Changing times and diverging lives: the 60s generation of Chinese women from little Red Soldier to glamorous housewife

The principal objective of this project is to explore the lives of the 1960s generation of Chinese women (those born in the 1960s), paying special attention to the social shaping of gender and generation. In China, the sea change in the social economic and political life in the last sixty years has afforded successive generations with different life experiences, producing a society that has now been deeply marked by strong generational cleavages. Under the shadow of the Cultural Revolution generation, there is no existing systematic research about the 1960s generation. Taking those aged between their 40s and 50s as the most illustrative group to reflect these changes, I argue that my research on the 60s generation of Chinese women is not just to give them their own identities and to fill the knowledge gap, but also to provide a fruitful line of enquiry for modern Chinese history and society in generational and gendered context. Drawing upon interviews with four groups of the 60s generation women, I explore and interpret the data to reveal how gender and generation affected their daily existence at different stages of their lives: childhood, youth and adult years, focusing on themes such as political movements, parents, education, relationships, marriage, children and work. Through reflexive scholarship and investigation, this project contributes to the understandings of the gender and generational impact of social change in China.