Salaff, Working Daughters of Hong Kong

In preparation for reading Salaff, you should review Moore's discussion of Working Daughters on pages 109-11. The Hong Kong economy has changed significantly since the book first appeared, so you should also take a look at Salaff's preface to the 1995 edition, in which she provides an update on recent changes in Hong Kong's pattern of industrialization and development, and how this has affected working class women's status.

As you look at Salaff, try to evaluate her arguments on two levels:
1) the theoretical arguments she is making about women's status, family structures/functions, and the impact of young women's wage labor within a rapidly developing context;
2) the evidence she presents, how it was collected, and what kinds of inferences and generalizations she makes based upon it.

The following questions are intended to guide your reading and will serve as the basis for class discussion:

1. How does Salaff depict the relationship between women's employment, increased social or economic autonomy, and their status, both in theoretical terms, and through the life histories of the young Hong Kong women she interviewed? What do such factors as marriage choice, utilization of personal earnings, peer group relations, and status within the family reveal about the effects of women's labor? What model of individuality is suggested by this discussion? Are there other notions of individuality or factors influencing women's status which Salaff neglects?

2. What, according to Salaff, are the effects of modernization on working class Hong Kong families? Salaff suggests a model which she dubs the "modified centripetal family." What functions does such a family perform, how are decisions made, and what role does gender play?

3. In her conclusion, Salaff argues that the persistence of the centripetal family prevents women from achieving higher status: "As long as the core centripetal family norms legitimately define family action, women will be dependent upon the family and their labor-force participation will expand their opportunities largely to the extent deemed necessary by their parents, acting consistently with long-standing family norms" (275-6). What model for the family does she argue will promote women's equality? What notions of power and status underlie this discussion? How does her discussion of the nature of women's subordination and her proposed social, political, and kinship solutions differ from those of Ortner, Sacks, and Engels?

4. Salaff describes her methods in some detail in the preface to the original edition. What, concretely, are they? (You might want to make a list of them and bring them to class for discussion.) What strengths and weaknesses does she describe for each method? How did she select her sample? What questions did she seek to address, and how does this seem to have influenced her choice of methods? How does Salaff use the life histories she gathered to generalize about young working class women in Hong Kong? How did she gather and how does she use statistical evidence?

 

For more information, contact:  aleshkow@holycross.edu