We employ data from the three most recent Chinese population censuses to consider urban women’s labor force participation decisions in the context of their families and their residential locations. We are particularly interested in how the presence in the household of preschool and school-age children and/or the elderly and disabled affects women’s likelihood of engaging in work outside the home. We find that the presence of older women in the household significantly increases prime-age women’s likelihood of participating in market work and that presence of pre-school age children significantly decreases it. Never married, divorced, and widowed women are all more likely to participate in the labor force than married women and the effect of marital status has increased quite substantially over time. Each of these effects is much larger in magnitude for migrant women than for non-migrant urban residents.