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Journal of Gender Studies

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Book Reviews

To cite this article: (2001) Book Reviews, Journal of Gender Studies, 10:1, 89-107, DOI:10.1080/095892301300050636

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Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2001

Book Reviews

Part-time Prospects—an international comparison of part-time work inEurope, North America and the Paci� c RimJACQUELINE O’REILLY & COLETTE FAGAN (Eds) 1998London, Routledge286 pp., 0 4151 56696, hb £55; 0 4151 5670X, pb £17.99

This is an excellent collection of 14 papers reviewing and summarising existing knowl-edge and debates up to the present on part-time work in modern economies. A hugevolume of information on recent trends and research results is summarised in severalchapters. Other papers compare the characteristics of part-time work in two or threedifferent societies, each attempting to identify what causes part-time work to � ourish insome countries but not others. The detailed comparisons cover Germany, Finland,Holland, Portugal, Spain, France, Sweden, Britain, the USA, Japan, South Korea,Australia and New Zealand. However, the main emphasis is on Western Europe in the1980s and 1990s, and hence on the debates of the last two decades: are part-time jobsa threat to labour standards, as trade unionists have always argued? Is the growth ofpart-time jobs due primarily to employers’ demands for cheap, � exible labour? Why doblack British women avoid part-time jobs? How does the welfare bene� t system impacton wives’ employment decisions?

The editors’ � rm position is that part-time work is determined primarily by national,social structures and the institutional environment. This perspective leads to the emphasison comparative studies, where national differences loom large. Inevitably, the singlechapter that compares social-cultural groups within a country overturns the editors’ thesis.Dale and Holdsworth use several datasets to explore the puzzle of black British womenworking full-time across the lifecycle, whereas most white British women switch perma-nently to part-time jobs after they marry and have children. As the authors admit, higherfull-time workrates among ethnic minority women are achieved in spite of the usualchildcare problems, not through preferential access to childcare, and are observed acrossall occupations. They conclude (p. 92) that the British welfare state, labour market andinstitutional environment cannot explain the very different work patterns of ethnicgroups in Britain.

The 21 contributors to the collection are economists and sociologists. Yet all thecontributions rely on quantitative national data. Several present statistical analyses ofdata for EU and OECD countries. There is not a single chapter based on qualitativeresearch, and none of the contributors ever turns to qualitative data to � ll the gaps leftby purely quantitative studies. Furthermore, economics is the dominant (or implicit)

ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 online/01/010089-19 Ó 2001 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/0958923012003618 3

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framework in most of chapters. When economic and institutional explanations fail, thecatch-all concept of the gender order/contract/regime is pulled in to tie up loose endsand contradictions in the evidence. However, the thesis is never properly applied ortested in any chapter. It is a pity that sociologists seem to have adopted the laboureconomics framework so completely that none of the contributors offers an alternativesociological perspective on part-time work, as I attempted to do (Hakim, 1997). Thereis plenty of theoretical work still left to do in this � eld, but it may need studies that getbehind the national statistics to examine women as actors and agents.

A new development that is mentioned brie� y in Delsen’s chapter on male part-timeworkers is the growth of working students. As I have argued (Hakim, 1998, pp. 145–177),a rapid increase in (part-time) student jobs is an inevitable consequence of mass highereducation systems and the prolongation of full-time education well into their 20s for themajority of young people. The addition of millions of young secondary earners to thepart-time workforce consolidates the position of this separate, segregated workforce thathas so far been dominated by prime-age working mothers who earn a secondary wagein permanent part-time jobs. As new groups take up part-time jobs, the limitations ofearlier theories are exposed.

The collection will be valuable for teaching purposes, and labour market specialistswill � nd it a useful and wide-ranging synthesis. However, there is little new in the book:all the main � ndings are well established in the research literature on part-time work.None of the contributors is concerned to identify the continuing unsolved puzzles andcontradictions in the data, and theory, to guide future research. For example, why is itthat Finland and Portugal are the two EU countries combining the highest femalefull-time workrates and the lowest part-time workrates? These two countries seem tohave nothing in common, thus weakening ‘societal’ explanations for patterns of femaleemployment.

REFERENCES

HAKIM, C. (1997) A Sociological Perspective on Part-time Work, in: Between Equalization and Marginalization(Oxford, OUP).

HAKIM, C. (1998) Social Change and Innovation in the Labour Market (Oxford, OUP).

CATHERINE HAKIM, London School of Economics, UK

Gender and the South China Miracle: two worlds of factory womenCHING KWAN LEE, 1998Berkeley, University of California Press210 pp., 0 520 21125 1, hb £36.50/$55.00; 0–520–21127–8, pb £12.50/$18.95

This is a very rich ethnography, focusing especially on gender, but incorporating a rangeof detailed material appropriate for a variety of interests. The book’s theme is acomparison of the organisation and culture of two factories in southern China, bothowned by the same company (which the author calls Liton). One factory is in Shenzhenin Guangdong Province, adjacent to Hong Kong, and the other in Hong Kong itself,which was still a British colony at the time of the study. The factories manufacturedelectrical goods, with the production lines and their immediate supervisors being allstaffed by women.

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Ching Kwan Lee undertook the study for her PhD research, and has made a � neconversion of her thesis into a book, making it readable and engaging. Lee worked inboth factories in 1992–93, and in an epilogue entitled ‘The Ethnographic “Labyrinth” ’,she describes her � eldwork, and particularly the nature of her relationship withmanagers. The Hong Kong plant was suddenly closed in 1993 (with one day’s notice)and so Lee was unable to return to work there for a second period, as she had intended.Her method she describes as participant observation with the analytic strategy of‘extended case methods’.

Lee notes that the governments of both areas pursued non-interventionist strategies toencourage investment. But despite such similar policies and the same company owner-ship, the organisation and control of the two factories can be characterised quitedifferently. In the Hong Kong plant, Lee describes and analyses what she calls ‘familialhegemony’, while in the Shenzhen plant a much harsher ‘local despotism’ rules. Theanalytical framework she takes from ‘three traditions … Marxist labour process theories,feminist research on gender and work, and studies on Chinese women’ (p. 14). Lee setout to bring gender into theory and analysis concerning the production process, andparticularly the work of Michael Burawoy (1985). But the book is primarily about genderin production, especially the lives of women, the way they are controlled at work andhow this � ts with their domestic obligations.

The factories were quite different. In Hong Kong Liton employed mainly older,married women. They tended to stay with the company for a long time, partly becausethe nature of the job suited their needs: in a comparatively relaxed atmosphere (thoughone of hard work), women were able to informally � t in childcare responsibilities. Thewomen’s careful exploitation of formal and informal rules to suit their mothering duties,Lee sees as a form of resistance to management, yet such was the value women placedon these opportunities, they accepted that their pay was less than other factories.

In Shenzhen, the workforce on the production lines consisted of young women, whohad migrated from other provinces, many to the north. This section is especiallyfascinating. The young women’s initial stated reason for migration was poverty, but thereality behind this became clearer as Lee probed further. The young women came toescape parental control and familial responsibilities. Lee notes (p. 75) that beforemigrating the young rural women were disadvantaged in the allocation of familyresources. Migration also allowed them to dissolve any marriage arrangements made byparents. Work in a factory was seen as a suitable and appropriate for young unmarriedwomen away from home. Conservative village people associated service industry jobs,such as waitressing, with sexual services, but factory jobs with regular labour weremorally acceptable (p. 83).

The Shenzhen factory organisation on the shop � oor was dominated by localnetworks. The importance of connections to a particular locality (such as a village orcounty in another province) were obvious and accepted by the young women. Localconnection with the supervisor or above secured promotion even for the new andinexperienced worker. But this localistic networking was also the basis for giving andreceiving loans, and for support in illness, in addition to recruitment.

The other key characteristics of the Shenzhen plant were a series of strict rules,including not going to the toilet without a special ‘leave seat’ permit, and compulsoryovertime, with violations punished by � nes. Lee was able to conclude her work with somereference to her more recent and ongoing research in China. She notes that this localdespotism still rules, with workers still complaining about food, overtime and pay, andthe minimum wage law and work hours rules continuing not to be enforced in foreign

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owned companies. Although many women have migrated for various reasons, poverty isstill an important factor, as Lee describes in a visit to one of the worker’s homes, andthese companies are welcomed.

There is a need for more such studies. The Shenzhen rules listed are reminiscent ofmills in 19th-century Yorkshire, some now converted to expensive designer shops, withthe minimum wage only reluctantly paid by some, while others enforce compulsoryovertime (working seven days a week or no lunch breaks) with the threat of unemploy-ment: meanwhile, in some of the new industries such as call centres, toilet permits arealso required. These workplaces cry out for similar ethnographies, and internationalcomparisons in the face of global networks, production and consumption.

REFERENCE

BURAWOY, M. (1985) The Politics of Production (London, Verso).

ANDY WEST, Save the Children, Kunming, People’s Republic of China

Female Fortune: land gender and authority. The Anne Lister diaries andother writings 1833–36JILL LIDDINGTON, 1998London & New York, Rivers Oram Press298 pp., 1 85489 088–3, hb; £35.00; 1 85489 089–1, pb £12.95

Anne Lister—scholar and writer, traveller and heiress—inherited Shibden Hall estate inthe West Riding of Yorkshire in 1826 at the age of 34. She is best known as a writer ofthousands of letters and 27 volumes of diaries. Since the late 1980s, historians have usedher writings to shed light on her lesbianism. The main aim of Female Fortune is to showthat Anne Lister was more than a lesbian. She was also a businesswomen, politicaloperator and ‘husband’ to Ann Walker, a rich neighbouring heiress with whom Annelived until she died in 1840. The book is a collection of extracts from Anne’s diaries from1833 to 1836 which have been ignored by previous historians. Liddington not only aimsto show Anne’s personal relationship and her economic and political activities, but alsohow the local community responded to her unorthodox relationship with Ann Walkerand its inheritance complications. She does this by including extracts from other primarysources, such as Ann Walker’s correspondence. The picture of Anne Lister that emergesfrom these sources is that of an independent, propertied woman who managed to run herlife very effectively and maintained her authority at home, on her estate and in the widerbusiness world, while conducting a clandestine lesbian marriage.

The selection from her diaries and other writings are preceded by an introduction inwhich Liddington sets out the political, economic and social context. It contains,however, a lot of information that is not necessary to understand the following extracts,such as Ann Walker’s family tree dating back to the 15th century. The introduction isfollowed by a very helpful ‘note on the text’ in which the author outlines the selectionprocedure, the nature of the extracts and the editing process. Liddington has selected 10per cent of the original diaries which focus upon Anne’s key relationships plus herpolitical and economic activities. To make the transcriptions clear and accessible, she hastranslated the parts that were written in Anne’s secret code, added punctuation andextended abbreviations. At the same time, she has tried to preserve a sense of distance

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by retaining many of Anne’s spellings. The extracts themselves are divided into sevenbroad chronological sections. To present a coherent narrative thread and indicatechanges in the diaries, Liddington provides extensive introductions. The seven sectionsare followed by an epilogue which describes what happened to Anne, her estate andwritings after 1836 and an afterword that outlines ‘how we should make sense of AnneLister’. The latter and the extensive introductions clearly go against Liddington’s aim ‘toallow readers the opportunity to judge what an independent propertied woman in early19th century England, determining upon a lesbian marriage without even the cover ofa match of convenience, could do’ (pp. xx–xxi). The book, furthermore, contains a veryuseful list of main characters, detailed notes that are especially strong on the peoplementioned, and a bibliography listing the primary and secondary sources.

Female Fortune complements earlier representations of Anne Lister in two respects: � rst,by including well-chosen and highly contextualised extracts which document Anne’spolitical and economic activities, the boundaries of her freedom and authority, and thelocal community’s perceptions of her; and second, by including passages which re� ecther daily life, from her moment of waking up to the �nal jottings of the evening. This selectionfrom her diaries and other writings, furthermore, enriches our understanding of womenlandowners in the early 19th century in England. It shows us that although such womendid not enjoy formal political rights, they could exercise very real political leverage overtheir tenants and could also draw up leases that placed a long list of responsibilities onthem. Finally, as many extracts relate how Halifax and the surrounding West Ridingcounty dealt with the agitation for political reform and the change in manufacturingfrom water power to steam power, the book sheds light on a very turbulent period inBritish history. Female Fortune is thus a valuable resource for a variety of historians. It is,however, far less appealing to non-specialised readers. They will easily � nd themselvesskipping the extracts and reading solely the very clearly written introductions thatprovide the narrative thread. Non-specialised readers with an interest in women in theearly 19th century would have bene� ted much more from a monograph describing AnneLister as a businesswoman, political operator and ‘husband.’

HENRICE ALTINK, University of Hull, UK

Educating Muslim Girls: shifting discoursesKAYE HAW, 1998Buckingham, Open University Press203 pp., 0 335 19773 6, pb, $44.90; 0 335 19774 4, hb, $123.50

Educating Muslim Girls is an empirical study of the educational experiences of Muslim girlsin two schools in Britain, one single-sex state school and one private Muslim girls’ school.The main aim of the book is to explore the interrelationship between ‘race’ and genderand the tensions of equality and difference, which shape feminist discourses in education.The author uses the theoretical writings of Foucault to understand the experiences ofMuslim girls. As well as carrying out a number of in-depth interviews, the researchervisited Pakistan where she spent some time in state schools and Further Educationcolleges. The research is also based upon collaboration with Maria Hanifa, who workedin one of the British schools, and Saeeda Shah, the head teacher of a tertiary college inPakistan. The authors question how Muslim girls are being educated in Britain and

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suggest that independent single-sex girls’ schools could offer some bene� ts for theeducation of Muslim girls.

The book is divided into two parts. The � rst concentrates on three themes: theoreticaland conceptual underpinnings of the research (such as the work of Foucault, Feminism,post-structuralism and discursive analysis); a detailed insight into the personal, pro-fessional and political basis of the research; and � nally a historical background onparticular Islamic concepts and meanings. It provides the reader with a great deal ofhistorical information and knowledge of an unexplored area of research. It engages withtheoretical debates as well as being highly critical and analytical of the issues surroundingthe education of Muslim girls.

Part two explains the methodology and design of the research and draws on qualitativeempirical data to present the � ndings. The ‘voices’ of the staff and students areintroduced by using direct quotes and analysis of stories written by students concerningthe high academic performance of a � ctitious Muslim girl. The stories are also used tohighlight other interesting issues such as racism, arranged marriages, honour and theirstatus as sisters. The � nal chapter brings together the theoretical and empirical aspectsof the research and examines the implications for equal opportunities and social justiceissues. In analyzing her data, the author’s effective use of collaboration adds a criticaldimension to the research.

This book adds a valuable contribution to current debates around ‘race’, gender,religion and culture. As the author suggests, each part of the book can be read separately,and this is certainly one of its strengths, and allows it to be read either as a qualitativestudy of the educational experiences of Muslim girls in Britain or as a theoretical analysisof ‘race’ and gender. The collaborative element of the book is also particularly effective.It allows the authors to emphasise their own viewpoints whilst retaining their individualand distinctive styles. The author’s re� exivity and her positioning as a white non-Muslimacademic woman engages in an exploration of the questioning of differences between theresearcher and the researched. The only weakness of the book is the discussion oftheoretical analysis, which is left to the last chapter. To add the theoretical dimensionswith the empirical evidence in the same chapters would have strengthened the book. Butoverall a stimulating, critical and analytical book which provides refreshing debate intothe experiences of Muslim girls in Britain.

KALWANT BHOPAL, Middlesex University, UK

Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of CourtshipILONA BELL, 1998Cambridge, Cambridge University Press262 pp., 0521 63007 X, hb £37.50

Stephen Greenblatt has got a lot to answer for. Ever since he concluded the massivelyin� uential Renaissance Self-fashioning (1980) with a personal anecdote involving a conver-sation with a stranger on an aeroplane, Renaissance scholars have felt impelled to provethemselves in touch with reality by introducing similar anecdotes. Here, in the introduc-tion to Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship, Ilona Bell strives for real-life supportfor her thesis with an introductory anecdote about a guest at a Hallowe’en party whoboasted of his success in using the poetry of Shakespeare and Donne to woo all his(female) lovers. This may not be quite the unequivocal proof Bell intends: one is forced

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to assume, for example, that the Shakespeare reference was to the poems addressed tothe ‘Fair Youth’ rather than those to the ‘Dark Lady’, since the latter are hardly poemsof romantic courtship. If one then argues that the sex of the subject to whom the poemswere originally addressed does not matter, then this rather undoes the force of Bell’swhole argument, for it is her interesting and provocative contention that we ourselves(feminists included) are guilty of effacing women as conscious subjects and agents ofElizabethan poetry because we have paid too little attention to them as the ‘primary lyricaudience’ of that poetry. We have ignored the extent to which Elizabethan love poetrywas originally implicated in the social practice of amorous courtship. The moreShakespeare’s Sonnets are resituated in this context, the less they can be seen to beallowing their ‘female lyric audience’ consciousness and subjectivity, so perhaps it is nosurprise that Shakespeare is left out.

Nevertheless, Bell’s is a timely and refreshing study, which makes sense of whathappened to Petrarchism in 16th century England, and which enables readings of 16thcentury lyrics as events or speech-acts designed by men to anticipate and respond towomen’s interpretative skills and sexual desires. That this apparently common-senseapproach to 16th century love lyrics has not been much favoured by academics isattributed by Bell to the mapping of academic feminism onto an earlier modernist andnew-critical suspicion of 19th century biographical readings. T. S. Eliot’s mid-20thcentury de� nition of the lyrics as ‘the voice of the poet speaking to himself or nobody’has been overtaken in Renaissance Studies by an awareness of the extent to which lyricpoetry facilitates social and material transactions. However, this awareness has beenapplied to readings of Petrarchan love poetry to stress the male poet’s careeristself-fashioning at the expense of the woman as rhetorical topic of discourse. Feminist usesof psychoanalytic theory in � lm criticism have been adapted to the criticism of EuropeanPetrarchism: the male poet’s descriptive strategies are seen as objectifying his femaleaddressee and subject of his discourse in the same way that the male ‘gaze’ objecti� es thewoman in narrative cinema. Bell argues, by contrast, that the fact that EnglishPetrarchism is actually pseudo-Petrarchism (that is, rather than languishing over thepoet’s torments, it seems to aim more purposefully at wooing the beloved) necessarilymeans that female consciousness is present in it at the level of dialogic anticipation.Male-authored love poetry expects, and responds to, the wit of a woman reader, whichknowledge of Elizabethan courtship practices helps us to infer, and see as central.

While there can be no doubt that Bell’s urging us to read the 16th century English lovelyric as part of a dialogue of courtship is truly illuminating, there is a tendencythroughout her study to discount the double sexual standard that makes the publicationof a clandestine courtship more damaging to a woman’s reputation than to a man’s, aswell as a tendency to overestimate the creative latitude of the ‘female lyric audience’ asdiscernible in the poetry we have. Of Spenser’s Amoretti (1595) Bell writes, ‘the malepoet’s struggle to interpret her confusing eye signals matches the female reader’s effortto interpret his ambivalent verbal signals’ (p. 159). Sure: but what is new here? As sooften, woman’s language is here being de� ned as body language, its power as a site ofinterpretative ambivalence by no means an indicator of the intentional wit of its author.

The tour de force of Bell’s book is a thoroughly convincing and absorbing interpretationof two manuscript lyrics, attributed here to Sir Henry Lee and Anne Vavasour at variousstages of their progress towards courtship and marriage. Bell’s brilliant interpretation ofthese lyrics brings together the full analytic force of her insight into the relationshipbetween the need for vailed, allusive meanings in clandestine courtship, and the rise ofsuch densely allusive, � gurative writing in lyric poetry of the 1570s onwards. However,

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her account is less convincing in relation to published poetry. In George Gascoigne’sstory of Master F. J. in the Hundreth Sundrie Flowers (1573) for example, there can be nodoubt that success in the courtship enterprise for men is deliberately and comically linkedto the idea of relative illiteracy in women; F. J. succeeds in bedding the adulterousMistress Elinor partly because her syntax is as open as her body is promiscuous. If F. J.’ssexual success depends, as Gascoigne implies, on a certain lack of wit in the ‘primaryfemale lyric audience’ of his love poetry, it follows that readiness of wit in women’sresponse to courtship is usually a measure of how well the woman can fend off suitorsand ward off sexual slander, rather than a measure of her freedom of choice in relationto her suitors.

Finally, does Bell’s study offer new ways of reading the women who actually wrote inthis period? Bell’s chapter discussing a sonnet by Elizabeth I, a translation of Petrarchby Mary Sidney, and two published texts of poetry by Isabella Whitney, must be said toexaggerate in calling itself ‘A female lyric tradition’ (p. 100). Moreover, Bell’s setting ofIsabella Whitney’s work in the context of a ‘poetics of courtship’ has, I think, the effectof reducing her range of rhetorical and ironic effects. Whitney opens her Swete Nosegay(1573) with an allusion to unspeci� ed economic troubles, before going on to publish aseries of verses which purport to be familiar letters advertising her virtue, reliability andgood credit among her kin. She then ingeniously abandons this tactic in a � nal poem inwhich she admits to being ‘very weak in Purse’, going on to write a mock will andtestament bequeathing her moveable goods to London, which, she says, has treated hermeanly, like an unfaithful lover, always requiring her to pay for everything and nevergiving her credit. Bell ignores the irony, and reads the allusion to unfaithful loversliterally and autobiographically. Whitney’s text, she says, ‘returns again to the chronicpain of her broken marriage contract, the way one’s tongue constantly returns to a sorein the mouth’ (p. 116), surely a reductive and na õ ve interpretation.

In sum, while Bell’s book is enormously stimulating, and has certainly sent me backto these 16th century lyrics with a renewed sense of their relevance as social andhistorical events, readers may remain sceptical of her attribution of intention and agencyto the ‘female lyrics audience’ of published, male-authored 16th century love poetry.

REFERENCES

GASCOIGNE, G. (1573) A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres bounde up in one small Poesie (London, Richard Smith). Modernedition, C. T. PROUTY (Ed.) (1970) (Columbia, University of Missouri Press).

WHITNEY, I. (1573) A Swete Nosegay, or Pleasant Posy: Contayning a hundred philosophical �owers (London, RichardJones). No modern edition.

LORNA HUTSON, University of Hull, UK

Same-sex Domestic Violence: strategies for changeBETH LEVENTHAL & SANDRA E. LUNDY (Eds), 1999Thousand Oaks, Sage Publications259 pp., 0–7619–03224, hb $69.95; 0–7619–0323–2, pb $30.00

Same-sex Domestic Violence: Strategies for Change is an engaging and very readable book likelyto meet the needs of workers and students from a spectrum of disciplines, who aredeveloping their knowledge and skills in working with domestic violence, particularlysame-sex violence. Gay men and lesbians in violent or potentially violent relationshipsand survivors of violent relationships will identify with the contributions and learn from

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them. The rare frankness with which the contributors have shared their personal andprofessional experiences is striking and their courage remarkable.

Same-sex violence is an area which has been neglected by service providers andresearchers and consequently the book will be much in demand. The contributors areprimarily survivors of same sex violence, who are also anti-violence activists, advocates,attorneys, social workers, or men and women involved in service-delivery to victims ofviolence, either in domestic violence projects and shelter provision, and/or in educationand training. A number of contributors are from ethnic minorities and these highlight theparticular dif� culties couples with one or both partners from an ethnic minorityexperience in accessing services which can help them in their plight (pp. 3–7, 165–171).

Sado-masochistic practices in gay and lesbian relationships are discussed in the contextof safety and of helping workers and victims to distinguish between sado-masochism andabuse (pp. 135–145). A gay man describes his experience of repeated rape and of thedif� culty he experienced in acknowledging, even to himself, that rape had occurred (pp.9–10). Advocates, lawyers and counsellors are made aware of the need to be sensitive tothe dilemmas of gays and lesbians in violent relationships and the trauma of publicityduring public hearings. For those who are still in the closet, this may prove more thanthey can face, even when they are experiencing intolerable violence (pp. 43–55). HIVand same-sex violence is the topic for a chapter written by a social worker and acommunity activist (pp. 97–110). It indicates that persons with HIV are often atparticular risk in violent relationships, and ‘that the realities of living with an HIVinfection may present signi� cant barriers to leaving an abusive relationship and accessingnecessary services’ (p. 104).

The book is divided into four parts—Part I. Prologue: hearing the problem; Part II.Legal Perspectives; Part III. Organising Coalitions/Building Communities; and Part IV.Providing Services. Martha Lucia Garcia, writing on ‘A New Kind of Battered Woman:challenges for the movement’ in Part III, challenges the Battered Women’s Movementto respond to the multiple realities of battered women and to provide appropriateservices for battered immigrant women and bisexual women (p. 170). The � nal part, PartIV considers the need for separate services for battered lesbians and bisexual women,and explores what is involved in assessing the lesbian victim.

The needs of women in same-sex violent relationships and survivors of such violencepredominate this book, particularly Parts III and IV. This book is recommended to allinterested in domestic violence, particularly same-sex violence.

HEATHER FERGUSON-BROWN, University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, UK

Gender and Mental HealthPAULINE M. PRIOR 1999London, Macmillan195 pp., 0333687620 , pb £13.99

The positioning of gender and mental health is becoming increasingly complex. As ideasof mental health and illness generally encompass medical and social models it would besurprising, of course, if male and female categories were not used to illustrate theseunderstandings. Moves to understand the male and female minds often de� ne onegender by reference to the other. Social constructions of health, care and illness that

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formerly spoke mainly of femininity in the main now look at masculinity and malenessto understand what is expected, normative and oppressive.

Prior locates her choice to write about gender and mental health (actually moredisorder or illness) in this context of � uidity. She observes, for instance, that althoughwomen (particularly those who are reasonably well educated) make use of mental healthservices there is an increasing international trend for young men to move into thespotlight of psychiatric services, in particular through the seminal status of hospitalpatient.

Rather than seeing women’s use as problematic and over-medicalised should weinstead see men as excluded from the world of mental health services? Are theymarginalised into the illicit drug, alcohol and criminal systems? One can almost hear thegasp of exasperation as women yet again are told that rather than succeeding in gettingand accepting treatment they are in fact dominating the system to the exclusion of men.Such arguments are familiar in the sphere of education and welfare generally in the UKwhere the failure of boys or men is de� ned as an urgent social problem.

Prior offers a range of international evidence to argue that gender is a factor and alsoa relationship worth pursuing in mental health discussions. Part One of the book focuseson mental disorder with reference to the mainstream debates around ‘at risk’ popula-tions, psychiatry, treatment and therapies. It is striking that evidence in respect of genderis not routinely available or interrogated since it offers such a clear dimension for almostany theoretical position. She observes that ethnicity is often seen as relevant and thatinternational comparisons have much to offer here—one suspects particularly those fromoutside the USA, which are becoming more accessible.

Strangely, Prior does not have much to say in respect of age, at either end of the lifecourse. The portrayal of children, male in particular in respect of attention de� citdisorder, and female in respect of eating disorders, is evoking current interest and theconnections between child and adolescent services and generalised children’s services saymuch about family models and the status of children as actors in their own life projects.

Old age itself provides a � eld where a more gendered approach might be fruitful bothin understanding the ageing process of people who have been classi� ed as having mentalhealth problems even if transient and in understanding the mental illnesses which areviewed as a ‘life sentence’ such as dementia. A visitor to an old people’s residential ornursing home in many industrialised societies now encounters a world mainly of oldwomen, looked after, in the main, by a range of young women. The enforced segregationevident in 19th century asylums is being repatterned to some extent, complicated furtherby class and ethnicity variables in many instances.

Prior builds on her own extensive research into the detail of the 19th century lunacyconstructions, in particular the Dundrum Central Criminal Lunatic Asylum in NorthernIreland, to illustrate many of her historical allusions (a slightly more detailed index wouldhave facilitated references to this and other topics). Such institutions provide a rich seamof material for studies of mental health—their dissolution will make the present daymuch harder to capture for the interest of future historians. Shelters, hostels, grouphomes and domiciliary care are all dif� cult to describe in administrative detail and, asPrior explains, make international comparisons of community-based mental healthservices particularly haphazard affairs.

The second part of this book focuses on mental health policy: some chapters workhard to mention gender as an axiomatic device. This is with the exception of the � nalchapter on crime and mental disorder, both areas in which much overlapping statisticaldata is rigorously pursued. Prior debates whether ‘madness’ and ‘badness’ are conceptu-

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alised differently in respect of gender. No simple solutions to this rhetorical question areoffered, for gender alone tempts one to a simplistic position which becomes underminedby the data. In respect of the UK’s special hospitals where arguments continue for allpatients between the balance of control, treatment and protection, Prior seems to arguethat smaller units may offer a more therapeutic environment, though recent events inAshworth Hospital point to the risk of isolated units with abuses of power within andoutside the facility.

This book provides, as it claims, an overview of a wealth of material relevant to genderand mental health policy, services and politics. The � ction of Sylvia Plath and theexperience of Kate Millett provide opportunities to hear women’s voices as users ofservices and more remains to be said about the gendered perspectives of users in thepublic eye, of pressure groups and of staff. If gender provides further illumination of theworld of the mind then gender-responsive services, supports and emotions will need tobe mapped out and veri� ed by users.

JILL MANTHORPE, University of Hull, UK

What is a Woman? and other essaysTORIL MOI, 1999New York, Oxford University Press517 pp., 0 19 812242 X, hb £25.00

Toril Moi’s What is a Woman? is a considerable book in length and scope. In length itconstitutes over 500 pages, largely because it is, in a sense, two books—on the one hand,eight essays previously published between 1981 and 1997 and, on the other, three newessays, two of which form the � rst 250 pages of the collection. In the recent work, theessays present a formidable challenge to many aspects of post-structuralist and post-mod-ernist thinking. Simone de Beauvoir acts as Moi’s mentor, the woman who, in Moi’sview, tackled the issues of contemporary feminism earlier, more effectively and yet stillis without the recognition that is her due. Building on her 1994 study Simone de Beauvoir:the making of an intellectual woman, the new essays are Moi’s call for a full and scrupulousre-evaluation of Beauvoir’s signi� cance.

Moi wants to reinstate some ‘old’ words, like justice, equality, oppression, liberation—and woman. Of course this is not a turn to essentialism but an attempt to situate womenin precise, concrete, material ways. One of the major contentions of Moi’s � rst essay,‘What Is a Woman? Sex, gender, and the body in feminist theory’, is that the sex/genderdebate that has so preoccupied contemporary feminism has ultimately not been helpful,leading post-structuralist feminism into byways that are irrelevant to the original questionand, paradoxically, into ever more abstract theorising when what is being sought is aspeci� c, historicised understanding of the body. Predictably, the chief focus of Moi’sattention here is Judith Butler. Moi offers as a more fruitful possibility Beauvoir’sphenomenological view of the body as both itself ‘a situation’ and placed within othersituations, an approach which resists the division between sex and gender, objective andsubjective. To paraphrase very loosely James Joyce, if you can’t � nd the answer, changethe question.

The second essay, ‘ “I Am a Woman”: the personal and the philosophical’, isconcerned with the relationship between the personal and the theoretical and this isexplored, � rst, through a critique of current views on the place of the personal in feminist

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writing and, second, through an extended analysis of the opening paragraphs of TheSecond Sex. Beauvoir’s work is offered as a model for how to speak both personally andtheoretically and how to make general claims without generalising. The strategy of Moi’sargument in this chapter is characteristic of her writing throughout. She shows anintellectual sharpness in establishing important distinctions—here between dif� culty andobscurity, clarity and transparency, the objective and the impersonal; she is alert to howargument can drift from the tenable to the untenable—for example, how a concernabout speaking positions can become an ad feminam argument that inhibits debate bydiscrediting the speaker; she delights in the reversal that can offer new potential andpraises the work of Cora Diamond on the political usefulness of the impersonal.

Moi returns repeatedly to the importance of context. There is nothing necessarilyessentialist or exclusionary about the concept of ‘woman’, nothing necessarily dominantand negative about the impersonal or egalitarian and positive about the personal. Thekey issues are always how the concept is being deployed, by whom, with whatconsequences, for whose interests. Similarly, Moi rejects the view that male theorists areanathema to feminism. Her abiding interest in Freud is clear from the earliest inclusion,a 1981 essay on Freud’s Dora, while in recent years she has been in� uenced by the workof Pierre Bourdieu and his sociology of culture. Her approach to the male theorist isevident in one of her titles where she speaks of ‘appropriating’ Bourdieu. The feministcritic is not the handmaiden of the master but will both critique and learn for the bene� tof feminism. But then, as far as Moi is concerned, such is her role with respect of thefemale theorist and the feminist theorist.

The academic stringency in Moi’s work has caused problems over the years and thereis a sub-text throughout the collection wherein Moi at times reaf� rms her earlier self andat times marks a moving away. This is partly an intellectual activity, evident, for instance,in her questioning of the post-structuralist approach and metaphysical traces of Sexual/Textual Politics, but it is also partly personal. Feminist complaints that Moi has been‘unsisterly’ or ‘unsupportive’ or ‘dismissive’ are mentioned only to be deconstructed withmeticulous care, a response which is just but probably of no comfort to those nursingtheir wounds. My own feeling is that the disagreements have sometimes sprung not somuch from theoretical differences as from questions about the tone of Moi’s writing, anissue which interestingly she considers, though not with regard to herself, in a compari-son of Beauvoir and Irigaray.

Moi has always been rightly praised for her intellectual and stylistic lucidity. The longnew essays are somewhat repetitive but, like Beauvoir’s, they show how to write theoryin an intelligible and engaging way and how to make effective use of varied illustrations.She is adept at forceful, summative sentences where the point is so neatly encapsulatedthat one knows already that they will be quoted again and again. Moi’s new work, shetells us, is still with philosophy but is also ‘full of art history, Ibsen, and Strindberg’. Sheis ‘curious to see what will come of this’ (p. 399). So are we all.

MARY EAGLETON, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK

The Culture of SewingBARBARA BURMAN (Ed.), 1999Oxford & New York, Berg350 pp., 1 85973 208 9, pb £14.99; 1 85973 203 8, hb £42.00

Books of essays by many hands are inclined to be irritating. Different approaches do not

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often form a coherent picture. The content is likely to be of uneven interest and qualityfor any particular reader. Yet the history of women and needlework has so manyrami� cations that there is much to be said for being presented with a number ofdisparate approaches. The Culture of Sewing, edited by Barbara Burman, comprises 19articles in three sections, the � rst dealing with class and identity, the second withconsumption and the � nal section with dissemination and technology.

The articles in the main concentrate on the world of a home dressmaker, exploringthe economic, social and psychological implications of the struggle to acquire, exerciseand exploit this quintessentially ‘womanly’ skill. Apart from users of the skills of sewingthemselves, women are seen as consumers of other women’s sewing skills, the ‘littledressmaker’ as well as the more expensive local couturier, and as buyers of sewingmachines, fabric and paper patterns. The roles of magazines in feeding women’saspirations and fantasy, and the way these have been used in marketing the machineswhich removed some of the sheer drudgery of sewing, are explored. The focus ondifferent social and historical groups of women is particularly valuable in highlighting thecontrasts in the meaning of sewing to these groups. For example, home sewing was seenas a survival technique and means of maintaining middle-class standards of appearanceamong army wives in the west of the USA in the 19th century. It was also clearly ameans of expressing solidarity among often isolated groups and selected withoutreference to the wishes of the women themselves. An article on the ‘make-do and mend’campaign during the 1939–1945 war teases out the differences in the impact of thepropaganda on wealthy women for whom sewing had previously been a decorative andcreative part of life, and on those who had always ‘made do and mended’ and had nomind to carry on with it once they had the choice, even if that meant doing unpleasantwork in munitions factories. The dressmaking and designing skills of Jamaican womenwho emigrated to England are revealed as a means of self-assertion in an alien and oftenhostile world.

Discussion of the extent to which clothes have been the arena of competition betweenwomen is somewhat muted, surfacing mainly in an article on the use advertisers havemade of the anxieties of adolescent girls. One of the themes running through the book,though often left to the reader to articulate, is the importance of dress for women as ameans of presenting a particular image of themselves and their children to the world.This did not only involve being fashionable, that is, like other people in her own groupor one to which she aspired. It brought in, among other factors, notions of respectability,the high value placed on ‘managing’ in spite of dif� culties, of showing the world thatworking, for example, in a factory did not mean a woman could not ‘look nice’, that is,feminine. Thus, sewing has operated on many levels: to give con� dence; as anopportunity to exercise skill and creativity; a means of independent economic survival;as a challenge to perceptions of a woman’s social status; as a way of competing withpeers.

So far, so positive, and there is considerable value in taking that approach to atraditionally undervalued female pursuit. But the book does rather miss the sheerdrudgery which sewing has represented to many women; only hints at the appallinglevels of pay they have received when they sewed for money; and the littleness of mindit imposed on generations of women who, like Aurora Leigh, were condemned to spendmuch time in an activity unvalued by those around them and which, because they couldnot transcend the basics of the skill, gave them little personal satisfaction.

ANN HOLT, York, UK

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Cartographies of Desire: male sexuality in Japanese discourse, 1600–1950GREGORY M. PFLUGFELDER, 1999Berkeley, University of California Press399 pp., 0 520 20909 5, hb £28.50

In Cartographies of Desire Gregory P� ugfelder uncovers the astounding richness of Japaneselanguage documentary sources on male homoeroticism, describing a society with a denseweb of public and private discourses of male same-sex eroticism whose contours haveshifted dramatically in the past four centuries. P� ugfelder’s book is a ‘constructionistanalysis of sexual cartographies’ (p. 4) and his central argument is that discursive‘mappings of sexuality do not re� ect an unchanging reality so much as participatecentrally in its construction, helping to engender the very desires and subjectivities thatthey purport merely to represent’ (p. 3). While concurring with the general tents ofcontemporary queer theory, P� ugfelder situates Foucault’s History of Sexuality in its limitedgeo-cultural context and he critique’s Foucault’s notion of ars erotica—an overarchingdiscourse of eroticism supposedly characteristic of Japan, China, India, ancient Rome aswell as the Islamic world—as ‘inadequate to describe the differences that exist amongand within sexual knowledge systems in these diverse societies, and, in typicallyEurocentric fashion, makes little allowance for historical change outside the West’ (pp.6–7). He supports this position with a wealth of data, masterfully gathered in a textwhose attention to detail mirrors the intricacies of the popular, legal and medical sourcesassembled.

P� ugfelder maps three distinct paradigms of male–male sexuality in Japan overthe period 1600–1950: (1) the Edo Period (1600–1868) aesthetic discipline of shudo, ‘theway of loving youths’; (2) the Meiji Period (1868 to early 20th century) reformistdiscourses of ‘civilised morality’; and (3) sexological discourses of same-sex eroticismdating from the � rst half of the 20th century. The Edo period shudo paradigm of malehomoeroticism was an aesthetic and ethical system based on asymmetrical aged-basedrelations between an older married male, the nenja, and a youth, the wakashu. Therelationship was considered mutually ennobling and was structured as a senior, privilegedman acting as cultural mentor and tutor, providing the youth with an ethical model andtraining. In return, the older man received the erotic and aesthetic pleasures ofappreciating the youth’s body and the moral satisfaction of leading a young man intocultured maturity.

In the following Meiji period concerns of the Japanese elites turned to the establish-ment of a national system of ‘civilised morality’ so that the self-modernising Japan couldcount itself an equal amongst the nations of the Western-dominated imperial order.Under the shudo system male same-sex relations had been policed in diverse andnon-uniform ways, depending on the locality, social context and class background of themen involved. However, with the Meiji period this contextual and local diversity ofregimes was replaced by a uniform national medical-legal regime. This led to the end ofthe shudo paradigm and a change in understandings of same-sex eroticism that was sogreat and so rapid that by 1889 one commentator stated that if ‘children of today’ weretold about the forms of male homoeroticism that had been considered normative earlierin the 19th century, they ‘would think it the tale of a foreign country and not our own’(p. 195).

While P� ugfelder traces the intimate impact of Western moral and sexologicaldiscourses on Japanese understandings of male homoeroticism, he resists a simplistic

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model of the ‘Westernisation’ of Japanese discourses, a position he critiques as ‘aromantic narrative in which the na õ ve charm of the former (Asia) inevitably succumbs tothe virile strength of the latter (the West)’ (p. 13). He shows how in the early 20th centuryJapanese ‘sexologists were forced to negotiate the contradictory premises of, on the onehand, a native textual legacy that embodied earlier systems of sexual understanding byno means uniformly hostile to male–male erotic relations, and, on the other, a globalstructure of scienti� c knowledge that transcended national and cultural boundaries andin which male–male sexuality held a largely negative set of valences’ (p. 21).

Gilbert Herdt has noted that, ‘Sexual cultures can rise and fall with the social politicsof the times, they are not dependent upon procreation in any simple sense, and theirmeanings can rather quickly be spun into “traditional” customs and lifeways’ (Herdt,1999, p. 8). P� ugfelder’s careful account of the decline of shudo under the impact ofWestern understandings con� rms Herdt’s view that sexual cultures are highly dynamicphenomena susceptible to rapid reformulation. According to P� ugfelder, in the Edoperiod the primary kinship metaphor used when speaking of shudo homoeroticism wasthat of a younger and an older brother, that is, a pairing of masculine elements.However, from the Meiji period male homoeroticism came to be understood incross-gendered terms on the conjugal model of husband and wife, that is, a masculine–feminine coupling.

As a consequence of Japan’s engagement with Western knowledge of eroticism, thegendering of male homoeroticism was radically restructured from a phenomenon thattook place within the domain of masculinity to one that was imagined as taking placeacross the gender divide separating the masculine from the feminine. From an ethno-graphic perspective, P� ugfelder describes how a society with a predominantly age- andstatus-based understanding of male–male eroticism replaced this view with a cross-gen-dered understanding as a result of the project of modernisation. His book’s comparativerelevance could have been improved with a little more cross-cultural contextualisation.For example, a comparison of shudo with other age/status-based systems of malesame-sex relations, such as in Melanesia, would have been enlightening.

While the arguments of this book are relevant to the broader inquiry into genderand sexual difference at the global level, P� ugfelder directs his text more to the� eld of Japanese area studies than to the literature of comparative historical orethnographic studies of same-sex eroticism. It is an intensely detailed study of localdiscourses, and amidst the textual detail it is easy for the reader to lose sight of thelarger issues that frame the analysis. The reader must surrender themselves to this textand approach it much as they would a multi-charactered epic novel. Thankfully,P� ugfelder has a lucid and accessible style and he does occasionally provide summariesof his main points, but they are typically unsignposted and hidden away in the midst ofstructurally dense semantic analyses. A more sustained engagement with the theoreticalissues raised in the excellent introduction and the all-too-brief summary coda wasneeded.

Another problem the general reader faces is that the book has no glossary of thelarge number of Japanese terms that pepper almost every sentence, and it is extremelytaxing for the non-Japanese-literate person to keep up arguments that trace the shiftingnuances of terms across discursive transitions. This important data could have beenmade much more accessible if P� ugfelder had tabulated the main categories typical ofeach paradigm of homoeroticism and distinguished terms which are synonyms of eachother from those that mark major conceptual distinctions. An historical glossary thatde� nes each Japanese word in terms of the period in which it was used and the discursive

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paradigm within which it took its meaning would be a welcome addition to any futureedition of this book.

The three page coda on ‘Historicising male–male sexuality in Japan’ (pp. 333–335)provides an excellent summary of what the book is about and the time-harried readershould perhaps approach this � nal section in order to garner a picture of the keyarguments. Despite some stylistic shortcomings, through his excellent scholarship andmastery of the nuances of textual detail P� ugfelder does indeed succeed in demonstratingwhat he sets out to achieve, namely, ‘to highlight the embeddedness of desires withinshifting constellations of cultural meaning’, and to show that ‘[t]he apparent materialityof sexual practices and seeming insubstantiality of erotic discourses are in the end not soeasily distinguishable’ (p. 335).

REFERENCE

HERDT, G. (1999) Sambia Sexual Culture: essays from the �eld (Chicago & London, University of Chicago Press).

PETER JACKSON, Australian National University, Australia

Engendering Citizenship in EgyptSELMA BOTMAN, 1999New York, Columbia University Press141 pp., 0 231 11299 8, pb $17.50/£13.95

Selma Botman is concerned with the question of women’s and men’s unequal relation-ship to the state in 20th century Egypt. She argues that although the concept ofcitizenship presupposes equality of rights, responsibilities and opportunities, it is not agender-neutral category. Despite nationalist ideological investment in the idea of popular‘unity’, Egypt (and one might have added many other nations) has depended on powerfulconstruction of gender difference. As a result, women and men are different sorts ofpolitical subjects under the state, irrespective of changes in social, political and economicforces over time, notwithstanding considerable feminist activism to defend, protect andadvanced women’s causes.

Botman asserts that women’s subordinate citizenship is due to unchanging patriarchalstructures underpinned by religious ideology. She avoids de� ning the problem primarilyin ideological terms which obscure the need to change certain material practices thatsustain discriminatory beliefs against women. Her discussion of women’s rights as citizensis placed within broader frameworks of social, economic and political change coveringthree distinct political periods.

The semi-liberal constitutional era (1923–1952) with partial independence fromBritish rule favoured women’s participation in the nationalist movement, but deniedthem the vote and any forms of organised independent feminist activities which beganto emerge during the early years among elite women. Without the vote and parliamen-tary representation women’s ability to advance their feminist cause was severely cur-tailed.

During the state-run socialist regime of Abdl al-Nasir (1952–1970), women obtainedthe vote in 1956 and made impressive public gains in formal employment, wage labourand educational opportunities across social classes. As a result, they were able and

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encouraged to participate in political life, although remaining notably underrepresentedat the highest levels of the socialist state. Promotion of womens’ civil rights was part ofa political project of modernity rather than an end in itself. The centralised regimeforbade independent feminist movements that challenged the patriarchal order. Themaintenance of patriarchal laws governing marriage, divorce and personal status gainedNasir support from Islamic modernists who provided a theological defence for theregime’s policies, including endorsement of women’s franchise and employment opportu-nities. Thus, social conservatism and political authoritarianism tempered advances madefor women’s civil rights during the socialist era.

The contradictory policies regarding women’s rights in the two previous political erascontinued under Anwar Sadat and Husni Mubarak’s open door (in�tah) policy of theyears from the 1970s through the 1990s. Sadat revised the personal status laws, grantingwomen more control over marriage, divorce and child custody despite opposition fromthe Islamist movement, but these changes were reversed by Musbarak, as Islamicactivism continues to pose a threat to women’s citizenship.

Botman sees both the autocratic state and the ‘family’ as the major sites of women’soppression. By linking the relations within the family to the relationship of individualsand the state, she avoids compartmentalising public/private domains. None the less, thequestion of women’s subordination was the concern of women’s studies in the 1970s.Botman remains within that frame although feminist studies has moved away from thisinitial position. For instance, the domestic as a category contains all sorts of assumptionsabout the natural status of the activities and relationships contained within it. Feministstudies have long challenged these assumptions which Botman does not explore.Similarly, the con� nement of forms of political activity to formal organisations andparliamentary representation disregards analysis of ‘informal’ networks, various forms ofprotest, non-participation or negative political activity. Moreover, formal equality doesnot necessarily entail practical equality.

Botman’s use of the generalised notion of patriarchy as an explanatory tool isproblematic. What about subordinate masculinities? Shortcomings such as this arisewhen ‘women’ remain the marked category, rather than gender. In addition, Botmantreats women as a general category, assuming that all Egyptian women share the viewsof the mostly middle-class feminist leaders. Besides, since some women are able toexercise their rights as citizens more fully than others, inequalities that exist betweenwomen and men are relative. More generally, questions of gender are presenteddescriptively rather than analytically. Botman does not identify shifting de� nitions ofcitizenship across the three political eras. More precisely, we are told but do not learnhow gender intersects with the different versions of nationalism to create social identitiesof both men and women, or how political and ideological boundaries are shaped on thegender axis.

Botman’s assessment of so-called Islamic fundamentalism is simplistic and inadequatein the light of the vast literature on the subject, as is her assertion that the veil or hijabhas made women invisible (p. 94). Indeed, the paradox of veiling is that it draws attentionto what it ostensibly seeks to hide.

Other shortcomings of the book include repetition, lack of tabular presentation ofstatistical data (pp. 56, 72, 97) and sole reliance on secondary sources without offeringany signi� cant new insights.

AZAM TORAB, University of Cambridge, UK

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Gender, Migration and Domestic ServiceJANET HENSHALL MOMSEN (Ed.), 1999London & New York, Routledge314 pp., 0 415 190673, hb £61.28

The growing demand for domestic workers in many parts of the world is related to theincreasing demand for female labour in the formal sector. As they become sociallymobile, working middle-class women � nd it dif� cult to cope with housework and childrearing. The gendered drudgeries of domestic chores are relegated from middle-classworking women to working-class maids, or from women of dominant ethnic groups tosubaltern women. Filipina domestic workers, for instance, take up the subordinatehousework in Hong Kong, Singapore, Middle East, Western Europe, and NorthernAmerica so as to enable their female employers to attain (and reproduce) economicallyand socially superior positionality. Yet, migrant domestic workers are not necessarilyhelpless victims who suffer harassment, loneliness, racial discrimination, and exploitation.Domestic work is regarded as a step to attain better jobs, or as a means to realiseeconomic and social independence. A young Filipina working in Singapore notes, ‘I onlycome here to work as a maid because it was the only way to save enough money to goto America …’ (p. 293).

The volume consists of 17 chapters (an introduction and 16 ‘country’ essays) which areslotted into � ve parts representing � ve continents, namely, I. North America: Pratt(Canada), Stiell and England (Canada), Mattingly (United States); II. South America:Radcliffe (Ecuador), Pappas-Deluca (Chile); III. Europe: Anderson (European Union),Cox (Britain), Narula (France), BarbicÏ and MiklavcÏ icÏ -Brezigar (Slovenia); IV. Africa: leRoux (South Africa), Miles (Swaziland), and V. Asia: Raghuram (India), Ismail (SriLanka), Elmhirst (Indonesia), Tam (Hong Kong), Yeoh and Huang (Singapore), � veshort introduction to each part, and a conclusion, authored by female geographers. Thebook ‘considers the worldwide commonalities in the experiences of these women, and thedistinctive differences related to local conditions’ (p. 2). This Olympian frame (which failsto represent the Persian Gulf), imposes a structural constraint on the volume. I foundmost of the chapters frustratingly short. Radcliffe (Chapter 5), for example, deals with aninteresting theme of domestic work as a passage that enables rural indigenous youngwomen acquire ‘white’ identity, which is associated with progress, civilisation and thenationhood in Ecuador. The chapter pursues interesting themes such as the effects of theneo-liberal development agenda (e.g. UNICEF policy in promoting the professionalisa-tion of domestic work) in technifying the domestic work without ridding the servilecontents, as well as the ways in which domestic labour works as a means of attainingwhiteness and national identity. Yet, the empirical evidence Radcliffe provides is � imsy,and these important issues are not adequately discussed.

Anderson (Chapter 7) focuses on the ‘racialisation’ of private domestic services inEurope. Likewise, Stiell and England (Chapter 3) illustrate the ways in which racialisednational identities of Jamaican domestics, Filipina housekeepers, and English nannies arecreated in the intersection of popular stereotypes and representations of nationalidentities by placement agency staff and domestic workers who internalise these nationalidentities. According to these popular stereotypes, Jamaicans are assertive and aggressive,Filipinas are submissive and hard-working, and English nannies equipped with presti-gious English accents are held in high regard. As a welfare state declines and middle-classfemale employment grows simultaneously, domestic chores have been transferred fromEuropean female employer to non-European female domestic worker. Non-European

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female domestic workers, thus, play crucial roles in sustaining the European family.Many of the later Chapters are too short to satisfy critical readers but are short enoughfor busy practitioners.

The best chapters are Elmhirst (Chapter 15) and Yeoh and Huang (Chapter 17).These two chapters, which successfully combine contextualisation, description of casehistories, innovative analysis, and discussion, happen to be the second longest and thelongest essays, respectively. Elmhirst gives adequate space to theorise and contextualisethe issues she is raising. The discussion of ‘producing domestic space’ and ‘producingdomestic time’ are illuminating. There is a general tendency to assume that a vacuumis created in domestic space as the middle-class women take up jobs outside their homes.This gap is, then, assumed to be � lled by the migrant domestic workers. Elmhirst doesnot take the domestic space as a gap to be � lled. Rather she argues that power relationsbetween employers and domestic servants are played out in the process of producingdomestic space and time. Many shorter chapters, too, especially BarbicÏ and MiklavcÏ icÏ -Brezigar (Chapter 10) and Miles (Chapter 12), contain interesting ideas and insights. Iffour to � ve chapters were dropped and remaining chapters expanded, the quality of thevolume would have been much higher. Despite this shortcoming, this volume hasundoubtedly expanded our knowledge about the state of migrant domestic workers invarious parts of the globalising world. Anyone interested in the comparative studies ofmigrant domestic workers will � nd this volume useful.

YASUSHI UCHIYAMADA, University of Edinburgh, UK

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