“Rubber Rice Bowls”: Work and Family for Women Entrepreneurs in Post-Socialist Rural China

The three decades of China’s market-oriented reform since 1978 have brought about an increasingly deregulated and privatized rural economy, which posed new opportunities and challenges for women to balance work and family. This study focuses on a unique group—women entrepreneurs—who were neither the Maoist “iron girls” nor the cheap laborers in capitalist workshops. Drawing on interviews from two coastal villages in Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces collected during 2004-2010, where rural industries and petty entrepreneurship had become an important economic engine, this study finds that women, although underrepresented compared with men, had played an active role as entrepreneurs. Based on life histories of 8 women entrepreneurs, this study finds different ways to balance work and family, whose strategies changed as the reform unfolded. In particular, women entrepreneurs described their employment as “rubber rice bowls”, in contrast with “iron rice bowls” of urban workers and “mud rice bowls” of peasants. Contextualized in the reshuffling of job hierarchies and the restructuring of welfare institutions, women entrepreneurs found their “rubber rice bowls” satisfying due to its flexibility and potential rewards, but also challenging because of the increasing risks and competition. Such entrepreneurial dynamics led to various patterns of work-family balance among women entrepreneurs, which could not be summarized under the traditional gender norms or the socialist egalitarian ideology.