Holding Up More Than Half the Sky
eBook - ePub

Holding Up More Than Half the Sky

Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92

  1. 360 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Holding Up More Than Half the Sky

Chinese Women Garment Workers in New York City, 1948-92

About this book

In 1982, 20,000 Chinese-American garment workers—most of them women—went on strike in New York City. Every Chinese garment industry employer in the city soon signed a union contract. The successful action reflected the ways women's changing positions within their families and within the workplace galvanized them to stand up for themselves. 

Xiaolan Bao's now-classic study penetrates to the heart of Chinese American society to explain how this militancy and organized protest, seemingly so at odds with traditional Chinese female behavior, came about. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Bao blends the poignant personal stories of Chinese immigrant workers with the interwoven history of the garment industry and the city's Chinese community. Bao shows how the high rate of married women employed outside the home profoundly transformed family culture and with it the image and empowerment of Chinese American women. At the same time, she offers a complex and subtle discussion of the interplay of ethnic and class factors within New York's garment industry. 

Passionately told and prodigiously documented, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky examines the journey of a community's women through an era of change in the home, on the shop floor, and walking the picket line.

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Yes, you can access Holding Up More Than Half the Sky by Xiaolan Bao in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Business & Business General. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover Page
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Contents
  5. Foreword
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. A Note on Interviews and Transliterations
  8. Introduction
  9. Part 1: The Milieu
  10. Part 2: Chinese Women Workers before 1982
  11. Part 3: The 1982 Strike and Its Impact
  12. Conclusion
  13. Epilogue
  14. Glossary
  15. Notes
  16. Bibliography
  17. Index