Abstract
Amid China’s rapid social transformation, women’s life courses are shaped by both historical constraints and changing family expectations. This study develops the concept of intergenerational regret as an empirically grounded analytical construct for understanding how women interpret unrealised life possibilities and how these interpretations are transmitted and reworked across generations. Based on an embedded multiple-case design, the study draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation with three generations of women in four families in Hunan Province. Using affective politics and relational self theory, it examines how regret is produced under gendered institutional constraints, how it enters family interaction, and how it may be ethically renegotiated. The findings show that women’s regret is shaped by period-specific institutional arrangements, gendered family roles and intra-household power relations. Regret is transmitted through two recurring but context-sensitive processes: ‘expectation projection’, through which elders redirect unrealised aspirations into hopes for younger women, and ‘experiential discipline’, through which past hardship is used to frame caution and protection. The study further shows that, under specific material and relational conditions, shared experiences of constraint can support forms of emotional resonance and more reciprocal dialogue. This article proposes ‘bidirectional ethics’ as a framework for understanding how critique and care may be negotiated together within Chinese family life, offering a culturally situated account of women’s relational agency under enduring gendered obligations and uneven material conditions.