Teri Caraway begins her fine book with an observation that gives rise to a puzzle. Modern global industrialization has been accompanied by women's rapid entry into the formal wage labor economy, particularly in manufacturing. Their entry could potentially produce dramatic social, cultural, and political change around gender issues. But industries have not shifted to hiring more women (becoming feminized, in Caraway's terms) in the same ways, to the same extents, or on the same time frame. While some manufacturing establishments have feminized, others have masculined. Some feminized quickly, others only gradually and incompletely, and some feminized and then masculinized. And gender inequities in pay and particularly in access to positions leading to upward career ladders have largely persisted. Given this variation, what factors influence the timing and nature of women's entrance into manufacturing? And what are the implications for our understandings of political economy and of women's role within it?

Caraway answers this question with a multilayered comparative analysis, developing a “gendered political economy” approach (pp. 32–35). She distinguishes her analysis from the primary alternative explanations, which invoke shifts to export-oriented industry, the cheapness of women's labor, or gendered discourses of labor that situate women as docile and reliable workers. Caraway integrates feminist insights about women's placement in the workforce with intuitions from political economy about the operation of labor markets under conditions of industrial expansion. She thoroughly and carefully tests through statistical analysis the major factors that could be seen to explain women's entrance into and experiences in the new industrial economies of Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Latin America. Her analysis shows convincingly that the differences in feminization across industries and regions are real and that no single factor (like lower wages for women, for instance) explains what is happening. The answer, she argues, is multifaceted and depends upon reconceptualizing political economy through an awareness of gender's significance as a cultural and structural factor.

While her analysis mobilizes careful statistical modeling and testing in cross-national contexts, Caraway also conducted a case study in Indonesia. To understand these processes on the ground, she considered four manufacturing industries that experienced different paths of feminization (and sometimes de-feminization): textiles, plywood, automobiles, and garments. In addition to collecting quantitative data on these industries, she interviewed managers and observed shop-floor operations in more than 50 factories, enabling her to produce a rich and nuanced account of what feminization means to the workers and managers in industrializing nations and sectors. The strength of this layered approach, as Caraway explains, is that “each of these vantage points provides a different window on how gender shapes industrialization and each offers an empirical check on the claims advanced” (p. 7). Her work thus checks and enhances the wealth of feminist ethnographic research on women in industry internationally and advances the more broadly and quantitatively oriented body of political economy research on industrializing nations.

While the entire book provided valuable insights, the most interesting piece for this reviewer was Caraway's analysis of Indonesia. As an authoritarian society, Indonesia presents a fascinating case. Suharto's policies in the 1970s and 1980s for expanding education and implementing family planning, in combination with economic crisis, generated a larger pool of employable women (p. 62). But Caraway notes that the most important factor contributing to feminization in Indonesia (and by implication elsewhere) was the relationship between the regime and potential sources for opposition to feminization, particularly labor unions. Suharto actively demobilized all sources of political opposition to his regime and struck at labor unions aggressively. The military actively controlled labor, and independent labor organizations were supplanted by a state-controlled comprehensive union subject to frequent military and political interventions (pp. 75–77). As independent labor unions had been largely male dominated and had opposed women's active entrance into manufacturing to maintain availability and higher wages for men, their repression worked to the benefit of women who wanted more access to manufacturing positions and employers who wanted to experiment with them. Beyond labor unions, the Indonesian state's management and repression of opportunities to organize popular, political, and religious opposition to women's manufacturing work contributed to women's emergence as a pool of appealing and available employees (p. 80).

Feminization, however, was not an even process in Indonesia. As the nation transitioned to export-oriented industries, feminization came first in expanding industries that were creating new jobs, not in the more capital-intensive industries where male labor remained entrenched and, in Caraway's terms, sticky. Nonetheless, within more labor-intensive industries, feminization took place in waves, first sweeping textiles, then shifting to plywood and garments, and finally encompassing footwear and electronics (p. 87). The first wave facilitated the rise and configuration of the second and third waves through spillover and snowballing within particular industrial sectors and eventually spillover into other sectors. But feminization involved more than the entrance of women into manufacturing sectors; the author argues that divergent practices of employing women both depended upon and produced gendered discourses of labor, defining women and men as differentially qualified, as well as temperamentally and physically suited, for different kinds of labor (pp. 114–17). Employers rhetorically constructed men's naughtiness, women's patience, men's strength, and women's obedience in relation to particular industries and then justified staffing choices in part around these constructions.

Caraway's analysis is not completely convincing. While the Indonesian case is compelling and the large-scale comparative analysis is well done, the two pieces of her research produce some tension when set side by side. She argues that cultural factors are not as significant as larger-scale structural factors rooted in political economy, and purports to show this by testing key cultural variables in her model, including fertility rates, percentage of women in the labor force, and education for girls (p. 147). Rather, she claims, “demand-based explanations and labor market institutions have a stronger overall effect on feminization” (p. 153). Her own case study of Indonesia, however, complicates this assertion by raising questions about what lies behind demand and labor market institutions. As she describes gendered discourses about labor, these discourses appear to rest upon cultural foundations, drawing up and crystallizing beliefs about men and women as workers in the context of a rapidly shifting industrial scene.

While she correctly situates her work as providing comprehensive comparisons among industrializing nations, she could have relied more upon the feminist ethnographic work that she clearly respects. In particular, feminist anthropologists like Dorinne Kondo (Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace, 1990) have untangled the ways that women's work in gendered manufacturing contexts has both relied upon and dynamically shaped female laborers' conceptions of self. Caraway's study of discourse gets at some of this, but the intriguing connections between managers' discursive representations of women and the cultural and immediate experiential roots of these representations could have been developed more comprehensively.

Caraway's analysis of unions also raises further research questions. Feminist labor historians in the United States have also noted opposition to feminization among many prominent unions during America's push toward a large-scale manufacturing economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These unions largely represented their male members' interests in maintaining the masculinized construction of much manufacturing work and the assumed higher wages. But some U.S. unions and union organizers were interested in women's work and sought to increase women's representation in male unions and to organize largely female unions in feminized industries (e.g., see Alice Kessler-Harris, Gendering Labor History, 2007; Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State, 1991). Is this a factor in any of the regions that Caraway is studying?

These questions aside, however, Assembling Women contributes well-considered and supported—and clearly communicated—insights to global gender studies, political economy, and labor studies. Scholars in all of these areas should find this book valuable and will likely be as eager as I am to hear more from this terrific scholar.