Nancy E. Riley – författare

China is home to a fifth of the world�s inhabitants. For the last several decades, this huge population has been in flux: fertility has fallen sharply, mortality has declined, and massive rural-to-urban migration is taking place. The state has played a direct role in these changes, seeing population control as an important part of its intention to modernize the country. In this insightful new work, Nancy E. Riley argues that China�s population policies and outcomes are not simply imposed by the state onto an unresponsive citizenry, but have arisen from the social organization of China over the past sixty years. Riley demonstrates how China�s population and population policy are intertwined and interact with other social and economic features. Riley also examines the unintended consequences of state directives, including the extraordinary number of �missing girls,� the rapid aging of the population, and an increase in inequality, particularly between rural and urban residents. Ultimately, China�s demographic story has to be understood as a complex, multi-pieced phenomenon. This book will be essential reading for researchers and students of China and social demography, as well as non-specialists interested in the changing nature of China�s population.

Controlling reproduction – who has children, how many, and when – is important to states, communities, families, and individuals across the globe. However, the stakes are even higher than might at first be appreciated: control over reproduction is an incredibly powerful tool.

Contests over reproduction necessarily involve control over women and their bodies. Yet because reproduction is so intertwined with other social processes and institutions, controlling it also extends far into most corners of social, economic, and political life. Nancy Riley and Nilanjana Chatterjee explore how various social institutions beyond the individual – including state, religion, market, and family – are involved in the negotiation of reproductive power. They draw on examples from across the world, such as direct fertility policies in China and Romania, the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland and Brazil, racial discrimination and resistance in Mexico and the US, and how Japan and Norway use laws intended to encourage gender equality to indirectly shape reproduction.

This engaging book sheds new light on the operations of power and gender in society. It will appeal to students taking courses on reproduction in departments of sociology, anthropology, and gender studies.

This book examines the dynamics of power within the families of married women who have migrated from rural areas to China''s Dalian Economic Zone.  Engaging the question of whether waged work gives women power in their families, this ethnographic study finds that women do indeed use their new positions and urban status to negotiate their family status.  However, women use these new resources not necessarily to promote their own individual liberation, but rather to strengthen their contribution as wives and, especially, as mothers.  Thus, this new modernity provides a space for the re-inscribing of traditional roles, even as it may work to give women new-found power within their families.  How and why this process occurs is related to the dual inequalities these women face as rural migrants and as women.

This handbook presents a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of gender in demography, addressing the many different influences of gender that arise from or influence demographic processes.  It collects in one volume the key issues and perspectives in this area, whereby demography is broadly defined. The purpose in casting a wide net is to cover the range of work being done within demography, but at the same time to open up our perspectives to neighboring fields to encourage better conversations around these issues.

The chapters in this handbook carefully document definition and measurement issues, and take up parts of the demographic picture and focus on how gender plays a role in outcomes.  In other cases, gender often plays a cross-cutting role in social processes; rather than having a single or easily distinguishable role, it often combines with other social institutions and even other statuses and inequalities to affect outcomes.  Thus, a key factor in this volume is howgender interacts with race/ethnicity, class, nationality, and sexuality in any demographic setting.

While each section contains chapters that are broad overviews of the current state of knowledge and behavior,  the handbook also includes chapters that focus on specific cultures or events in order to examine  how gender operates in a particular circumstance.