During the past three decades China has been experiencing the largest mass migration of people from the countryside to the city in human history. As of 2015, an estimated 250 million Chinese have left the countryside and became new urban citizens, among them at least a third are women. Because of the enormous number, and the potential economic and social impact on Chinese society, this large group of female rural–urban migrants have recently attracted considerable scholarly attention. Arianne Gaetano's Out to Work: Migration, Gender and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China is the latest contribution to this fast-growing field of research. Building on a decade of regular interviews with, and in-depth survey of, 11 migrant women who worked as domestic cleaners or hotel room maids in Beijing, Gaetano provides a nuanced account of the changing lives of individual women and the impact of such migration on their family and work in the city at the turn of the millennium. The trajectories of these women reflect differently at various stages on their experience of migration, but collectively “migration especially empowers some rural women and advances gender equality by enabling greater autonomy in courtship and marriage” (p. 134).

Structured both thematically and chronologically, the six core chapters book, ended by brief introduction and conclusion, present the pathways through which these women changed from countryside girls to sophisticated urban working women and show how mobility shapes gender roles and relations, with a special focus on their identity and agency. In Chapter 1, Gaetano charts the historical factors that have shaped large-scale migration in China since the early 1980s, concentrating in particular on how the rapid development of the domestic services sector in the city gave rise to a high demand for women from the countryside. Through the story of one migrant woman, the second chapter sets out to examine the mixed nature of the background of migration. For the girls who had been traditionally bound to the village, the city in the reform era opened up new possibilities for a more independent and self-determined way of life, offering a desirable venue for social recognition and empowerment different to their male counterparts. However, the rural–urban and gendered variances, as Gaetano cogently reminds, also produce “particular gendered patterns of migration that reflect and also perpetuate such difference and inequality” (p. 29).

While Chapter 4 presents migrant women's working conditions and their negotiation of power relations with their employers, co-workers, and clients, for me the most interesting accounts are those given in chapters 3 and 5. Although the migrant women have left the countryside and entered new social contexts, the network of their kin and co-villagers still plays a vital role in their lives. In many cases, this network facilitates their job opportunities and integration into the urban sphere, increasing their social capital and negotiating power. But at the same time, this network also enables traditional patriarchal power and ideology from the village to penetrate their new lives in the city, restricting both their choice of employment and the autonomy of their personal lives. Under the combined force of this network, migrant women take strenuous efforts to adapt to the urban life within their workplaces and families. Their exposure to a consistently shifting urban lifestyle and consumer culture greatly shapes their identity, gradually transforming them from unskilled villagers to sophisticated city-dwellers.

Focusing on the experiences of five migrant women, the last chapter turns to explore the more intimate aspects of their lives in the city. As their way of life changes in the new urban context, the patterns of love, courtship, marriage, and family relations also transform to new ones characterized by urban factors. Instead of accommodating a deeply entrenched patrilineal-patrilocal family system in the village, the migrant women are concerned with combating economic uncertainties, balancing between work and family, establishing new relationships with in-laws and natal families, and remodeling themselves as wives, daughters-in-law, and mothers.

In general, Gaetano's informants have a positive view of migration; despite various hardship and discrimination all of them are able to settle down in Beijing and adapted to new urban life. Yet throughout the book, readers are constantly reminded of the overarching theme: that the impact of migration is not one-sided but multifaceted. On the one hand, migration to the city promotes agency and gender equality for rural women, providing hitherto unavailable opportunities for them to acquire skills, accomplish self-determination, and pursue economic independence. On the other hand, the freedom and autonomy of these women are constrained by existing social and gender norms jointly reinforced by the party-state, the capitalist market, and the traditional rural patriarchal culture. As a result, new social identities are created for these women taking advantage of rural–urban disparities and regional and gender inequalities.

In her effort to present the changing lives and identities of these migrant women, Gaetano adopts a longitudinal approach, by building close relationships with her informants and by documenting changes of their lives over an extended period. Through her long-term observation of and contact with these women, Gaetano vividly depicts how they reflect differently at various stages on their experience of migration. The book thus deserves special applause for its fine-grained ethnographic account of various aspects of the lives of women migrants, bringing their seldom-heard voices to the fore.

The stories of the female migrants are telling, and Gaetano's arguments based on these stories are convincing. Yet critical readers may ask how representative these informants are, as they all reside in Beijing and they work exclusively either in the domestic services or hotel service sectors. As domestic service labor, their workplace is rather isolated, and they are relatively distant from institutional structures such as government and enterprises, two major players of the market economy in today's China. As Ngai Punhas has shown, in her study of female migrant workers in the factories in China's booming coastal areas, the empowerment and identity of these women are not only shaped by the ever-shifting force of gender and class, but also greatly manipulated by government regulations, municipal officials, factory managers.Footnote ¹ Moreover, the origin of these women, as Feng Xu argues, also plays an important role in facilitating their social network and collective identity in the city, circumscribing and delimiting their autonomy and freedom in both work and family.Footnote ² An inclusion of migrant women of different origins working in other sectors and other locations would no doubt enrich this meticulously researched and eloquently written book.

Despite this minor quibble, Out to Work is a compelling book to read, deserving critical acclaim for its insightful contribution to the discussion of gender, identity, and agency of rural-urban migrant women in contemporary China. What emerges from this timely book is not a single-sided story of how migration empowers women and improve gender quality but a vivid and multi-layered socio-cultural context in which migrant women operate. Full of intriguing observations and thought-provoking syntheses, it is highly recommended to scholars of migration, gender studies, and labor studies, as well as general readers interested in this perennial topic in China and other countries.