Paradoxical Empowerment: How Do Urban One-Child Generation Women Perceive and Navigate Fertility in Three-Child China?

Urban one-child generation middle-class women were believed to empowered by the One-Child Policy (OCP). They received political prerogative, legal rightfulness, financial rewards, preferential school enrolment, more accessible healthcare and more job opportunities. Additionally, as only children, they reaped concentrated familial investment,leading to higher educational attainment, greater earning ability, improved social status, and stronger reciprocal intergenerational ties (Fong, 2002). However, female empowerment and gender inequalities are multi-dimensional phenomena with non-comparable elements that progress non-unidirectionally. This study explores how complex and contradictory structural and familial forces have shaped one-child generation women’s contested empowerment with respect to their fertility.

Based on 90 semi-structured interviews with urban women born under the OCP, this study finds that their empowerment is characterised by temporal-geographical volatility, duality, and heterogeneity. First, the legal privileges of only daughters are contingent upon specific historical periods, subject to shifts in state priorities. What was once an advantage can easily become a disadvantage as the authoritarian state changes its scripts from anti-natalism to pro-natalism. As a result, the empowerment derived from their only-child status is precarious, leading to a contested sense of identity for these women.

Second, despite gains in education, career opportunities, property inheritance, and closer nuclear family ties, urban daughters remain trapped by reproductive expectations and exploitation. As only children, they face increasing matrilineal pressures, with the intimacy of caregiving becoming a means for parents to assert their expectations for grandchildren.

Last, the empowerment brought by the OCP was largely unintentional. Now, these women face a society that is far from gender-equal. Women with feminist beliefs are challenged by policies that reassert traditional domestic roles. Their embodied low-fertility culture contradicts the state’s pro-natalist agenda, leading to an inherent ambivalence. In response, many choose to reject childbirth and resist reproducing a system that is unfavourable to women.