Sewing Women By Margret Chen: Book Summary

Margret Chen’s book Sewing Women is an in-depth analysis of the modern garment industry in New York. In the first chapter she gives an overview of the history of the industry, from the end of the 19th century to the present, but she spends the bulk of the book discussing the ethnic garment industry of today, characterized by Chinese and Korean factories. Six of the seven chapters we read focused on the differences between these two producers, which I will briefly summarize.

Chinese shops are owned by owned by Chinese ethnics and employ Chinese immigrant women to do work on a piecework system. This gives workers more flexibility but lower average wages. A big draw for employees is that these shops are unionized, and therefore provide health …show more content…
I appreciated the many quotes in the text and found them to be very helpful in framing Chin’s research. I did find some that some of the information became repetitive over the seven chapters. I was surprised to read about the thriving garment industry in New York because, prior to reading the book, I didn’t know that this existed today. I found it interesting that the book is called Sewing Women, when a sizable portion of the text focused on men in the garment industry and the degendering of the Korean garment industry as a whole. In that same vein, the text briefly mentioned the different gendered ways men and women discuss working in the Korean garment industry. It seamed clear to me that women often choose to work in the industry largely out of fear of harassment in other, male-dominated, industries. However men, did not seem to think, or at least did not mention, the gendered nature of the garment industry. Lastly, as someone who is very pro-union, the book made me think about the complexities and potential downfalls of unionization. In particular the text mentioned how union activity has undermined Chinese workers pay and union rules that prevent undocumented workers from