Only Daughters

An innovative examination of how talent, virtue, and gendered expectations are negotiated in post-reform China

Under China’s One-Child Policy, a generation of only daughters in the 1980s grew up with unprecedented access to university education and careers in high-paying fields. Often dubbed “little princesses,” these brotherless girls had the benefit of parental ambition and family wealth that traditionally went to boys. And yet, as Ye Liu reveals in Only Daughters, this cohort of educated and privileged women did not go on to smash the patriarchy; instead, they were tripped up by cultural expectations. Liu shows that the One-Child Policy forced these women to grapple with the dual burden of achieving success usually reserved for men while upholding the traditional female virtues. Empowered as girls, as women they struggled to reconcile inherited ideals of filial piety and the state-imposed demographic duty to bear children with their own aspirations for autonomy and success.

Drawing on extensive interviews and observations, Liu traces the life-course transitions of siblingless daughters, aligning them with key phases of China’s structural transformation. She shows that the momentum of their girlhood successes collided with a patriarchal backlash, which limited their choices in the labour market, marriage and motherhood. Liu finds that, having abandoned the ideology of meritocracy and acknowledged that the conditions of their empowerment were temporary, these women adopt strategies that blend neoliberal self-reliance with traditional cultural values. With this timely account , Liu sheds new light on the resilience and adaptability of women within patriarchal systems in China and beyond.