Abstracts of Books

Abstracts of Books General Elizabeth Wayland Barber. Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth, and Sodety in Early Times. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. ix + 334 pp.; Ul. ISBN 0-393-03506-9. Archaeologist Elizabeth Wayland Barber draws upon recently gathered data to explore one of women's most important contributions to past societies—their role in textile production. Barber argues that for over 20,000 years the fiber arts were an enormous economic force which belonged primarily to women. In seeking the answer to the question, "Why were textiles traditionally women's work?" Barber discovered that cloth production was directly related to women's roles as wives, mothers, providers, entrepreneurs, and artists (p. 29). The numerous photographs, sketches, and maps add to the effectiveness of Barber's analysis of her archaeological findings. Gina Buijs, ed. Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Women, vol. 7; Shirley Ardener and Jackie Waldren, series editors. Oxford and Providence: Berg, 1993. vü + 204 pp. ISBN 0-85496-729-X (cl); ISBN 0-85496-869-5 (pb). While emigration has a deep impact on all migrants, that impact is also gendered, affecting women in different ways from men Ui their accommodation to a new sodety's labor market, marriage customs, and ideology of pubUc and domestic space. The wide-ranging essays in this coUection make clear, however, that no generalizations can be drawn about women's experience of migration. As Buijs argues in the introduction, gendered difference in immigrant experience depends upon the specific relationship of host and home culture. Topics of individual essays include the internal emigration of Chechuan women to Peru's hinterlands; Chüean exües to North America; Palestinian women doubly exUed to West Berlin from the camps of Lebanon; the differing experiences of Somali and Bangladeshi women m Britain; Asian (and especiaUy South Asian) women's partidpation in the British labor market; internai and external emigration by Catholic and Hindu women in Goa; Vietnamese women in Hong Kong refugee camps; British single women emigrants to South Africa; and internal labor migrations within South Africa. © 1995 Journal of Women's History, Vol. 7 No. 3 (Fall) 1995 Abstracts of Books 157 Harriett GUbert, ed. Fetishes, Florentine Girdles, and Other Explorations Into the Sexual Imagination. New York: HarperCoUins, 1994. 304 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-016-273313-3. A variety of scholars and authors contributed to this book, which is a cross between a dictionary and an encyclopedia on sexuaUty. Arranged m alphabetical order, the entries average one page in length, occasionaUy indude references or sources, cover the ancient world to the present, and attempt to drde the globe in their inclusiveness. A sample of the entries (which include biographies, ideologies, and objects) are: androgyny, Jacobean revenge tragedy, Nagisa Oshima, and Shuihu Zhuan. The result is a "companion" or "tourist guide" intended to escort the reader through the labyrinth of sexuality. Scholars interested Ui sexuality may find this volume's lack of bibtiography and notes frustrating and its brief entries too stick. Carol A. Stabile. Feminism and the Technological Fix. Manchester and New York: Mandiester University Press, 1994; distributed in the U.S. and Canada by St. Martin's Press, vü +184 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-7190-4274-7 (d); 0-7190-4275-5 (pb). Against what she sees as the dominant technophobia of American feminism and the uncritical and apolitical technomania of academic postmodernism , Stabile argues for feminist engagement with modern technology within a framework of socialist political activism and class analysis. After critiquing the theoretical perspectives of both mainstream feminism and feminist postmodernism, Stabile analyzes the technophobic tendencies in feminist science fiction and ecofeminism; representations of women in relation to new technological frameworks; and Donna Harraway's ideas about cyborg poUtics. W. Peter Ward. Birth Weight and Economic Growth: Women's Living Standards in the Industrializing West. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. xv + 218 pp. ISBN 0-226-87322-6 (d). Ward's examination of historical trends (from c. 1850 to c. 1930) in birth weight in seleded cities (Edinburgh, Vienna, Dublin, Boston, and Montreal ) is grounded on a linkage between birth weight and economic development that, as Ward...