A Study On The Social Support For Women Left-behind In Rural Areas Due To Their Husbands’ Labor Export

With the development of China’s economic opening-up and exchanges to the outside world,the export of labor services also expands on a large scale. Therefore, the number of ruralleft-behind women also increases quickly due to their husbands’ labor export. These left-behindwomen encounter various problems, which are more difficult and severe than that of anotherkind of left-behind women whose husbands are also away as labor workers in China. Theseleft-behind women of labor export families face worse economic pressure, living pressure andemotional pressure, which constitute a social phenomenon worth attention and studying. So, themain purpose of this paper is trying to construct a social supporting system to solve the socialproblems that these left-behind women of rural labor export families face.The left-behind women of rural labor-export families refers to those married women inrural areas while their husbands work abroad for years or work abroad seasonally. Theirhusbands are engaged or mainly engaged in physical labor services. The so-called social supportin this paper essentially refers to a free social assistance system for this particularly vulnerablegroup aiming to help these left-behind women resume their normal social life. The socialassistance mainly includes five categories: material support, business support, informationsupport, social communication support and emotional support, and they are mainly from threeentities: social individuals, social organizations, government organizations. This paper, using thetheories in social support research and judging from China’s national conditions, constructs atheoretical analysis framework aiming to study and help these left-behind women of rurallabor-export families. The social assistance system for the left-behind women of rurallabor-export families is like concentric circles, with the left-behind women as the center,extended families as its fixed layer, social individuals, social organizations, governmentagencies and other organizations as its half fixed or less fixed layers. The extended family playsa basic and key supporting role in the system, with the social individuals and organizations as anextensional supporting role, the government agencies as a complementary but also a necessarypart integrated in the system. The concentric circle system can be tested by left-behind women’ssubjective experiences and objective utilization of the supports to see if it works properly as aclose and complete system.The content of this paper is arranged as follows. The first chapter is the introduction and the theoretical foundation part of the whole research, defining the left-behind women and rurallabor-export families, introducing several social supporting theories and integrating the properanalysis framework for the research on the rural families. The second chapter makes a statisticanalysis on the social supporting system based on case studies and the result of author’s samplesurvey. A questionnaire had been specially designed for the left-behind women, and a surveywas conducted in Qianting, a small town in Zhangpu County. The third chapter further analyzesthe social supporting system from the perspective of family affairs, social communications,mental stress and other aspects, combining the related data from other literature reviews andcase studies. The last chapter, targeted on the construction of the social supporting system forthe left-behind women of rural labor-export families, puts forward the correspondingcountermeasures and policy suggestions.