Women Power in Family Matters from Perspective of Intersectionality Theory

The gender imbalance in women’s decision-making power under traditional patriarchy has long existed. Existing research mostly focuses on the lack of status among rural or low-income women. However, little is understood about the little and big ways in which the educated women in cities in China exert power in the family. Based on Intersectionality Theory, this study investigates the power practice of one highly educated urban professional woman. Four core family domains were examined: marital residence choice, bride price and dowry negotiation, household and childcare division of labor, and fertility decision-making. This pilot autoethnographic case study illustrates how the intersection of education, professional status, urban middle-class position, gender norms, and familial emotional dynamics shapes women’s decision-making power for a highly educated urban professional woman in contemporary China. Their power practices—equal negotiation, flexible adaptation, and autonomous leadership—are neither traditional gender domination nor confrontational resistance, yet they rest on the spouse’s career compromises, the unpaid intergenerational care labor of the mother-in-law, and the subject’s own cognitive and emotional management of familial relationships. This context-specific empowerment, rooted in daily negotiation and strategic compromise, remains conditional and relationally contingent rather than constituting a structural transformation of patriarchal arrangements. As a pilot study, it offers a tentative analytical dimension for understanding gender relations among similar demographic groups, one that future multi-case research can test and refine.