Able to come and go: reproducing gender in female rural–urban migration in the Red River Delta

Abstract By examining household gender relations between migrant women and their left‐behind husbands, we aim to understand how gender shapes rural–urban migration and is being negotiated in the context of market‐driven rural transformations in the Red River Delta. In this study, rural women ensure the survival of their households as they link up with urban informal labour markets, moving to the city to work as junk collectors and buyers. Female migration destabilises conventional gender roles as left‐behind husbands take up social reproductive work that is partially relieved by wives' frequent home visits. Additionally, invoking women's traditional obligations, left‐behind husbands continue to ‘feel like men’, underscoring the resilience of conventional gendered norms on work, even where men actually take up women's work in their wives' absence. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of this resilience premised on the principles of structured agency, suggesting that actors may actively reproduce gendered notions of work in order to cope with changing spatial arrangements of household livelihood strategies brought about by political economic pressures and opportunities in rural and urban Vietnam. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.