Drawing on gender construction theory, this study examines marital construction of breadwinning as both responsibility and privilege in urban China in the market reform (1978–). Data come from interviews with 39 married couples in Beijing in the summer of 1998. Husbands are found to be more devoted to paid work than are wives, although both spouses are active in the labor market. Moreover, both wives and husbands prefer the husband to be the main or obligatory provider and the wife to be a family-committed career seeker. The analysis shows that the persistence of the male provider role in urban China is mainly due to marital interactions on an everyday basis, the normative constraints of the breadwinning boundary to both genders, and the lack of an economic environment that provides wives with a sufficient number of self-fulfilling jobs and socialized domestic services.
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