Abstract:As a special role of women, stepmother is always trapped in an awkward situation in manipulating with relationships among family members. People have mixed feelings towards stepmothers. The negative stereotype of an evil stepmother has long been recognized and accepted. As remarriage gradually becomes a common phenomenon in Mainland China, more and more stepmothers emerge. This paper intends to explore the contemporary types, identity and social cognition of stepmothers systematically based on qualitative and quantitative analysis. There are 245 cases used for analysis, among which 185 were collected by students who attended the course Cultural Anthropology at Zhejiang University. Another 60 cases were collected from Tianya BBS between January and April, 2015. In addition, we did a small questionnaire survey among students at Zhejiang University and got 178 valid questionnaires which were only used as a reference to a few related issues.
Nowadays, there are three ways through which a woman enters a new family and becomes a stepmother. We could name them ″Remarry after wife's death (xuxian),″ ″Remarry after divorce″ and ″Remarry with mistress″ from the paternal perspective. The result is three types of stepfamilies. Our studies show that the harmony index of the second type of stepfamily is usually not lower than that of the normal families. Base on 185 cases collected by students, we found that stepmothers who were married for the first time account for 34% and those married for the second time account for 65%. The majority became stepmothers during the age 30-39 and 33% of them were less than 30. Stepmothers could also be divided into two categories according to whether they entered the new family with their own kids. The possibility of giving birth to a new baby was significantly low if she entered the new family with her own kids. But other stepmothers were more likely to give birth to a new baby and confronted with problems of how to get along with their own kids and stepchildren.
Stepmothers' identity may fall in four situations which could be generalized as ″Fear of Identity,″ ″Abandon of Identity,″ ″Rejection of Identity″ and ″Acceptance of Identity.″ Many stepmothers including those who were about to be still hope to play the role of biological motherhood and thus leading to problems of ″Fear of Identity″ and ″Abandon of Identity.″ On the other hand, some tended to slide into another extreme and rejected to play the role of stepmothers at all. Only those who could separate social motherhood from biological motherhood and adjust their expectations accordingly could act as stepmothers quite well and maintain good relationships with their stepchildren.
Usually, a stepchild won't accept his or her stepmother willingly if she once was his or her father's mistress and caused his or her parents' divorce. The age of stepchild has a significant influence on the stepparentchild relationship. The attitude stepmother showed to stepchildren is also closely related to the stepparent-child relationship. Nowadays, the main reason why stepchildren hate their stepmothers is their duplicity. It's uncommon to see traditional wicked stepmothers who maltreat stepchildren as described in traditional fairy tales. As far as stepmothers' husbands are concerned, child-orientated ones usually are less likely to cherish stepmotherhood than the self-orientated ones. Their roles in step-families could be categorized into ″Detached Father″ or ″Involved Father.″ The former often contributed negatively to family relationships, but the latter could act as great lubricant for stepparent-child relationship. The attitudes of stepmothers' parents-in-law often depend on whether stepmothers could take good care of stepchildren.
Our investigation indicate that the public acceptance of stepmothers is still not optimistic. Stepmothers are still stigmatized in the Chinese society. The good news is that the public have started to pay attentions to the differences among stepmothers. At the same time, youngsters are ready to treat stepmothers individually than as a group. The mass media also start to pay more and more attention to touching stories about stepmothers or reinterpret stepmothers in classic fairy tales, which indicates an obvious tendency of the destigmatization of stepmothers. The tendency is closely related to the increasing scale of stepmothers, the spread of feminism, the transformation of social attitudes towards marriage and family and the improvement of public cognition, etc. However, due to the sluggishness of socialcultural change, the slowness of the transformation of social attitudes and the separation of biological motherhood with social motherhood, the destigmatization of stepmothers still has a long way to go.
刘志军 朱月. 继母的当代类型、身份认同与社会认知——基于245个样本的分析[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 0, (): 1-.
Liu Zhijun Zhu Yue. Contemporary Types, Identity and Social Cognition of Stepmothers: An Analysis Based on 245 Cases. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 0, (): 1-.