Davin was one of the first scholars to study
Chinese Communist Party policies on women and the problems of working them out in practice. Her first major work was
Woman-Work: Women and the Party in Revolutionary China (1976), which she published after returning from her second stay in Beijing. The scholar
Gail Hershatter called the work "classic". She explained that the book followed policies from the 1930s until 1949, but spent the most time and detailed analysis on the 1950s. Chapters treated the Women's Federation, marriage reform, the effects of land reform and collectivization on women, and the lives of urban women. Davin, Hershatter continued, acknowledged the great changes brought about by the new "Party-state", and described the contradictions between the reformist Marriage Law and the realities of its results; women in the countryside were also caught between economic independence and their continued fixed place in
patrilocal families. The book, said Hershatter, "effectively laid out an agenda for much of the subsequent scholarship on women in the Mao years". John Gittings wrote that the book went "far beyond the stereotypes offered both by the communist regime and its critics" and that it probed the "tensions between a new '
socialist' emphasis on women's participation in economic and political life and a relatively unchallenged structure of gender and generational relationships in the family." During the following years, Davin wrote articles and chapters that analyzed marriage migration, domestic service, and
welfare entitlements for Chinese women workers. Her jointly edited book ''China's One Child Family Policy
(1985) was one of the first studies of the early effects of that policy. The review in The China Journal'' called the essays, though written when the policy was relatively new, "a timely review of the policy's origins, problems, and prospects." In 1999, after tracking the changes of the post-Mao economic reforms, Davin published a second major study,
Internal Migration in Contemporary China, that used field research, interviews, and published media. She remarked that her own parents' "stories of the migration of their parents and grandparents from the west of
Ireland to New Zealand gave me an interest in the forces that drive people to leave their homes and families in search of a living elsewhere, and a sympathy with the struggles and sufferings of migrants everywhere." Dorothy Solinger in
China Quarterly wrote that the book was "more for the initiate than for the specialist," but "rich with observations and covers every major topic that touches on internal geographical movement in China since the late 1970s," including the demographic traits of the migrants, state policies, the reason farmers leave the countryside and to come to the city, and the images of these migrants in the media. Although Solinger found "carelessness" and a tendency to rely on "vague words" such "few" and "in general," she found that "overall this volume stands as an excellent summation ... and is filled with insightful comments, if not encased within an overarching framework." Davin's interests in women's lives extended to other fields. Her 1992 article, "British Women Missionaries in Nineteenth Century China" examined women whose lives were supposed to take place only in home and family. It looked at their China careers, their effect as role models, and their own conservative views of what their influence should be. ==Studies of Mao Zedong==