Women And Industrialization In Asia

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume examines the nature of married women's participation in the economies of three East Asian countries—Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In addition to asking what is similar or different about women's economic participation in this region of the world compared to Western societies, the book also asks how women's work patterns vary across the three countries.

Transforming Gender and Development in East Asia brings together a collection of original essays from top scholars in the United States and Asia to explore the centrality of gender in the process of economic development in East Asia. Contributors demonstrate through ethnography, personal narratives, field observation, and in-depth interviews the essential parts women have played in the national growth, economic restructuring, and industrialization of East Asian countries, including South Korea, Taiwan, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China.

It is well known that the female work force has played a large part in the Asian `export miracle.' Yet their role has commonly been depicted as confined to sweat shops and tea houses. This book examines the bigger picture regarding women in the labour market and how this has been changing in the course of development and industrialisation. Drawing on labour force survey data from across the continent, the book includes studies on India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand. Written in an accessible style and with the key issues amply supported by up-to-date quantitative data, Women and Industrialisation in Asia produces some surprising results and dispels some common myths regarding the position of female workers in the region.

This collection contributes to key theoretical debates about women workers in Asia and breaks new ground by focussing on issues that have been little documented in other studies in the area. It provides new information and insights into labour systems associated with labour intensive export manufactures and state-labour relations in a comparative context. The contributors present a range of unique and varied perspectives from which they consider aspects of the increasing integration of Asian economies, exploring implications for their labour markets.

Women's Work in Industrial Revolutions provides easy to use primary sources lessons which examine women's crucial contribution to the process of industrialization. It is global in scope, presenting the latest scholarship on historic views from Europe, Japan, and China with links to aspects of women's work in today's industrializing nations. The lessons are presented in six thematic sections.Each thematic section is designed to stand alone, providing students with background information, focus questions, primary source documents, and ways to examine the materials. The unit also contains a teacher background essay, teaching outcomes, correlations to National History Standards and AP World History topics, a glossary, a bibliography, and relevant Internet web sites.

This volume of twelve original essays examines the interplay between women's education and development, and if and how it has changed women's status, in selected nations in Asia. Educational expansion in recent decades have benefitted women in Asia at least in quantitative terms. Industrialization has also created room for increased waged employment for them. However, the relative openness of these systems has not been paralleled at the cultural level. Women in Asia, which remains largely patriarchal, are thus caught in contradictions. This volume examines how women use and compromise with opportunities and limits in education, the role of education in their economic participation, and the enhancement and tension brought to their family roles. The volume is edited from a cross-national perspective. The chapters, each covering a nation, rest on a common framework. Each begins with a brief historical account of education fore women. It then investigates the extent women have been able to take advantage of them. What follows is an analysis of how women use their education in the labor market and in the family. Society's definition of women's roles in the family often acts to reduce the effect of schooling on women's economic participation. This interplay is further complicated by such factors as social class and/or caste, religion and ethnicity.

Barbara N. Ramusack writes on South and Southeast Asia, surveying both the prescriptive roles and the lived experiences of women, as well as the construction of gender from early states to the 1990s. Although both regions are home to Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim religious traditions and had extended trade relations, they reveal striking differences in the status and roles of women and the processes of cultural adaptation. Sharon Sievers presents an verview of women's participation in the histories of China, Japan, and Korea from prehistory to the modern period that provides a framework for incorporating women into world history classrooms. It offers analyses on major issues derived from recent research and discusses such stereotypical cultural practices as footbinding (long seen as "exotic" in the West) in the context of women's lives. Book jacket.