Silver-Haired Working Women: Intergenerational Contract, Elderly Care and Gender in Lianhe

This chapter turns to the labour organisation in the old age period and elderly care. Through a historical and comparative framework, it reveals changing intergenerational contract mechanisms and compares the different elderly care arrangements between the parents’ generation of the first generation, the first generation and the ‘older sisters’ group of the second generation, covering both collective era and reform era. It examines how the variations of the factors both at a structural level and an individual level, such as family structure, number and sex composition of adult children, living arrangement, physical situation, economic standing and appreciation of intergenerational exchange and so on, have produced different social exchange patterns and disparate elder care modalities between genders and cohorts. It particularly stresses the effects of the changing labour systems and adult children’s understanding and appreciation of labour in these systems.