Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java

by Diane L. Wolf

Taking the reader inside the households where Javanese women live and the factories where they work, Diane Wolf reveals the contradictions, constraints, and changes in their lives. She debunks conventional wisdom about the patriarchal family, while at the same time clearly identifying the complex dynamics of class, gender, agrarian change, and industrialization in the Third World.
 

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1992

Reviews

[Flo! · Rating 4 out of 5]

First person to give it a review! The book is the author's thesis. It is a fieldwork results of her measuring and descriping experiences. Honestly, very interesting, sometimes very repetitive due to it being a research. It gives a wide insight in the lives of young women, who are the first to work in factories in rural Java. It properly shows how at first, parents were often skeptical, but after a few years, factory work outshone every other mode of employment. It was also weird to read how these factory daughters were basically late teens/early twenties and the description of their behaviour really shows that. It is an incredibly niche topic to read a book about, but very insightful and accessible.

Also the lives of Javanese factory daughters were often compared to Taiwanese factory daughters, as their cultures are different, but the conditions comparable. This really shows what a difference culture makes as young Taiwanese women basically had no freedom and had to hand in 50-100% of their income, while their Javanese counterparts had more freedom and retained most of their income.

[CL Chu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this immediately after Hart's Power, Labor, and Livelihood: Processes of Change in Rural Java. While Hart's quantitative analysis clarified what came after Geertz's controversial picture of "shared poverty" by showing the entangled changes of labor relationship, social organization, and agricultural production in the 1970s, Wolf focused on the more qualitative side of the story in the 1980s and further unpacked the myth of rational, aggregated household decisions. Her (inter-)personal accounts of the women she worked with also added agency and comlexity to the narratives.