Reframing Good Motherhood: Moralized Individualization in Entrepreneurial Mothering of Rural China

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10: Gender Roles and Ideologies

Abstract

The growing presence of women entrepreneurs in China reflects individualization. Literature suggests that individual interests in China are realized through family harmony, prosperity, and children’s success, and that childrearing has become intensified and transferred to the center of family. While this scholarship reveals the mechanism of family-embeddedness and relationality in Chinese individualization, it under-theorizes how mothers respond to moral accountability and potentially diverge from intensive motherhood. Additionally, existing studies on Chinese individualization mainly focus on urban middle-class women and rural–urban migrants, leaving the experiences of women in rural China underexplored.

This study draws on Yan’s (2018, 2009) theorization of individualization and neo-familism of Chinese society, examining how individualization among entrepreneur-mothers working in rural China is morally reshaped and strategically negotiated through entrepreneurial and mothering practices. Based on in-depth interviews with eight entrepreneur-mothers running small-scale businesses in rural China, this study explores how these women reshape motherhood and justify alternative mothering strategies.

This study argues that these women constructed a form of moralized individualization, where they leveraged moralized resources in pedagogical, relational, and spatial dimensions to achieve their entrepreneurial and mothering goals, while remaining subject to moral burdens. This enabled them to move beyond the binary of embracing or rejecting normative expectations by: (1) redefining “good mothering” by leveraging agentic and flexible entrepreneurial arrangements, where children’s independence, occasional participation in work, and skill acquisition were framed as pedagogical achievements rather than companionship insufficiencies; (2) transforming entrepreneurial ambition into work ethics to secure bargaining power of delegating intergenerational childcare labor, while still sustaining maternal authority and reproducing gender inequality in parenting; and (3) deploying rurality and “natural childhood” as temporal and spatial buffers that prioritize children’s wellbeing and delay educational competition rather than rejecting dominant mobility trajectories. Therefore, different strategies are morally articulated and utilized to harmonize entrepreneurial and mothering commitments.

Author

• Junyue Li, Qeen's University Belfast