The present study examines the trend of urban women's domestic role orientation in the wake of market transition in post-Mao China. During the 2005-7 period, we conducted in-depth interviews with 115 married women, who either currently held a job or had retreated to the home from workplaces, of both Mao and post-Mao cohorts in four large cities. It is found that women's growing domestic orientation mainly stems from labor commodification and denigration, as the party-state scaled back its welfare provisions and commitment to social justice, on the one hand, and unleashed market forces, on the other. Therefore, women's domestic orientation, rather than a mere reflection of persistent traditional culture, may be seen as their refusal to be commodified and passive resistance to labor denigration in the new age of economic liberalism. The findings also bear feminist and class implications of complex dynamics of capitalism.One notable trend invoked by China's post-Mao market reform (1978-) is urban women's growing domestic-role orientation. When compared with the Mao era, women's domestic-role orientation during the post-Mao period appears to re-embrace the separate-sphere ideology of men working mainly outside the household and women working within the household. Specifically, women tend to identify more with their domestic responsibilities than they do with the provider role and, additionally, devote greater energy to household well-being than to paid work. According to two national surveys on women's social status in China conducted in 1990 respectively (Jiang, 2006Tao and Jiang, 1995), the percentage of women who supported the separatesphere ideal rose from 44.8 percent to 50.4 percent; the amount of time that urban women spent in domestic tasks relative to that of their husbands went from 1.74 to 2.79 times higher. At the same