The trafficking of women from the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe for sexual exploitation has received a great deal of attention in the past two decades. The story of the victimization of young women who fall prey to traffickers has often been sensationalized by the media, policy makers, and agencies created to assist them. The focus on sexual exploitation renders invisible those women who voluntarily migrate from the region, find other types of paid employment, and deem their work abroad worthwhile for themselves and their families. Leyla Keough investigates the experiences of just such a group of women in her book, Worker-Mothers on the Margins of Europe: Gender and Migration between Moldova and Istanbul. A fascinating ethnography, her study demonstrates that women's migration is much more complex than typically perceived: despite various types of exploitation, many women voluntarily go abroad to work, sometimes repeatedly, and judge it beneficial.

Keough focuses on a particular set of migrants from the former Soviet Union: women from the Gagauz Yeri region of Moldova who “commute” to provide domestic labor in Istanbul. Their language, Gagauz, is Turkic, making Turkey an easier place to navigate for them, and one might imagine, a destination chosen from a sense of kinship. However, these women are Orthodox Christians, prefer to speak Russian, and, as Keough explains, identify with Russia as their “valued motherland” (84). In fact, many of the women Keough interviewed maintain strong prejudices against Muslims, especially against the middle- and upper-class Turkish women who employ them in their homes. Though her subjects recount experiences of harassment and exploitation while abroad, many of them return repeatedly for stays of six months to one year, sometimes sharing a position in a “good” home with a relative in a chain of migration. They also describe the rewards of their labor, “uplift,” in Keough's parlance: enough financial gain to support university educations for their children, coveted appliances, and redecorated homes.

Keough engages deeply with the work of other scholars of women's migration, and argues that these Moldovan women, far from representing the supposed unique case of post-Soviet migrants, defined by socialism and its collapse, should be seen as part of global developments, locating them on a “neoliberalizing social field of transnational labor” (22). In other words, they share much with women from post-colonial societies, including motivations for migrating, hardships endured, and forms of agency they exercise to ameliorate their situations. At the same time, the author insightfully discusses the particularities of the women under study. Unlike many other migrants, the Gagauz women, former citizens of the Soviet Union, identify as mothers and workers from the outset; they also see themselves as “modern” before they migrate, making a journey not from the periphery to the center, as most commonly occurs, but between “semi-peripheries” (126). Viewing Turkey as less civilized than their home country, the Gagauz women must negotiate not only their community's perception that leaving their families renders them “bad” mothers, but also that work as a domestic in Muslim Turkey represents a fall from modernity and civilization. Keough's analysis—significantly of both the migrating women and their employers in Turkey—vividly reveals the interplay of their respective culture's notions of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and citizenship. In the process, she also provides evidence of the sometimes surprising legacies of socialism in Moldova.

For a non-social scientist, however, the book can be difficult to read. At times the writing is dense and jargon-filled, with several stock phrases appearing far too often. The repetitions of her conclusions also becomes tiresome. Finally, I believe the book needs an epilogue, as her research, while valuable, is somewhat outdated. Keough's research trips to Moldova and Turkey took place in 2002, 2004, and 2005, with added time in Istanbul in 2009. In a field such as migration, much can change in the realms of law, economics, politics, and culture. Since Keough critiques the policies of funders and aid agencies addressing human trafficking, especially the International Organization for Migration (I.O.M.), and offers policy recommendations, her writing should be as up-to-date as possible. Additionally, the book could have benefited from some follow-up with the women she interviewed. One cannot help but wonder what has changed for them and their community. Are the same women still going to Turkey? Have their daughters followed? Have new destinations arisen for the migrants? And, given the amount of time that has passed and the volume of people who have migrated for labor from Moldova, has acceptance of the women's journeys increased back home?