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Finding Mr. Right
Single Professional Women Imagining Ideal Masculinities and Negotiating Femininities in Contemporary China
Abstract In China, the universality of marriage has remained largely unchanged in spite of the country’s dramatic social transformations since the reform and opening up began in 1978. However, since the mid-2000s, there has been a noticeable trend of delayed marriage among younger generations, particularly among urban educated women. Through an analysis of the self-narratives of single professional women collected through interviews of ten focus groups, conducted in Shanghai in 2015, I argue that this group of women desire marriage, yet they do not easily succumb to the immense pressure to get married. They regard marriage as a means of pursuing personal happiness rather than as a necessary component of a woman’s life course. Finding personal happiness through marriage for these women, first and foremost, depends on finding “Mr. Right.” By examining their conceptualization of the ideal man, I contend that their constructions of ideal femininities and masculinities are intricately intertwined. In envisioning an egalitarian companionate marriage, single professional women denounce and valorize different masculinities. These negotiations are vital not only to their self-identification as independent, modern women, and to challenging dominant gender paradigms, but also to their self-regulation of desires.
Keywords single women; masculinities; marriage; China
