Factory Girls

810 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The book’s treatment of technologies used by EDF, however, is disappointing. Historians of technology will balk at Frost’s character­ ization of recent literature in their held: the social constructivist school, he writes, portrays technology as being influenced by social and political concerns without examining the ways in which technol­ ogy in turn shapes society. This oversimplification is compounded by a promise to reveal a “far more complex” (p. 7) process of technolog­ ical choice, a promise that the author does not fulfill. His chapter on the “means of production,” in which he focuses most intently on EDF’s technologies (e.g., nuclear reactors and computers), shows how man­ agers used descriptions of technology to achieve political ends and how workers used newly acquired computing skills to devise new forms of protest. These accounts are interesting; indeed, Frost should have explored these issues in greater depth. But his analysis does not illuminate the process of technological choice. Had Frost not announced that he would explore this process, the reader might not notice the shortcoming. Alternating Currents stands easily on its analysis of the complex relationship between EDF, the French state, and private industry, as well as its explorations of the role of rhetoric about technology in French politics and the attitudes of French labor unions toward technological development. Gabrielle Hecht Dr. Hecht is acting assistant professor in the history department at Stanford Univer­ sity. Her current research focuses on the development of nuclear power in France. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan. By E. Patricia Tsurumi. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 215; tables, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). E. Patricia Tsurumi’s excellent new monograph is part of a growing literature on the social costs of Japanese industrialization. Her anal­ ysis of the contribution of women thread mill workers to industrial­ ization in both the cotton and the silk industries during the Meiji era (1868—1912) stresses the hardships of their work life and the impor­ tance of their contribution to both nation building and industrial growth. While company apologists stressed the identity of interests of the worker, the company, and the new nation-state, Tsurumi effec­ tively shows that few workers were taken in by this self-serving statement and argues instead that these women were motivated by loyalty to their families. Indeed, despite the low social prestige accorded to the mill girls after the early 1880s, the women took considerable pride in their ability to ease the plight of the poor farm families from which they were recruited. Textiles played a critical role in Japanese industrialization. After the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the new government placed a high priority TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 811 on industrialization as a means of maintaining Japanese indepen­ dence against Western imperialistic encroachments. In the first period of development in the Japanese textile industry (1868-81), women workers were recruited from the dispossessed samurai elite, and they were urged to “reel for [the sake of] the nation.” Wages, conditions, and social prestige for these workers were fairly good. However, in 1881 economic conditions worsened, and, in response, Japanese mill owners began to squeeze labor to meet international competition. Thus, in 1883 labor practices such as regular night work, graded wage scales, and very low wages became widespread when the large and heavily capitalized Osaka Cotton Company set a standard for the industry. As ring spinning replaced mule spinning, the work force became highly feminized and wage costs dropped even further since women commanded roughly half of men’s wages. Women workers were no longer recruited from the samurai class but from the rural poor, whose ranks were swelled by the economic policies of the Meiji government, which fueled a growth in rural tenantry. In one of her most important arguments, Tsurumi maintains that the wages of women factory workers, which went routinely into the family economy, allowed marginal farm families to bear the cost of high rents. Their labor helped sustain both Japan’s most modern and most traditional economic sectors as industry prospered on women’s low wages and rural landlords fattened

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