This research investigates the commercialisation of postpartum care in China, specifically the commodified extension of the traditional custom zuoyuezi (‘sitting the month’), through a gender lens. Traditionally, zuoyuezi involves postpartum women being confined within the family and cared for by family members after childbirth. Today, commercial care packages replace familial supervision either with a postpartum care team, or an individual doula, known as yuesao, offering physical care, childcare guidance, and aesthetic body treatments. Through 28 in-depth interviews with middle-class women, their families, and care providers, my research examines how commercial postpartum care intersects with traditional gender roles, family values, and political ideologies.
The research yields four findings. First, women navigate tensions between seeking personal empowerment and adhering to traditional caregiving roles. While commercial services provide more privileged women with temporary solutions, they also reinforce consumption-based empowerment. Second, this empowerment often translates into heightened personal responsibility rather than freedom, as the absence of men in postpartum practices perpetuates gendered division of labour, ultimately increasing women’s long-term workload. Third, this individualised responsibility exacerbates postpartum vulnerabilities, isolating women from social support. Lastly, while the market acknowledges women’s identities beyond motherhood, it also imposes pressures of rapid bodily recovery and improvement, trivialising postpartum vulnerabilities.
This research highlights the growing tension between traditional values and market-driven individualisation in China, contributing original insights into how globalised market economies engage local cultural practices. It contributes to reproductive health research by exploring post-birth well-being beyond medicalisation, offering timely insights into an often neglected period of reproductive health. It emphasises the socio-economic transformations and interpersonal relationships that also affect women’s wellbeing, challenging the individual-autonomy-based model of care. The thesis ultimately calls for rethinking empowerment and agency as a relational, embodied process connected to structural inequalities.
