Min (1999: 140) remarks: ‘It is universally acknowledged that the kitchen is the world of women.’ Her research is focused on the changing role of women in twentieth-century China. Her methodology is comprised of a narrative enquiry based on interviews with women from four generations of one Chinese family. These are: ‘Ms Li, a housewife, aged 90 years, who had completed primary school… Ms Zhang, aged 69 years, a retired doctor… Ms Wang… a 40 year old mother and University Lecturer. . . Lian Lian, aged 10 years… a primary-school student’ (ibid.).
Min’s findings illustrate the considerable differences of time spent in the kitchen by these women. Thus Ms Li spends about ten hours a day on housework, Ms Zhang spends less than an hour per day and Ms Wang spends about two hours. Min comments that ‘Apart from reasons such as diminishing family size, help by older family members, and employment, an essential factor that has influenced women’s activity in the kitchen is the changing attitudes of women towards housework, across the three generations’ (ibid.: 143). For example, for Ms Li who was born at the beginning of the twentieth century, there were only two ways in which women could demonstrate their worth. This was through bearing a son and through caring for their families. Ms Zhang lived in an age when equality in terms of sameness was stressed and women were expected to engage in paid work in the same ways as men. Ms Wang was born at a time when there was strong questioning of ‘sameness’ equality and where ‘a woman of good qualities should not merely seek success in her career, but should also aspire to being a good wife and mother at home’ (ibid.: 145).
While women across these generations spend different times in the kitchen, this does not mean that caring is no longer women’s work. As Min notes, there is ‘no indication that the well-entrenched sex-role patterns will become history in the 21st Century’ (ibid.: 152). The reduced time in the kitchen that are features of the lives of Ms Zhang and Ms Wang was due to buying in help or through the use of female family members. For example, Ms Li takes on the housework for Ms Zhang. In this regard it is pertinent to note that the toy that the child in the family, Lian Lian, prizes most is the plastic kitchen that her father bought her for her fifth birthday. And as an epilogue to the study Min notes that at the close of her research Ms Wang moved to a new house with a kitchen that was twice the size of her previous one. In addition she has spent ‘ten times her and her husband’s salaries for a month’ (ibid.: 154) on refurbishing the kitchen.