“Makes a powerful - and provocative - argument that China’s female shortage, far from empowering women, has actually resulted in a situation where urban women’s rights are increasingly imperilled…Leftover Women [will] leave readers coldly angry.”

“Leta Hong Fincher’s ‘Leftover Women’ offers a...chilling account of the pressures on Chinese strivers...One hopes that “Leftover Women” will soon be translated into Chinese, as it is likely to resonate deeply with urban educated women. It seems the party has forgotten the Mao-era dictum: ‘Women Hold Up Half the Sky’. ”

“Leftover Women should carry a health warning: this book will severely raise your blood pressure. Leta Hong Fincher’s subject - researched through statistical analysis, sociological surveys and extensive first-hand interviewing - is the toxic vitality of sexism in China today.”

“A timely, rich and intricately written book on gender equality in China...Hong Fincher’s work paints a broad and pervasive picture of women’s rights in post-socialist China gradually eroding. She delves into China’s patriarchal culture, the growth of its real estate wealth and the impact of the Communist Party’s central aim of maintaining social stability.”

“Gender oppression is not a product merely of cultural expectations or stereotyping, as much mainstream feminist writing would have us believe. It results from multiple forces—economic, social, political; micro and macro—working in concert. Leftover
Women’s greatest achievement is in conveying these manifold intricacies. Fincher deftly links the machinations of state power to the headlines gracing the covers of women’s magazines, and
the minutiae of family relationships to trends in the real estate industry.”

“An eye-opening, groundbreaking book that cast light on critical yet overlooked changes in China—and which seems more timely than ever ten years on.”

“Hong Fincher, a doctoral candidate at Tsinghua University, describes a state-sponsored backlash against economically independent single women in urban China, and the growing wealth gap it enforces, in this highly suggestive study...The book serves as a vital introduction to gender issues in urban China.”

“In ‘Leftover Women,’ Leta Hong Fincher convincingly argues that an orchestrated state campaign co-opts women to marry and buy marital homes, often to the detriment of their careers and financial independence.”

“Important and interesting...gender relations, in many ways so much more advanced in China than in India, are going backwards as traditions that were seemingly flattened by Mao re-emerge.”

“A compelling piece of original research...Leta Hong Fincher, an American journalist-turned-academic, argues that the same party that pushed through the elevation of women’s status in the 1950s is now trying to engineer their return to the kitchen.”

“In this commanding book Hong Fincher argues that China’s international image, celebrating the increasing education and wealth of its women, masks an alarming slide back towards deep gender inequality - and that the very education and wealth of Chinese women is being used against them.”