how shifting demographic policies and persistent cultural values have affected women at different stages of their lives and explores their ability to negotiate and resist these constraints.”—Marina Svensson, Lund University
“Skillfully combining macro and micro perspectives, Only Daughters offers a novel understanding of the gendered perspective on what it is like to grow up as a brotherless girl in China—and thus of the longer consequences of China’s One Child Policy—as well as the ways in which patriarchal structures have been reformed and remolded rather than eliminated.”—Susanne Bregnb忙k, Lund University
“A tour de force in contemporary sociology, Liu Ye’s masterful study deploys the life-course paradigm to chart the singular trajectories of China’s post-1980s only daughters. Interweaving intimate narratives of educational ambition, professional striving, marital negotiation and maternal identity, this book brilliantly situates individual agency within the sweeping macrostructure of the nation’s one-child policy. Insightful, nuanced and impeccably researched, this is a crucial intervention for global scholars of gender dynamics, demographic transitions and modern Chinese society.”—Xiying Wang, author of Gender, Dating and Violence in Urban China
