Chapter 1 of this useful, informative book efficiently summarizes colonial political history and Burmese social life under British rule, making the work far more useful to non-specialists than it might otherwise have been. In dialog with contemporary Burma historiography Chie Ikeya envisions Burmese colonial modernity through the lens of the woman question.

Chapter 2, “Women on the Rise: Education and the Popular Press,” questions a historiographic consensus that Burmese women enjoyed unusually high status in pre-colonial days. Acknowledging, as work on eighteenth century Chinese women has documented for Chinese elites, that Burman women enjoyed considerable domestic powers, Ikeya balances recognition of such “traditional” freedoms against obvious “customs and representations unfavorable to women. . . [and] subordinated them to men socially, spiritually, and politically” in precolonial Burmese social convention. (p. 51) The chapter tracks male avatars, women writers, newspaper columns written by or for women readers, and the their arguments for women's social and cultural liberation.

Chapter 3, “Between Patriotism and Feminism: Politicized and Organized Women,” argues that “what is important is not that Burmese women's activism was modeled after British imperial feminists or Indian nationalist-feminists, but that Burmese women perceived the need to mobilize against gender discrimination and took organized action” (pp. 91–2). The detailed history of religious, political, nationalist, and emergent professional organizations that Ikeya provides opens parallels that go beyond Southeast Asia. Chapter 4, “Modern Woman as Consumer: Fashion, Domesticity, and the Marketplace” comes to terms with the fact that in Burma, “as elsewhere, fashion served as a powerful trope for modernity” (p. 97). The entire paraphernalia of capitalist consumer culture and debates appear: personal choice, whether Berman women should dump old beauty practices and adapt to imported ones, various dress scandals teetering on questions about exposing women's body versus striking a blow for national modernization, elite housewification, and, most interesting to me, commodity advertising in the powerful new press.

Chapter 5, “Mixing Religion and Race: Intermarriage, Miscegenation, and the Wives and Mistresses of Foreign Men,” introduces administrative, racial, economic and ethical problems surround the colonial practice of temporary marriages. Given the ethnic makeup and labor migration into the area Ikeya's description is compelling. Chapter 6, “The Self-Indulgent Khit hsan thu” Ikeya takes up the modern girl problem. In line with the findings of much recent scholarship, Ikeya shows how the commodity girls sporting new aspirations, an international “look,” self-indulgent eroticism and so on became a lightning rod for criticism. All across the political spectrum critics accused the modern girl of all sorts of social misdemeanors, but most importantly, in Ikeya's view, they accused Khit hsan thu of castrating Burmese men. Consequently Ikeya ends the chapter arguing that Burmese nationalist discourse contained a dogma about remasculinization of colonized, feminized men.

This is an admirable book for a number of reasons.

First, Ikeya has taken on the major problems facing historians of colonial modern womanhood. She addresses not just the question of nomenclature or new words created to define womanhood, but also engages the questions of women's' citizenship, fashion, class realignments, housewification, race, miscegenation, gendered social status indicators, and colonial manhood.

Second, Ikeya has managed to tell a national story—this book is about Burma—through intellection, political activism, social performance and women's expression of individual aspirations, their affiliates, and male advocates and their critics. In other words, this is not so much a book about women as it is a book about Burma that shows where the national story goes when you truly acknowledge all the evidence.

Third, Ikeya blends historiographic awareness with methodical documentation. But she is sufficiently familiar with South and Southeast Asian historiography of the woman question that she can call not only on specialists like Anthony Reid but also South and South East Asia historians like Mrinalini Sinha, Durba Ghosh, Mina Roces, and Emma Tarlo to amplify her analyses.

Fourth, Ikeya explicitly debates the difference between the older conventions of elite women's social privileges and the question of modern equality. To argue, she suggests, that Burmese women already enjoyed freedoms not granted to other women is to imply that women in Burma had little reason to advocate for political or social rights. This is a little like arguing that because little Eva loved Uncle Tom to the point of wanting to emancipate him, consequently Uncle Tom's great-granddaughter would not be a suffragist. Uncle Tom and his great granddaughter actually have no relationship to each other's political or social aspirations. Refiguring Women is a slender volume with a lot to say but I particularly stress this theme because it is implicit in much current debate and scholarship. The advent of colonial modern social life, national and colonial law, and political struggles transformed the way that all people considered future times. Arguments to the effect that traditional women did not have it so bad and that their avatars exaggerated their suffering under the old regime disregards the fact that freedoms are extrapolated differently in modern times. Ikeya makes this analytic point well and without polemics.

Finally, throughout this book there are references to Chinese women's movements, Chinese movies, Chinese-Burman miscegenation. It is not clear from these references whether Burmese intellectuals had systematic access to political information about Chinese social movements or whether the Sino-Burman population retained social and language ties to China. Because the political time-lines for advocates of women's citizenship in China are so similar to the Burma case and even include even some of the same corporate imperialist players (Lever Brothers Corporation's Sunlight Soap, branded in 1884 in England was advertised in China, as well as Burma, and probably all around the British Empire) I would have appreciated more comparative work on the China side. However, this is asking too much of one talented, upcoming historian. My experience suggests that in comparative contexts a collaborative work group is the most efficient way to conduct such comparisons.