Diligent Daughters: Women’s Educational Outperformance in Contemporary China

Changing Filial Configurations: From Classic Patriarchy to Empowered Daughters

Before the Communist Revolution in 1949, families in China were governed by classic patriarchal configurations, elements of which continue today (Murphy, 2020: 98; Hsu, 1948; Sangren, 2000; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 10–14; Watson, 2013; Wolf, 1968). Under such configurations, men are connected to their families vertically: they must have sons to continue the descent line and must care for their parents in old age (Murphy, 2020: 98; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 10–14). To fulfill these responsibilities, they are raised “to forge an independent path beyond the home” (Murphy, 2020: 98) and embrace an ethic of entrepreneurship, defined as long-term diligent striving to “improve the material well-being and security of . . . the jia, or economic family” (Harrell, 1985: 216–17). A standard career path consists of academic success followed by professional or official appointment, through which men cultivate themselves into filial sons and accomplished individuals.

Women, however, are connected to their families horizontally, as daughters who will marry out and later as wives who have married in (Murphy, 2020: 98; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 10–14). Because they marry out, they are considered “spilled water” 泼出去的水, a wasted resource, by their natal families. They grow up learning to depend on family relationships, help their mothers in the home, and anticipate future care duties as wife, mother, and daughter-in-law (Murphy, 2020: 98). Rather than striving publicly for the jia, they emphasize personal security through binding themselves to what Margery Wolf (1968) terms the uterine family, their biological offspring. Only after women bear sons do their interests overlap with those of the patriline (Harrell, 1985: 221; Kandiyoti, 1988; Sangren, 2000: chap. 7).

In the twentieth century and especially after 1949, this patriarchal system has transformed, yet it has also shown resilience (Davis and Friedman, 2014; Evans, 2008; Hershatter, 2019; Mann, 2011; Santos and Harrell, 2017a). Its generational axis, subordinating youth to elders, has weakened and in some contexts reversed (Santos and Harrell, 2017a). By contrast, its gender axis, subordinating women to men, remains strong but is no longer primarily supported by men’s position within the patrilineal lineage (Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 26–27). These shifts picked up momentum during the heyday of socialist transformation in the 1950s and continued in the era of collectivization and in the post-collective reform era.

Yet the situation is complex, with much regional and rural–urban variation. In the reform era, labor migration has buttressed emerging “girl power” in the countryside because women’s economic contributions give them greater say in families (Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 18–20; Yan, 2006). In urban areas, where the one-child policy was strictly enforced, plummeting childbirths contributed to the empowerment of daughters (Fong, 2002; Gu and Yeung, 2021). But with the dismantlement of public child care facilities, growing numbers of urban women have chosen to become housewives, whereas rural-origin women continue to participate in the labor force at higher rates (Howlett, 2021b; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 29; Zavoretti, 2017). ⁹ Meanwhile, son preference remains strong in many parts of China, particularly in rural areas and in the southern provinces, including Fujian (Greenhalgh and Winckler, 2005: 226–29; Jiang and Zhang, 2021: 8–9; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 25). ¹⁰ Moreover, the retreat of the state from directly supervising marriages, which it did during the era of high socialism, has created space for the reappearance of gender norms resembling the pre-socialist era (Davis, 2014). For example, it is now common for high-status men to take additional extra-legal wives and for parents-in-law to control conjugal property (Davis, 2014; Fincher, 2016).

Yet in seeming tension with resurgent gender inequality, women of diverse backgrounds have become prime economic contributors to their natal families (Fong, 2002; Xie and Zhu, 2009; Huang, 2012; Shen, 2016; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 24–26; Shi, 2017; Zhang, 2017: 240–41; Sier, 2021b). This trend results in what Gonçalo D. Santos and Stevan Harrell (2017a: 23–26) term a “twisting of the genderedness of the generational axis” of patriarchy from patrilineal toward more bilateral arrangements. Many couples with both sons and daughters now prefer to rely on daughters for old-age care and financial assistance (Howlett, 2021b; Shi, 2017; Zhang, 2017: 240–41).

This growing economic contribution of diligent daughters is fueled by their self-development through education (Fong, 2002; Obendiek, 2017; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 23–26; Sier, 2021b). To account for women’s academic achievements, scholars cite the one-child policy and the concomitant rise of singleton daughters, who are the only hope of their families (Gu and Yeung, 2021; Fong, 2002, 2006; Ye and Wu, 2011). As Vanessa Fong (2002: 1103) writes, “Brotherless daughters . . . are encouraged to make full use of their academic talents because they are their parents’ only objects of investment, and only hope for old-age support.” In urban areas, parents hold higher expectations for girls, monitor them more closely, and invest in them equally (Gu and Yueng, 2013). Girls who conform to these new gender norms are more obedient and studious than their male counterparts (Fong, 2002: 1103; Gu and Yeung, 2021), and girls’ early success underpins their later dominance (Gu and Yeung, 2021). ¹¹

To be sure, the empowerment of urban singleton daughters is an important factor in women’s educational revolution. However, this narrative overlooks several important considerations. First, gender discrimination and patriarchal mores continue to affect even relatively empowered urban-origin girls and women. For example, while parents and teachers consider daughters superior in diligent memorization, they often see them as inferior in logical ability, reinforcing a self-fulfilling prophecy that perpetuates their underrepresentation in high-earning STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math) (Howlett, 2021a; Xu, 2018; Yang and Wang, 2019). At the same time, the academic dominance of women has given rise to widespread handwringing about a crisis in masculinity, a so-called boys’ crisis 男孩危机, which has produced an anti-woman backlash (Li, 2016; Liu and Wan, 2020; Zhao, 2017). This has led to discriminatory admission quotas in some undergraduate majors and exacerbated gender bias in the job market and in graduate school admissions, making women’s academic achievements even more impressive (Dong, 2021; Fincher, 2016; Zheng, 2017). In short, academically successful women must often push back against patriarchal mores even if they receive support from their natal families.

Second, conventional accounts pay short shrift to early marriage and childbirth pressures, which exert complex effects on both rural and urban women. The social norm of hypergamy encourages many families to support daughters’ higher education, which can improve their chances of finding an economically secure match. But this norm may discourage women from pursuing a master’s degree, or especially a PhD, which is widely regarded as making a woman “too educated to marry” (Fincher, 2016; Howlett, 2021b; Ji, 2015; To, 2015). Although women outnumber men in master’s programs, they are underrepresented in doctoral programs because of marriage pressure (Shen and Liu, 2022). Still, many women are moving away from hypergamic ideals to pursue companionate egalitarian matches (Jankowiak and Li, 2017). Higher education may help them to delay marriage while they search for “Mister Right” (Fincher, 2016; Howlett, 2021b; Ji, 2015), or to exit an undesirable match.

Third, the focus on urban singletons overlooks the 40 percent of women undergraduate students with rural origins (Li and Wang, 2020; Wang et al., 2013; Xie, Wang, and Chen, 2008). Some are singletons, but in many places the vast majority come from multi-child families (Gao, 2018; Murphy, 2020). In most rural locales, families were allowed to have two children if the first was a girl (Jiang and Zhang, 2021). In southern provinces, like Guangdong, Guizhou, Jiangxi, and Fujian, non-compliance with even this relaxed policy was common (Greenhalgh and Winckler, 2005: 226–29). In my rural field sites in Fujian, families of three or four children were unexceptional, and even many urban parents found ways to have a second child. ¹² Typically, many families consist of several older sisters and a younger brother because parents “keep trying” until they have a son (Howlett, 2021b; Ling, 2017). In multi-child families, parents tend to treat sons preferentially, and girls often must prove their academic potential to receive parental support for their education (Howlett, 2021b; Murphy, 2020: chap. 4; Gu and Yeung, 2021: 130; Wang, 2017). In rural areas and small cities, even singletons encounter a pervasive culture of “valuing sons over daughters.” Yet among rural-origin children, the ratio of daughters pursuing undergraduate degrees tripled between 1990 and 2010 and now exceeds that of sons (Yang and Wang, 2019: 154), demonstrating their successful resistance to these patriarchal norms.

Finally, the focus on urban singleton daughters glosses over the complexity of migration histories (Friedman, 2022; Howlett, 2021a; Ling, 2019; Sier, 2021a, 2021b; Zavoretti, 2017). During the reform era, hundreds of millions have migrated from peripheral places to central ones but lack official household registration, or hukou, which grants access to education, welfare, healthcare, employment, and retirement benefits. With so many migrants on the move, many Chinese cities doubled in size between the 1990s and 2010s. As a result, the majority of urban dwellers maintain close connections to the countryside and often have family members dispersed along the rural–urban continuum. ¹³

Migrants’ family situations and child-rearing practices often do not conform to the stereotype of urban singletons. To take one example, Mr. Li and Ms. Shen, a married high school teacher couple, were migrants to Xiamen, Fujian’s economic capital, from the rural county of Anxi 安溪 two hours to the north. They obtained an urban hukou and, bound by the one-child rule, had a singleton daughter in 2003. But in 2008, they decided to have a son, whom they adopted illegally through social connections in the countryside. Their daughter, once the family’s “only hope,” found herself competing with her new brother for parental attention.

The Agency of Educated Migrant Daughters: Resistance, Reciprocity, and Individualization

While I was teaching at Mountain County Number One, it was universally acknowledged that girls were more diligent than boys. Evidence of women’s superior ability to “eat bitterness” abounded. In the pre-dawn hour, the most diligent students could be found ambling around the school track, reciting their textbooks while the darkness dissipated. Almost all were girls. When the canteen opened at six, students poured in to gain a coveted seat so that they could study before their 6:50 a.m. breakfast, and again the vast majority were girls—the boys slept in. By contrast, the truants idling in the shadows of the sports field during evening study hall were all boys. These “lazy” students could not count on luck or brilliance to save them. As Yanzi, a second-year student, the daughter of farmers, said, “It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If you aren’t diligent, you won’t do well on the gaokao.” ¹⁴ And as Head Teacher Lin told me, “Some boys work hard and do well, but many are slackers. The girls are generally more stable and motivated.”

English-language qualitative social science scholarship offers three approaches to account for rural women’s academic diligence. The first focuses on how daughters resist son preference by proving their capability (Ma and Wang, 2016; Wang, 2017). The second investigates daughters’ desires to be recognized as filial (Obendiek, 2016, 2017; Shi, 2017; Sier, 2021b). The third elucidates rising “girl power” against the background of individualization and declining familism (Yan, 2006, 2009, 2016; Hansen, 2015).

Scholars following the first approach point out that rural-origin girls must often fight for parental investment in their education (Ma and Wang, 2016; Wang, 2017; see also Gu and Yeung, 2021: 130; Ye and Wu, 2011). In Fujian, as in many other places, girls report differential treatment (Howlett, 2021b; Murphy, 2020: chap. 4; Wang, 2017). Parents are often unable or unwilling to pay girls’ high school or undergraduate tuition fees, and some drop out to support the education of their siblings, especially boys. Under such conditions, many girls pursue resistance through diligence (Wang, 2017): they study hard to escape their oppressive homes and to prove their value (Wang, 2017: 658).

This focus on diligent resistance helps illuminate the challenges faced by girls and women in accessing education. But by emphasizing individual resistance, it overlooks how family members, especially mothers, sometimes push back against family and community norms on their daughters’ behalf. More, this approach tends to define agency narrowly as resistance, excluding or underemphasizing other forms of agency, such as filiality and self-development.

A second approach sheds light on the desire of diligent daughters to be recognized as filial. In educational contexts, parents and schools often frame filial piety as recompense for the sacrifices of parents (Kipnis, 2008). In rural, multi-child contexts, this intergenerational contract often follows a patriarchal logic: it is expected of sons, for whom filiality forms a public duty, but not of daughters, whose contributions are regarded as voluntary and thus based on feelings rather than obligation (Obendiek, 2016, 2017). By the same token, daughters often see their parents’ educational support, when it is given, as “even less instrumentally motivated than in the case of their brothers” (Obendiek, 2017: 82–83). Less entitled than boys, daughters often feel more grateful for their parents’ sacrifices.

The first approach highlights how daughters resist patriarchy through diligence, but it overlooks the cultivation of filial virtue. The second illuminates how parents sacrifice for diligent daughters, and how the latter, perceiving the sacrifice as a gift, reciprocate through filiality; however, it underemphasizes the struggle that daughters face. The reality is closer to a combination of both perspectives; that is, the desire to work hard for educational success is often based not only on resistance per se but on establishing the reciprocal relationships that such resistance produces. Diligent daughters strive to attract their parents’ sacrifices because they provide a pathway to recognition for filiality and thus full subjecthood within their natal families. At the same time, they feel a fierce desire to repay these debts, in part because this filial virtue is conventionally denied them as women.

These social arrangements result in gendered differences in patterns of rebellion. Both boys and girls may rebel against parental expectations. But whereas boys, who are expected to become successful and filial, typically rebel by challenging authority, girls often do so by proving their capability—by becoming successful filial individuals. As a result, many families are characterized by underfunctioning sons, who fail to live up to their parents’ expectations, and overfunctioning daughters, who outperform their brothers in school (Driessen and Sier, 2021).

In addition to the analytical frames of diligent resistance and filial reciprocity, a third approach focuses on rising individualism (Kipnis, 2012; Hansen, 2015; Yan, 2006, 2009, 2016). This trend coincides with an educational culture of increasing competitiveness and intensive parenting (Howlett, 2021a; Kipnis, 2011; Santos, 2021: chap. 4; Xu, 2017), as well as a general social tendency toward neoliberal-like focuses on self-development and personal happiness (Hansen, 2015; Martin, 2022; Yan, 2016). Such a shift reflects the partial reversal of the generational axis of patriarchy: many parents no longer define filial piety in terms of filial obedience but filial satisfaction, seeing happy children as filial (Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 21–22; Yan, 2016).

The extent of such declining familism may sometimes be overstated; in fact, many sons and daughters continue to contribute to their natal families (Davis and Friedman, 2014; Santos, 2021: 11–13; Santos and Harrell, 2017a: 21). But without doubt, rising individualism marks a shift in subjectivity and family relationships. For men and women, the individualistic focus on self-development is associated with an increasing desire for freedom 自由 associated with escaping the control of elders and avoiding manual labor, especially farmwork. In other words, sons and daughters both seek freedom from parental control, the generational axis of patriarchy. However, for many daughters this ideal of freedom additionally connotes independence from masculine domination, the gender axis of patriarchy. This shift toward independence accompanies a rising ideal of egalitarian companionate marriages (Jankowiak and Li, 2017). Daughters have increasingly insisted on having the main say in mate selection, a prime component of women’s empowerment since the Mao era (Yan, 2006).

The following analysis combines all three frameworks. Fusing resistance, reciprocity, and self-fashioning, women pursue full subjecthood—encompassing recognition for filiality, independence, and individual success; by gaining such recognition, daughters produce themselves as powerful moral agents within their natal families and in so doing change their families and wider society. Although I focus on women from peripheral places, my approach can help illuminate the experiences of urbanites as well. Although some urban singletons benefit from unquestioned parental investment, rural and urban women share many concerns—proving their worth, achieving self-development, and pursuing companionate marriages. Moreover, pervasive migration in the post-Mao era has made these groups difficult to disentangle.

Moving beyond Rural/Urban Dichotomization: Multi-sited Participant Observation

Although it can be a useful shorthand, the division of places and subjects into urban and rural overlooks nuances. Many urban women are in fact recent migrants from rural areas and peripheral places. Although many such migrants are members of the floating population or so-called farmer-workers 农民工, others are university-educated white-collar migrants, so-called phoenix men and women 凤凰男女, who used the gaokao to “change [their] fate” 改变命, that is, to achieve mobility. For both men and women, education provides one of the only viable pathways to acquiring an urban hukou (Howlett, 2021a; Obendiek, 2016; Sier, 2021a). But it is an oversimplification to call such migrants urban. Many come from multi-child households and have brothers, sisters, and parents dispersed across the rural–urban hierarchy. They frequently travel up and down the hierarchy and, like Mr. Li and Ms. Shen, maintain close connections with their native places. By the same token, not all urban hukous are created equal. People from peripheral towns and cities often aspire to improve their hukou status by migrating to more centrally located places.

In an attempt to capture this complexity, I am mindful of G. William Skinner’s (1964, 1965a, 1965b) market-systems approach, which analyzes China as a rural–urban continuum ranging from villages to major cities. This framework informed my methodology. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at three places along this continuum: My urban field site was the coastal metropolis of Xiamen (population 5,000,000), the economic capital of Fujian. Farther down the hierarchy, I conducted fieldwork in the backwater agricultural city of Ningzhou (population 800,000), the capital of Ningzhou prefecture. My rural field site was Mountain Town (population 80,000), the county seat of Mountain County, a sub-administrative district of Ningzhou prefecture.

In all three places, I received official permission to volunteer as an English teacher in schools. This participant-observer role allowed me to interact regularly with students, parents, and teachers. In Xiamen, I worked at Dragon Gate High School, a low-ranking public school with many blue-collar migrant children. In Ningzhou, I taught at Ningzhou Number One High School, the top public high school in the city, which attracted the best students from across the prefecture, including rural areas. And in Mountain Town, I taught at Mountain Town Number One High School, where about half the students came from the surrounding countryside. I commuted frequently between these schools, typically spending a few days to two weeks at each and teaching between ten and twenty hours a week. In Mountain County, I lived in a school dormitory and ate meals with students in the cafeteria, which enabled me to immerse myself in their everyday lives. Outside the classroom, my main language of communication was Mandarin, and all translations are my own.

In addition to teaching, I shadowed head teachers 班主任 and accompanied them on student home visits 家访. In the schools where I worked, many head teachers were rural-origin women who had used the gaokao to change fate. They often saw teaching as a gender-appropriate career that afforded moral authority while leaving time to care for children. Head teachers, who oversee a class 班级 and coordinate its subject teachers 科目老师, form life-long relationships with their students, giving them deep social insight. By observing their interactions with students, I saw how they fostered the next generation of diligent daughters. Many also told me how their educational success had transformed their own family dynamics. I frequently socialized with them together with their families, enabling me to observe these dynamics firsthand. During school holidays, I visited several in their native places, giving me better insight into their migration histories.

At the time of my fieldwork, I was affiliated with Xiamen University. As a visiting foreign graduate student, I attended regular seminars and lectures as well as social activities with master’s and PhD students, the majority of whom came from rural backgrounds. ¹⁵

In addition to participant observation, I conducted focus groups and interviews with Xiamen University undergraduates and interviewed students at Ningzhou Normal University, a teacher-training university. By interacting with people outside of school in temples, on public transportation, or during everyday activities, I encountered many women who had dropped out of school. Following my initial fieldwork from 2011 to 2013, I conducted follow-up visits to all three field sites in 2014 and 2016 and have stayed in touch with key interlocutors through video calls and social media until the present.

Through these activities, I met diligent daughters from many places in China, many of whom shared similar concerns and experiences. For the sake of consistency, however, I focus on women from Fujian. Although Fujian is a relatively wealthy coastal province, it displays typical patterns of rural–urban inequality (Howlett, 2021a). It is well known for its culture of valuing sons over daughters, especially in the countryside (Howlett, 2021b). Nevertheless, the province is relatively representative of educational trends nationally, including women’s performance (Howlett, 2021a).

Proving Ability: Resisting Son Preference through Academic Diligence

At Mountain County Number One, I often ate at the school cafeteria, which gave me a chance to have candid conversations with students. The public setting put them at ease while the mealtime hubbub and clacking of aluminum trays foiled eavesdroppers. On one occasion, I had lunch with second-year student Yanzi, mentioned above, and her friend Yang Rui, daughters from multi-child farming families. Over steaming trays of bean sprouts and tofu, they repeated familiar tropes about classroom gender dynamics: the top students were often girls; the boys were spoiled, lazy, and boisterous. When I asked them why girls worked harder, Yang Rui answered as Yanzi nodded in agreement: “China is a patriarchal society 男权主义社会, and girls want to prove their ability.”

Across the schools where I worked, many girls echoed Yang Rui’s view. The case of Lili, a Xiamen University PhD student, provides an example of how diligent daughters from multi-child families pushed back against son preference. Lili, who was twenty-seven in 2013, hailed from an inland prefecture and was the middle child between an elder sister and a younger brother. Originally factory workers, her parents had borrowed money from relatives to set up a scrap-metal recycling business in the prefectural capital. Lili’s elder sister had dropped out to work, earning money to support her family and educate her siblings. Lili, who excelled in school, grew up jealous of her parents’ preference for her brother, who, like Mr. Li and Ms. Shen’s son mentioned above, was adopted. After having two daughters, her parents had desired a son but could not conceive. Official adoption was difficult and expensive, so they had paid a middleman to acquire a boy illegally from another province, a common practice in peripheral places.

Although the boy had a bad temper and underperformed at school, he was exempt from housework and received the best tidbits at every meal. As Lili said:

My brother was clearly a problem child, but everyone just doted on him and spoiled him, which made him even lazier. . . . I worked hard in school because I knew how much my parents and sister sacrificed. . . . But when I brought home good marks, my paternal grandmother would say, “It’s just such a pity you were born a girl.” That made me very unhappy but also angry. I worked harder to show my worth.

Proving her capability through diligence, Lili attained admission to an academic high school and eventually a first-tier university, an extraordinary accomplishment for someone at her school. Recognizing her potential, her parents agreed to pay her tuition. But while she was at university, a maternal aunt revealed a disturbing family secret. Disappointed that she was a girl, her parents had abandoned her at birth. They had left her swaddled on a street corner, where another family had found her and taken her home. Regretting their decision, her parents had located Lili after a few days and pleaded with her adopters to give her back. Lili described the impact of this revelation:

I was so angry, so disappointed. My parents and I fought a lot, but I also became even more determined that I would show them my value. My brother will never be able to support them like I can. So my sister and I will have to take care of them in their old age. I will also pay back my sister, who has sacrificed so much.

Although Lili was my only interlocutor to speak of childhood abandonment, she was typical in seeing academic diligence as a way of pushing back against son preference.

However, the fight for recognition was not always a lonely one. Other women reported how their mothers played a pivotal role in making space for them to succeed. An example was Ms. Ma, a twenty-seven-year-old Ningzhou Number One head teacher who hailed from a small town in a neighboring prefecture.

Ms. Ma had a sister and brother, three and seven years younger than herself, respectively. Her mother was a housewife and her father, originally a farmer, derived income from acting as a middleman between townspeople and local government officials, with whom he had connections through agnatic kin. The family’s main source of steady cash was renting rooms to students at the local high school, just three blocks away, and they grew their own vegetables in a plot next to their three-story brick house on a dirt lane. All three children showed academic promise, but Ms. Ma was the hardest working. Although her father physically abused her mother and used corporal punishment on her brother, he doted on his daughters, particularly his eldest, and promised to pay their tuition if they got into university. But the patriarch’s support had not come without struggle, Ms. Ma said. Her mother, Auntie Yun, had persuaded her husband of the value of educating girls, saying that they would not be “spilled water” but could help take care of them in old age. She encouraged her daughters to study, saying their diligence would help them avoid her fate. Although Auntie Yun had shown academic promise as a schoolgirl, she had been forced to drop out of school at sixteen to marry. Suffering in an abusive relationship, she vowed that her own daughters would have better lives. Education would empower them to be independent and find better husbands.

Ms. Ma and her sister fulfilled their academic promise by getting into university on the basis of their examination results. Ms. Ma secured admission to Fujian Normal University, the best teacher-training university in the province. Her brother tested into an academic high school and was on track to get into university but bridled under his father’s pressure. When he rebelled by turning in an empty exam paper in his senior year, his father stormed into the school. Assuming he had come to beat him in public, the son ran away. He refused to take the gaokao that year, moving in with his maternal grandparents and vowing never to speak to his father again. “My brother was a rebel, a victim of the gaokao,” Ms. Ma said. “His QQ [a social media platform] tagline is ‘me against the world.’”

Such investment of mothers in their daughters was common in many families. As one Ningzhou mother, whose daughter was taking the National Civil Service Examination, said, “I always wanted her to have culture because I didn’t.” At times, however, motherly support could become oppressive. Yinglan, the daughter of Mr. Li and Ms. Shen, felt that her mother would only believe in her if she succeeded in school. “I just want to be happy in life, but she constantly pushes me to outachieve her,” she said.

Even if families supported the education of daughters, they often had to push back against patriarchal norms in the community. Su Mei was a PhD student at Xiamen University from a village in a rural coastal prefecture north of Xiamen. She had three siblings—an elder sister, a little sister, and a kid brother. She said her parents and grandparents had always supported her, describing her family atmosphere as warm. Like Lili’s elder sister, Su Mei’s elder sister had dropped out of school before ninth grade to support her parents and younger siblings. She and her little sister both excelled in school, as did her younger brother. Her father, who worked construction jobs in Israel to pay his daughters’ tuition fees, had been a laughingstock in her village for doting on his daughters. But after she got into university, Su Mei said, her whole neighborhood knew her name. When she got into a master’s program and her younger sister got into university, the entire village had heard about them. Her father’s status increased, and he was elected village head. “It is very important for my sisters and me to prove my parents right and pay them and my elder sister back for their sacrifices,” she said. “No one will laugh at us anymore.”

Because I met most of my interlocutors in academic senior high schools and at Xiamen University, I encountered many educationally successful women. By definition, almost any daughter who progressed so far needed the support of parents. But outside the school gates, it was common to find women who had been forced to drop out when their parents declined to pay their high school or university tuition. I met Jingjing while I was shopping for clothing in the Zhongshan Road Pedestrian Street in downtown Xiamen, where she worked as a sales clerk in a popular clothing chain store. Seeing that I was a foreigner, she asked me if I had ever read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. She was also a big fan of Peter Hessler, a prominent American writer of nonfiction books about China, and Han Han 韩寒, an irreverent Chinese writer who was known for dropping out of high school and producing sardonic critiques of the Chinese education system. She loved literature and had written her own novel longhand. She hailed from a village in southern Fujian bordering Guangdong and had a twin brother. Her father was a day laborer and her mother was a housewife and watched the fields. Both she and her brother had gotten good marks in school, but she had always scored better. With relish she explained, “I came out a few minutes earlier, so I’m the older one.” However, her parents had asked her to drop out at the end of junior high and work to support her little brother. Her brother, now in his second year of university, had opened a pop-up flower store with a classmate to help pay his tuition, but Jingjing’s remittances had provided the capital. As Jingjing explained,

My brother has a lot of university expenses. I send money home every month to my parents. It’s not so bad. Where I’m from, most girls have to do this. As long as I send them money, they leave me alone, and I have a lot of freedom. It didn’t bother me when my parents told me I wouldn’t be able to go to university. Lots of girls don’t go to university where I’m from. We’re used to it. Still, when my father told me I would enjoy making my own money, I got angry.

In sum, many women from rural and peripheral places use diligence to resist son preference and prove their capability. Sometimes they do so individually, but often they act with the support of their mothers and family members. Some, like Jingjing, do not succeed, and, along with the less academically inclined, drop out to work and marry early.

But even among academically successful daughters, resistance does not tell the whole story. For women like Lili, Ms. Ma, or Su Mei, diligence is a means to an end: by working hard, they pursue self-development and establish filial relationships with their natal families formerly reserved for sons. They provide for their parents, pay back sacrificing sisters, and support their brothers financially so that they can marry. In so doing, they strive for full subjecthood—encompassing recognition for filiality, independence, and individual success. Attaining these goals requires them, like their male counterparts, to pursue individual achievement, which for women entails negotiating with early marriage and childbirth norms.

Combining Independence and Filiality: Using Education to Navigate Marriage Norms

Both sons and daughters pursue self-development by using education to migrate up the rural-to-urban hierarchy (Howlett, 2021a; Sier, 2021a). But for many daughters this migration has the added connotation of independence 独立 or self-determination conventionally denied women as daughters, wives, and daughters-in-law. Independence and filiality are two sides of the same coin: By pursuing higher education, women distance themselves from patriarchal control and establish their ability to support their families economically.

Whereas professional success is expected of men, women must negotiate with patriarchal mores to achieve it, and marriage is a key domain for this negotiation. A nearly universal social norm in China, marriage is a constant concern for daughters in school and university. Young women find themselves in a double bind: they must marry to be filial, but an early or bad marriage can derail their filial ambitions. Many pursue the companionate ideal of an egalitarian love match but, if they do not achieve it, seek a husband who will at least support their filial desires.

Marriage pressure starts young. Parents usually forbid so-called early love; however, many girls are aware that if they do not do well in school, they will face immediate pressure to find a husband. As a Ningzhou junior high school principal said in an online community of teachers and administrators, “If a girl doesn’t get into university, she should start thinking about marriage right away.” ¹⁶ For academically inclined girls, the pressure ratchets up as soon as they graduate. A Mountain County Number One senior, the daughter of teachers, remembered her parents’ rapid about-face after she completed the gaokao, held every year in early June: “Until the moment I took the gaokao, it was forbidden to talk about boyfriends. Literally the very next day, my mother told me to go on a diet to make myself more attractive to potential mates.” As Ms. Ma told her students, echoing a popular saying, “For girls, marriage is the second chance to change fate after the gaokao.” But as this slogan suggests, marriage pressure is not necessarily antithetical to school success. Many girls see attending university as a way of avoiding early marriage while increasing their chances of finding a good husband. As Auntie Yun, Ms. Ma’s mother, told her daughters, diligent study would help them avoid a rural housewife’s fate.

Because girls envision marriage as a platform for contributing to their natal families, teachers tap into this desire to motivate them. This was a favorite strategy of Ms. Yang, a Dragon Gate head teacher whom I observed on home visits with her students. Six months before the gaokao, she visited the daughter of migrant vegetable sellers in their small but neat two-room apartment in a run-down building adjacent to the market. While Ms. Yang talked with the girl and her mother, the little brother played with a toy helicopter on the floor. The mother teared up as she explained that the boy was deaf and heard only poorly with hearing aids. He could have an operation in Shanghai that would cost 200,000 yuan (US$30,000), but the family could not afford it and there was no guarantee it would fix the problem. Ms. Yang turned to her student, who had underperformed on her monthly exams, and told her she had not yet become conscious of the importance of the gaokao. As she explained,

Let me be clear. If you don’t get into university, your family can’t afford a short-cycle program 专科 [a two- or three-year degree that typically charges higher fees]. You’ll become an ordinary worker, and the last thing you want to do is marry another worker. You’re holding your fate in your hands. By getting into university, you’ll be able to find a good husband, someone who can help you take care of your family. You need to stop playing with your phone so much and take your studies seriously. This moment does not come twice.

Under Ms. Yang’s mentorship, the girl did indeed get into a four-year university and married a university classmate soon after graduation. The couple found white-collar jobs in a nearby city and supported her family financially.

Ms. Yang’s speech focused on family duty, reinforcing an emergent norm that daughters should contribute to their natal families. It hinted at the status achieved by marrying a university graduate and avoiding blue-collar work (“you’ll become an ordinary worker”). Ms. Yang highlighted these factors because of her knowledge of her student and her family circumstances. But other motivations were important to many women, including companionate marriage and escape from traditional mores.

The story of the Ningzhou head teacher Ms. Ma, mentioned above, illustrates the complex interrelation of these motivations as well as women’s struggle to achieve them. For Ms. Ma, testing into a good university provided an escape from what she termed the stifling 压抑 culture of the countryside. As she said, “Everywhere you go, people are observing you, judging you, discussing when you will get married and whether you fit the traditional mold. In the city, my thoughts open up. But every time I go home for a few days, I can feel my mind closing down, becoming petty.”

Ms. Ma excelled in English, a subject known for demanding rote memorization but which for her signified a world beyond her small town and even beyond China. As she put it, “English was my best friend, even my lover. It was an escape, and it opened my mind up to the possibility of a different kind of life.” Her English scores helped her test into Fuzhou Normal University, the best teacher-training university in the province, and her position at Ningzhou Number One, which she secured upon graduation, offered a coveted career in an elite public school.

Ms. Ma’s success enabled her to support her parents financially and delay marriage to her boyfriend, whom she had known since high school. Although he had a good job in a tech company in Xiamen, she felt ambivalent about their relationship. As she said, “He lets me be independent, but we don’t really have feelings 情感. Also, I don’t like his parents. They are very traditional and value sons over daughters.” Ms. Ma dreamed of pursuing a graduate degree abroad and marrying a foreigner, which she imagined as an escape from tradition. But marriage pressure mounted from all sides—parents, peers, colleagues, and future in-laws. The tipping point came when her little sister told Ms. Ma that her delay was interfering with her own marriage plans: she could not tie the knot until Ms. Ma did, a rural custom. Fast becoming “leftover” at age twenty-seven, Ms. Ma gave up her graduate school aspirations and married. She saw this result as an acceptable compromise because her husband tolerated her independence and supported her filial desires: “My sister and I will take care of my parents in their old age. My brother certainly won’t do it. We also have to help my brother get married, because he cannot afford a house on his own and my parents can’t pay for one. My husband understands this and is willing to help.”

Ms. Ma’s case demonstrates how educational diligence enables women to pursue desires for independence, companionate marriage, and daughterly filiality but also how these desires must be negotiated with social pressures and norms. Although Ms. Ma did not achieve her dreams of overseas study and romance, she escaped her hometown and married a man who supported her filial wishes. Ms. Ma wanted to leave what she saw as the closed-minded culture of the countryside. Yet despite her parents pressuring her to marry, she did not see them as controlling. Education had given her the authority to be independent. “My parents don’t have a lot of culture,” she said, “so they let me make my own decisions.”

For many women, however, escaping parental control provided motivation for study and, paradoxically, early marriage. A case in point is Ms. Yang, the Dragon Gate head teacher introduced above. Ms. Yang came from a multi-child family in a small town of an inland prefecture. Her father was a road contractor and her mother was a housewife. Recalling her high school studies, she said, “I was a good student in part because I dreamed of getting out of my small town. My father was tyrannical and overbearing. I wanted to get as far away as possible.” More diligent than her little sister and brother, both of whom failed to enter university, she tested into Fujian Normal University and secured a job in Shanghai upon graduation. However, her parents wanted her to stay closer, so she accepted the teaching position at Dragon Gate in Xiamen instead.

She described her marriage at twenty-five to a physical education teacher at Dragon Gate as a way of ensuring her independence, despite her lack of feelings toward him. As she said, “In China, you’re not an adult until you get married. Having my own family gave me more control over my destiny.” Ms. Yang’s parents consented to the match even though he was not a high earner and lacked a “good” background because they worried their daughter would become leftover.

As Ms. Yang’s case demonstrates, not all diligent daughters delay marriage, and educated women sometimes leverage marriage to achieve independence. Moreover, the companionate ideal was difficult to achieve and could be compromised for independence and filiality.

But some educated women, like Ms. Ma’s little sister, neither migrated to cities nor delayed marriage; nevertheless, she came closer to the ideal of achieving a companionate match. After attending Quanzhou Normal University, a lesser-ranked teacher-training university near her home, she returned to teach in her hometown. At the age of twenty-four, she married a colleague, a physics teacher, and gave birth to a son the following year. She was content with her rural existence but led a different life from her housewife mother. She enjoyed cycling and cooking with her husband, who had relatively egalitarian ideas about sharing housework and family decisions. The couple was happy in their small town and did not aspire to leave. As Ms. Ma explained, “My sister is different from me. Everyone at home sees me as a little child because I’m not good at all the rural customs and relationships. But my sister excels at such things and feels right at home. She is well respected, and her relationship with her husband is happy and harmonious.”

The interconnected pursuit of independence, companionate love, self-development, and filial duty also motivate women’s pursuit of postgraduate studies. Many women use their postgraduate education to deflect parental marriage pressure. Lili, the Xiamen University PhD student, cited the prevalence of domestic violence and the difficulty of finding an egalitarian match when she explained why she had a “dread of marriage.” Upon graduating from university, she had had a relationship with a man from Beijing, but his parents accused her of being motivated by a desire for a Beijing household registration, and so she broke off the relationship. Pursuing a master’s degree followed by a PhD enabled her to follow her ambitions while holding off her parents. She imagined a career in academia to be relatively free and to provide opportunities for a companionate marriage.

Many women also said they pursued master’s degrees in higher-ranking, more centrally located institutions because they had failed to find good employment after university. They complained of gender bias in the employment market and hoped a master’s degree would help them compensate. But those who pursued PhDs were in the minority. Many gave up or did not entertain such plans because of parental and social marriage pressure. One such student was Jiali, who described herself as a “false feminist” because she abandoned plans to pursue a PhD. As she said, “My parents worry about me. They think I should start making money and get married. My peers say I have read too many books. Why should you think so much? Just get a job, get married, and live your life.” At Xiamen University, administrators fretted about the number of unmarried graduate students and organized singles’ events to help them meet prospective marriage matches. Meanwhile, parents coped with the shame of having an “old” unmarried daughter. They were anxious that their daughters would have no one to take care of them in old age. As Ms. Ma’s mother, Auntie Yun, said, “I supported my daughter’s decision to delay marriage, but at some point everyone started gossiping about us. And who will she rely on in old age? Having a husband and child provides stability and insurance for the future.”

In sum, women use academic diligence to achieve their ideals of independence, self-development, and filiality. Whereas sons are expected to be filial and successful, daughters must negotiate with early marriage norms and the notion that daughters marry out. Many daughters and their families see good gaokao scores as a step toward hypergamy. By migrating to the city for education, women can extract themselves from patriarchal control while improving their access to good husbands. Many women also dream of a companionate match. The right husband—ideally both egalitarian and financially secure—can help them achieve their ideal of full subjecthood: independence and filiality. But companionate marriage is hard to achieve, and pursuing a postgraduate degree can help women delay marriage while they search. Although many abandon plans for a master’s or especially a PhD for fear of being labeled leftover, higher education transforms family dynamics even for women who do not pursue postgraduate degrees.

Conclusion: Diligent Daughters Transforming Patriarchy

Women’s pursuit of full subjecthood—combining diligent resistance with self-development, independence, and filiality—is transforming families even while many gendered norms remain strong. Although few women fully achieve their ideals, the compromises they pursue reconfigure family power structures.

The lives of Ms. Yang and Ms. Ma are cases in point. Shortly after Ms. Yang married, her father, whose job required cementing relationships with government officials through frequent drinking sessions, developed liver cancer at age fifty. Ms. Yang took the lead in caring for him, accompanying him to Shanghai to undergo chemotherapy. Upon his death, Ms. Yang became the de facto head of her natal household. Her sister, a housewife, married a construction foreman, while her ne’er-do-well brother struggled to maintain an anemic shrimp-farming business. Ms. Yang was the only family member with the stability and prestige of a government job, and her position as a teacher gave her moral authority. Her mother deferred to her about family decisions, such as where and how to buy a house for her brother for his marriage. Ms. Yang was often unhappy with her husband, who had extramarital affairs, but her authority in the family enabled her to keep her parents-in-law, with whom she quarreled, at arm’s length. When her son was born, she arranged for her own mother to provide child care, which bucked the patricentric norm, in which paternal grandparents contribute the larger share of care work to a grandchild, especially a son.

Ms. Ma similarly refused the help of her husband’s parents after the birth of her daughter, causing a small scandal in her hometown. “They do a lot of things just because it is traditional, and I can’t accept it,” she said. Instead, she invited her own mother to live with her, and in this way Auntie Yun finally escaped years of domestic violence. In exchange for Auntie Yun’s help, Ms. Ma’s husband agreed to provide moral and financial support for Ms. Ma to buy a house for her brother so that he could eventually marry. Meanwhile, she and her sister are supporting their father financially. Ms. Ma is teaching her daughter English so that she can study abroad someday. “I will accompany her on her studies, which will let me finally fulfill my foreign dream. Maybe I’ll even try to do a graduate degree while my daughter is going to university.”

As I have argued, focusing on urban singletons to account for Chinese women’s education revolution overlooks the experiences of university-educated daughters from multi-child families with close ties to the countryside. The increasing financial power and filial support of diligent daughters, conventionally unexpected in this patrilineal context, is transforming patriarchy by shifting power within many families toward more bilateral arrangements. As part of this increased role, many daughters support their brothers to help reproduce the patriline. To be sure, in so doing they reinforce some patriarchal mores. But they also achieve moral authority, agency, and leadership within their natal families formerly reserved for sons.

At the same time, the gender axis of patriarchy has remained largely intact. Like many women, both Ms. Ma and Ms. Yang continued to provide the lion’s share of child care, which, despite the help of grandparents, created a significant burden. As Ms. Ma said, “If anyone had told me how difficult it is to raise a child, I never would have married. Everyone just says, ‘Other women do it. Why can’t you?’ There’s nothing that I hate more than that kind of talk.” But despite often failing to reach their egalitarian ideals, educated rural-to-urban migrant women like Ms. Ma and Ms. Yang are agents of transforming patriarchy. They marry university-educated husbands who are willing to support their filial desires and they take leading roles within their natal families.

The transformations taking place within families have broader social and political significance. Facing a demographic crisis of low birthrates, China’s leaders now worry the country will grow old before it grows rich (Minzner, 2022). Scrapping the one-child policy, they instituted a two-child policy in 2015, which became a three-child policy in 2021; however, birth rates continue to fall. Rather than seeing the silent revolution of China’s women as a source of national strength, the national leadership perceives a “boys’ crisis” or a crisis of masculinity and scapegoats so-called leftover women, thought to be picky and careerist, for the looming “silver tsunami” of social aging (Fincher, 2016, 2018; Li, 2016). In response, government leaders are cracking down on feminist movements and creating hurdles to divorce while promulgating traditional masculinity and family values (Fincher, 2018; Li, 2016; Minzner, 2022). Such policies appear to be backfiring, however, because they do not address why women choose not to have children, including unfair distributions of household labor, the rising costs of raising children, China’s dimming economic outlook, and the hypercompetitive educational environment (Fincher, 2018; Ji, 2015; Minzner, 2022; To, 2015). As the state backlash against independent women continues under increasing childbirth pressures, more daughters may have to fight for equal opportunities in education.

The types of ethnographic research pursued in this article could be followed by mixed-methods research that uses Skinner’s (1964, 1965a, 1965b) framework to move beyond rural–urban dichotomization by differentiating between the experiences of diligent daughters following different migration trajectories along the rural-to-urban continuum. More research is also needed to understand the interaction of women’s education with emergent mobility regimes and social movements in China. Growing numbers of youth are choosing to “lie flat” 躺平 by refusing the “nine-nine-six” working culture (9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days per week), which starts during the gaokao (Chen, 2021). As the economic outlook further dims under a burgeoning unemployment crisis in the wake of China’s “zero-COVID” policy, many educated youths are following a “run philosophy” 润学 of intended emigration (Yuan, 2022). As with university students overall, the majority of international Chinese students are women, and more may choose to stay abroad rather than return to China, exacerbating the low-birthrate crisis and brain drain (Martin, 2022). The political ramifications of this crisis extend beyond the need to reproduce the body of the nation. Another reason for the state backlash against independent women likely lies in how conventional patriarchal arrangements undergird men’s power in the public sphere: The public face of successful men relies on the unpaid labor that women perform in the jia (Sangren, 2000: chap. 7). Upsetting these arrangements challenges masculinist state authority.

For these reasons, the choices of diligent daughters have important implications for the economic and political future of China. This is not just true of China but of states all over East Asia and throughout the world. In more than seventy countries across five continents, women are now outperforming men in higher education (Gu and Yeung, 2021: 110; Inhorn, 2021: 380–82). The silent revolution of diligent daughters is a global and transnational phenomenon. More comparative ethnographic research is needed to understand the commonalities as well as the historical and cultural specificities of these cases.