In the 1980s, as China was beginning its transition to a market economy, there emerged calls for “women to return home” and to return “reproductive” functions to the private sphere. While often discussed in terms of women’s “choice” to do so in the midst of revivals of “femininity,” this does not adequately show how there were structural factors pushing women back into the home, including the ongoing gendered division of household labor. The public debates about this phenomenon, which continued in different forms in later years, show a transition of the mainstream ideology of Chinese society from the Marxist theory of women’s liberation to a “gender ideology” based in liberalism. Feminist theory requires a critique of this structural oppression created by the transition to marketization.