"Sisters and Strangers"

Paper Summary:

This paper reviews this interesting historical period through the eyes of the author and contains a critical book review of the title, along with a discussion of the personal value of the book. It shows how the story is really about the women themselves, and how they survived the harsh working conditions by creating a sisterhood working together to help each other while surviving harsh and intolerable conditions.

From the Paper:

"The author states her thesis early in the book, when she notes, "Modern industrial capitalism in twentieth-century China, as in England and the United States a century earlier, was built on the intersection of textile manufacture and female and child labor" (Honig 1). She goes on to elaborate on this thesis throughout the book, exploring the exploitation of women in the mills, and its connection to the Shanghai labor movement (Honig 3). Women's jobs were clearly compartmentalized in the mills, and many of the women were little more than girls, who the mangers found easier to control, and earned less money than men. The author interviewed many people who worked in the mills, and one manager remembered, "'Originally most of the assistants in the mills were child workers'" (Honig 51). Women from certain regions also tended to work in certain sections of the mill. For example, Women from Subei often performed tasks that had originally been performed by men, since they were stronger than some of the other workers. The Subei women usually did not work at weaving, which was considered more skilled and detailed than many of the other jobs. Each chapter is constructed to not only allow the reader to understand what the women went through each day in the mills, but also introduce the surroundings, the history, and the sociology of Shanghai that all played into the women's work in the mills. Each observation by the author either makes a point, or moves the book forward, making the reader eager to find out what will happen next, while clearly focusing on the thesis that women and children were the backbone of the industry, and the backbone of change in the end."

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