Book Review: Children of the Revolution: Violence, Inequality, and Hope in Nicaraguan Migration by Laura J. Enríquez

Abstract

title, and women are forced to migrate to cities for work, children during the divorce process most often reside with their father’s family, and custody defaults to fathers. Both authors present an invitation for future researchers seeking to deepen our understanding of divorce in contemporary China. Despite treading a similar topical territory, Li’s and Michelson’s books provide a strong complement to one another. Read in tandem, Michelson’s big data analysis places Li’s grounded ethnography of two rural townships into a broader national story of gender inequality in Chinese courts. For sociologists of gender, these books use the window of divorce litigation and its position within the contemporary PRC’s institutional and political machinery to reveal how systemic gender inequality entrenches through a complex symbiosis between cultural patriarchy and mundane bureaucratic incentive structures.