In 1982, 20,000 Chinese-American garment workers—most of them women—went on strike in New York City. Every Chinese garment industry employer in the city soon signed a union contract. The successful action reflected the ways women's changing positions within their families and within the workplace galvanized them to stand up for themselves.

Xiaolan Bao's now-classic study penetrates to the heart of Chinese American society to explain how this militancy and organized protest, seemingly so at odds with traditional Chinese female behavior, came about. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews, Bao blends the poignant personal stories of Chinese immigrant workers with the interwoven history of the garment industry and the city's Chinese community. Bao shows how the high rate of married women employed outside the home profoundly transformed family culture and with it the image and empowerment of Chinese American women. At the same time, she offers a complex and subtle discussion of the interplay of ethnic and class factors within New York's garment industry.

Passionately told and prodigiously documented, Holding Up More Than Half the Sky examines the journey of a community's women through an era of change in the home, on the shop floor, and walking the picket line.

| Cover Title Copyright Contents Foreword by Roger Daniels Acknowledgments A Note on Interviews and Transliterations Introduction PART 1: THE MILLIEU 1. The Vicissitudes of New York City's Garment Industry: A Brief History 2. The Garment Workers: Gender, Race, and Class in the City's Garment Industry 3. The Growth of the Chinatown Garment Industry PART 2: CHINESE WOMEN WORKERS BEFORE 1982 4. New York's Chinese Working-Class Families during the Exclusion Era 5. The Transformation of New York's Chinese Working-Class Families after World War II 6. Women in the Chinatown Garment Industry Illustrations 7. Chinese Women Workers and the ILGWU PART 3: THE 1982 STRIKE AND ITS IMPACT 8. Winds of Change: Preconditions of the Strike 9. The 1982 Strike 10. Continuing the Struggle, 1982–92 Conclusion Epilogue Glossary Notes Bibliography Index Back Cover |"Bao does an excellent job in not only portraying Chinese women workers' work and lives, but also revealing that the Chinese women's labor history in New York's garment industry is also part of American labor history, and they can only fully be understood through the complex interactions of race/ethnicity, class, and gender."—Wei Li, Journal of Asian Studies
"A significant reference for scholars of women's studies, Chinese American history, immigration history, and labor history."—Huping Ling, American Historical Review
"Offers a nuanced picture of transformations in personal and family life. Particularly successful are the portrayals of women's growing financial and emotional centrality in the family and of relations among Chinese women born in different parts of the world."—Adam McKeown, Journal of American History
|Xiaolan Bao was an associate professor of history at California State University at Long Beach.