The Incompatibility of Rights: Gender Essentialism, Market Primacy, and Women's Work Family Struggles in an Autocracy

Why do self-described gender egalitarians support the state's draconian birth restriction? Following China's universal relaxation of its one-child policy in 2016, this Element excavates an under-theorized and distinctly political dimension of the gendered work-family conflict: the incompatibility of rights. I demonstrate that young urban Chinese women have experienced the expansion of their civil right to mother-through birth quota relaxation-as intensifying labor market gender discriminations and undermining their civil right to equal employment. To cope, these women turned to various individualistic strategies of rights-trading, such as promising to limit childbearing when seeking to secure employment. In this process, young Chinese women have further come to perceive employment and motherhood as two incompatible moral claims of entitlement. This Element highlights how women's quotidian work-family encounters present a fruitful yet underexplored site for understanding their political ideations and citizenship struggles. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.