Title: Between marriage and the market: intimate politics and survival in Cairo 
Author: Hoodfar, Homa
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Gender Studies | Middle Eastern Studies | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Homa Hoodfar's richly detailed ethnography provides a rare glimpse into the daily life of Arab Muslim families. Focusing on the impact of economic liberalization policies from 1983 to 1993, she shows the crucial role of the household in survival strategies among low-income Egyptians. Hoodfar, an Iranian Muslim by birth, presents research that undermines many of the stereotypes associated with traditional Muslim women. Their apparent conservatism, she says, is based on rational calculation of the costs and benefits of working within formal and informal labor markets to secure household power. She posits that increasing adherence to Islam and taking up the veil on the part of women has been partially motivated by women's desire to protect and promote their interests both within and beyond households.   [brief]
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Title: Factory daughters: gender, household dynamics, and rural industrialization in Java
Author: Wolf, Diane L
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | Southeast Asia | Anthropology
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Title: Revolutionizing the family: politics, love, and divorce in urban and rural China, 1949-1968
Author: Diamant, Neil Jeffrey 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: History | Politics | China | Sociology | Asian History | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In 1950, China's new Communist government enacted a Marriage Law to allow free choice in marriage and easier access to divorce. Prohibiting arranged marriages, concubinage, and bigamy, it was one of the most dramatic efforts ever by a state to change marital and family relationships. In this comprehensive study of the effects of that law, Neil J. Diamant draws on newly opened urban and rural archival sources to offer a detailed analysis of how the law was interpreted and implemented throughout the country. In sharp contrast to previous studies of the Marriage Law, which have argued that it had little effect in rural areas, Diamant argues that the law reshaped marriage and family relationships in significant--but often unintended--ways throughout the Maoist period. His evidence reveals a confused and often conflicted state apparatus, as well as cases of Chinese men and women taking advantage of the law to justify multiple sexual encounters, to marry for beauty, to demand expensive gifts for engagement, and to divorce on multiple occasions. Moreover, he finds, those who were best placed to use the law's more liberal provisions were not well-educated urbanites but rather illiterate peasant women who had never heard of sexual equality; and it was poor men, not women, who were those most betrayed by the peasant-based revolution.   [brief]
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Title: Paying the price of freedom: family and labor among Lima's slaves, 1800-1854 
Author: Hünefeldt, Christine
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: History | Anthropology | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Christine Hünefeldt documents in impressive, moving detail the striving and ingenuity, the hard-won triumphs and bitter defeats of slaves who sought liberation in nineteenth-century urban Peru. Drawing on judicial, ecclesiastical, and notarial records - including the testimony of the slaves themselves - she uncovers the various strategies slaves invented to gain their freedom.Hünefeldt pays particular attention to marriage relations and family life. Slaves used their family solidarity as a strategy, while slaveowners used the conflicts within families to prevent manumission. The author's focus on gender relations between slaveowners and slaves, as well as between slaves, is particularly original. Her eye for ethnographic detail and her perceptive reading of the documentary evidence make this book a rich and important contribution to the study of slavery in Latin America.   [brief]
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Title: Industrialization, family life, and class relations: Saint Chamond, 1815-1914 
Author: Accampo, Elinor Ann
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: History | European History | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative study, Elinor Accampo explores the interrelationship between the structure of work and strategies of family formation in Saint Chamond, a French city that underwent intensive industrialization during the nineteenth century. Through a detailed analysis of fertility, mortality, marriages, and migration, the author analyzes the ways in which the family responded to changes in the organization of work. In the first half of the nineteenth century work was in the home, and families tended to be large in order to meet the demand for workers. But by the 1860s the mechanization of labor had begun to separate family life and work life, fundamentally transforming the relationship between work and family and making the survival of the working-class family more difficult. Accampo argues that workers began to have smaller families much earlier than has previously been suggested, and she demonstrates that fertility declined for reasons unique to working-class conditions. This decline in family size, and the context in which it took place, provides fascinating new material for understanding the working class world and the dynamics of class relations.   [brief]
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Title: The fabrication of labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914 
Author: Biernacki, Richard 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: History | Sociology | Labor Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This monumental study demonstrates the power of culture to define the meaning of labor. Drawing on massive archival evidence from Britain and Germany, as well as historical evidence from France and Italy, The Fabrication of Labor shows how the very nature of labor as a commodity differed fundamentally in different national contexts. A detailed comparative study of German and British wool textile mills reveals a basic difference in the way labor was understood, even though these industries developed in the same period, used similar machines, and competed in similar markets. These divergent definitions of the essential character of labor as a commodity influenced the entire industrial phenomenon, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques, forms of collective action, and even industrial architecture. Starting from a rigorous analysis of detailed archival materials, this study broadens out to analyze the contrasting developmental pathways to wage labor in Western Europe and offers a startling reinterpretation of theories of political economy put forward by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. In his brilliant cross-national study, Richard Biernacki profoundly reorients the analysis of how culture constitutes the very categories of economic life.   [brief]
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Title: Rural China takes off: institutional foundations of economic reform 
Author: Oi, Jean Chun
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | China | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities - counties, townships, and villages - with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state.Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.   [brief]
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Title: Re-drawing boundaries: work, households, and gender in China 
Author: Entwisle, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | China | Gender Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: Representing the culmination of more than a decade of empirical research in post-Mao China, this collection of essays explores changes in the nature of work in relation to changes in households, migration patterns, and gender roles during an era of economic reform. The contributors are respected scholars in fields that range from history and anthropology to demography and sociology. They use a variety of data and diverse approaches to gauge the impact of new economic opportunities on Chinese households and to show how the rise of the private sector, the industrialization of the countryside, and increased migration have affected Chinese workers and workplaces. The collection also asks us to consider how gender roles have been redefined by the economic and institutional changes that arose from post-Mao market reform.   [brief]
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Title: Battling for American labor: wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | History | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States - its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action - can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese families in the post-Mao era 
Author: Davis, Deborah 1945-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: How have the momentous policy shifts that followed the death of Mao Zedong changed families in China? What are the effects of the decollectivization of agriculture, the encouragement of limited private enterprise, and the world's strictest birth-control policy? Eleven sociologists and anthropologists explore these and other questions in this path-breaking volume. The essays concern both urban and rural communities and range from intellectual to working-class families. They show that there is no single trend in Chinese family organization today, but rather a mosaic of forms and strategies that must be seen in the light of particular local conditions.   [brief]
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Title: Family and frontier in colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 
Author: Metcalf, Alida C 1954-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: History | Latin American History | Latin American Studies
Publisher's Description: Colonial families in the Brazilian town of Santana de Parnaíba lived on the fringe of settlement in a vast and perilous continent. In her revealing community history, Metcalf tells how these settlers pursued family strategies that adapted European custom to the American environment. Turning to recorded events such as marriages, baptisms, and especially inheritances, she discovers that as the newcomers transformed the wilderness into a settled agricultural community, they laid the foundation for a class society of planters, peasants, and slaves. With an engaging description of family life at all three levels of society, the author shows how the families most successful in exploiting and controlling the resources of the wilderness gained wealth, power, and social dominance.Metcalf challenges accepted views by contending that not only external economic forces but also colonial family strategies paved the way for an inegalitarian society in Brazil. Her portrayal of frontier survival and coping, together with the heedless exploitation of wilderness resources, brings a historical perspective to the consideration of Brazil's last frontier, the Amazon.   [brief]
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Title: The family on trial in revolutionary France
Author: Desan, Suzanne 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: History | European Studies | French Studies | Women's Studies
Publisher's Description: In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere, The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence. The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France - sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges - all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.   [brief]
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Title: The children of NAFTA: labor wars on the U.S./Mexico border
Author: Bacon, David 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | American Studies | Labor Studies | Ethnic Studies | Latin American Studies | Immigration | Politics | Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Food, televisions, computer equipment, plumbing supplies, clothing. Much of the material foundation of our everyday lives is produced along the U.S./Mexico border in a world largely hidden from our view. Based on gripping firsthand accounts, this book investigates the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement on those who labor in the agricultural fields and maquiladora factories on the border. Journalist David Bacon paints a powerful portrait of poverty, repression, and struggle, offering a devastating critique of NAFTA in the most pointed and in-depth examination of border workers published to date. Unlike journalists who have made brief excursions into strawberry fields and maquiladoras, Bacon has more than a decade's experience reporting on the ground at the border, and he has developed sustained relationships with scores of workers and organizers who have entrusted him with their stories. He describes harsh conditions of child labor in the Mexicali Valley, the deplorable housing outside factories in cities such as Tijuana, and corporate retaliation faced by union organizers. He finds that, despite the promises of its backers, NAFTA has locked in a harsh neoliberal economic policy that has swept away laws and protections that Mexican workers had established over decades. More than a showcase for NAFTA's victims, this book traces the emergence of a new social consciousness, telling how workers in Mexico, the United States, and Canada are now beginning to join together in a powerful new strategy of cross-border organizing as they search for economic and social justice.   [brief]
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Title: Perfectly Japanese: making families in an era of upheaval
Author: White, Merry I 1941-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Social Science | Japan | Cultural Anthropology | Asian History | Gender Studies | Popular Culture
Publisher's Description: Are Japanese families in crisis? In this dynamic and substantive study, Merry Isaacs White looks back at two key moments of "family making" in the past hundred years - the Meiji era and postwar period - to see how models for the Japanese family have been constructed. The models had little to do with families of their eras and even less to do with families today, she finds. She vividly portrays the everyday reality of a range of families: young married couples who experience fleeting togetherness until the first child is born; a family separated by job shifts; a family with a grandmother as babysitter; a marriage without children.   [brief]
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Title: In one's own shadow: an ethnographic account of the condition of post-reform rural China
Author: Liu, Xin 1957-
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Anthropology | China
Publisher's Description: China underwent a dramatic social transformation in the last decade of the twentieth century. This powerful ethnographic study of one community focuses on the logic of everyday practice in post-reform rural China. Enriched with many vivid anecdotes describing life in the village of Zhaojiahe in northwestern China, In One's Own Shadow skillfully analyzes the changes and continuities marking the recent history of this region and highlights the broader implications for the way we understand Chinese modernity. Liu's narrative provides a wonderfully evocative exploration of many domains of everyday life such as kinship and marriage traditions, food systems, ceremonial celebrations, social relations, and village politics. He brings to life many of the personalities and customs of Zhaojiahe as he presents the villagers' strategies to modernize in an environment of scarce resources and a discredited cultural heritage. This accessibly written ethnography will be an essential contribution to the anthropology of China.   [brief]
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Title: The middling sort: commerce, gender, and the family in England, 1680-1780
Author: Hunt, Margaret R 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: History | Gender Studies | Social Science
Publisher's Description: To be one of "the middling sort" in urban England in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century was to live a life tied, one way or another, to the world of commerce. In a lively study that combines narrative and alternately poignant and hilarious anecdotes with convincing analysis, Margaret R. Hunt offers a view of middling society during the hundred years that separated the Glorious Revolution from the factory age. Thanks to her exploration of many family papers and court records, Hunt is able to examine what people thought, felt, and valued. She finds that early capitalism and early modern family life were far more insecure than their "classical" models supposed.Commercial needs and social needs coincided to a large extent. The family is central to Hunt's story, and she shows how financial struggles brought conflict, ambiguity, and tension to the home. She investigates the way gender intertwined with class and family hierarchy and the way many businesses survived as precarious successes, secured through the sacrifices made by female as well as male family members. The Middling Sort offers a dynamic portrait of a society struggling to minimize the considerable social and psychic dislocation that accompanied England's launch of a full-scale market economy.   [brief]
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Title: Working families: the transformation of the American home
Author: Hertz, Rosanna
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Gender Studies | Women's Studies | Sociology | Social Problems | Anthropology | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | Ethnic Studies | Politics | Politics
Publisher's Description: The dynamics of work and parenthood are in the midst of a revolutionary shift in the United States. Focused around a major factor in this shift - the rise of dual-income families - this groundbreaking volume provides a highly informative snapshot of the intricate fabric of work and family in the United States. With selections written by leading scholars both inside and outside academia, Working Families offers intimate stories of how families manage and how children respond to the rigors of their parents' lives, as well as broad overviews developed from survey and census data. Taken together, these essays present an updated and integral view of the revolutionary changes in patterns of work and family life occurring today. Using a broad range of methodologies, the contributors reach across gender, age, and class differences. They discuss working-class as well as affluent dual-career couples and work sites ranging from factories to offices. Straddling racial divides, the essays range from studies of white day care providers to a close look at a Mexican maid's daughter. The collection as a whole refutes the assumption that there is one normal type of family or workplace. These readable essays capture our attention as they build, cumulatively, to an absorbing picture of today's families and workplaces.   [brief]
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Title: Crime, cultural conflict, and justice in rural Russia, 1856-1914
Author: Frank, Stephen 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Russian and Eastern European Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Social Problems | European History | Law | Criminology
Publisher's Description: This book is the first to explore the largely unknown world of rural crime and justice in post-emancipation Imperial Russia. Drawing upon previously untapped provincial archives and a wealth of other neglected primary material, Stephen P. Frank offers a major reassessment of the interactions between peasantry and the state in the decades leading up to World War I. Viewing crime and punishment as contested metaphors about social order, his revisionist study documents the varied understandings of criminality and justice that underlay deep conflicts in Russian society, and it contrasts official and elite representations of rural criminality - and of peasants - with the realities of everyday crime at the village level.   [brief]
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Title: Chinese visions of family and state, 1915-1953
Author: Glosser, Susan L 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Asian History | China | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: At the dawn of the twentieth century, China's sovereignty was fragile at best. In the face of international pressure and domestic upheaval, young urban radicals - desperate for reforms that would save their nation - clamored for change, championing Western-inspired family reform and promoting free marriage choice and economic and emotional independence. But what came to be known as the New Culture Movement had the unwitting effect of fostering totalitarianism. In this wide-reaching, engrossing book, Susan Glosser examines how the link between family order and national salvation affected state-building and explores its lasting consequences. Glosser effectively argues that the replacement of the authoritarian, patriarchal, extended family structure with an egalitarian, conjugal family was a way for the nation to preserve crucial elements of its traditional culture. Her comprehensive research shows that in the end, family reform paved the way for the Chinese Communist Party to establish a deeply intrusive state that undermined the legitimacy of individual rights.   [brief]
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Title: Reorganizing the Rust Belt: an inside study of the American labor movement
Author: Lopez, Steven Henry 1968-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Sociology | Economics and Business | Labor Studies | Public Policy | Anthropology | Urban Studies | Urban Studies
Publisher's Description: This gripping insider's look at the contemporary American trade union movement shows that reports of organized labor's death are premature. In this eloquent and erudite narrative, Steven Henry Lopez demonstrates how, despite a hostile legal environment and the punitive anti-unionism of U.S. employers, a few unions have organized hundreds of thousands of low-wage service workers in the past few years. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been at the forefront of this effort, in the process pioneering innovative strategies of grassroots mobilization and protest. In a powerful ethnography that captures the voices of those involved in SEIU nursing-home organizing in western Pennsylvania, Lopez illustrates how post-industrial, low-wage workers are providing the backbone for a reinvigorated labor movement across the country. Reorganizing the Rust Belt argues that the key to the success of social movement unionism lies in its ability to confront a series of dilemmas rooted in the history of American labor relations. Lopez shows how the union's ability to devise creative solutions - rather than the adoption of specific tactics - makes the difference between success and failure.   [brief]
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