A Study On The Rural Left-home Wives Under The Background Of Industrialization And Urbanization

Since the opening-up and reform, our country’s industrialization process has been accelerating ceaselessly, and urbanization has been developing rapidly, thus the demand for labor force of big cities has been increasing daily and a large scale of rural working force has moved outside. Because of the working outside of rural husbands and the leaving home of rural wives, the responsibilities of household production, supporting and maintaining the family which should have been undertaken by the couple, now totally fall under the wives staying at home, which we call the rural left-home wives. Our unique two systems in urban and rural areas that cut apart have seriously hindered the urbanization of peasant-workers, it has been hard for the migrant workers to blend into the urban community, they have no choice but leaving their root in the rural, leaving their wives at home undertaking the responsibility of taking care of the family.Based on Maslow’s theory of hierarchy of needs, social support theory and the theory of advantage prospective, taking L village in ChengDe as the study case, the paper sampled part of left-home wives to do the questionnaire survey and deep interviews to get their basic information as economic life, social life, family life and cultural and spiritual life. Through the survey, we found that left-home wives basically do the agricultural production working, restricted by the production conditions and physical qualifications, they are facing serious problems in agricultural production, and heavy labor work has not brought them higher income yet. They enjoy a low degree of participation in village affairs and public affairs and a narrow social network which is limited within the traditional geographical and blood related group. The long-term separation model of left-home wives and their husbands not only bring the negative effect to their marital stability, but also bring problems to educating kids and attending elderly, which make them shoulder heavy life burden, Heavy family burden and production activities squeeze their leisure time. The shortage of cultural resources and facilities make their cultural and spiritual life inadequate.The left-home wives are the results of nonsynchronous development of our country’s industrialization and urbanization. Taking the industrialization and urbanization as the basic clue to solve the problem of left-home wives, in the process of advancing rural productivity development and balancing urban and rural development, The government should create conditions for the development of left-home wives from the prospective of the institution, the economy’s developing and the urban construction. Non-governmental organizations should make the most of their own organizational advantage and make the full use of the bridge effect between government and left-home wives. The rural communities should facilitate their living state form the respect of community’s environment and resources. Left-home wives themselves should also establish positive development awareness and develop themselves’and group’s potential. Only by coordinating the government, non-governmental organizations, rural communities and the left-home wives themselves, can they improve left-home wives’ living state and promote their development.