Colby Magazine: Books and Authors

	Save Yourself a Lot of Money Jeff Wuorio's financial primer takes some of the worry out of personal finance

	Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves Mary Beth Mills, Associate Professor of Anthropology

	Everything but the Poetry is Out of Its Element Here


	*Family Honor* Robert B. Parker '54 *From East Germans to Germans?: The New Postcommunist Elites* Jennifer Yoder (government, international studies) *Cover Story* Gerry Boyle '78 *Across the Taiwan Strait: Mainland China, Tawain and the 1995-1996 Crisis* Suisheng Zhao (government), editor *New York's 50 Best Places to Have Brunch* Ann Volkwein & Jason Oliver Nixon '92

Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves
Mary Beth Mills
Rutgers University Press
218 pages

Thousands of young Thai women migrate each year from rural areas to the factories of Bangkok. The work, predictably, is boring and stressful, but it pays well and offers freedoms not available to Thai women only a couple of decades ago.

Compared to rural Thai communities and their economic practices, gender roles and familial tensions (which often are catalysts for labor migration), the vibrant city of Bangkok grants the women of the workforce the liberty to do and see and buy without familial supervision.

Mary Beth Mills inspects the long-term importance of these migrations of rural laborers for the workers themselves and for the less visible urban industries they work in, and she conducts an ethnographic analysis of gender and gender relations in contemporary Thai society.

Returning to their rural homes and to marriage and family still seems desirable to many modern Thai women, however, if not expected and inevitable. Mills explores the conflicting desires and "contested selves" that result when the women must choose between the rural and the urban, the traditional and the new, the family-oriented village life and the chancier life of the thriving city. "These struggles reveal not only the individual circumstances and needs of particular migrants and their families," Mills writes, "but also the effects of more wide-ranging structural and ideological tensions within Thai society as a whole."

An associate professor of anthropology at Colby, Mills spent six years researching this thoroughgoing academic study of Thai women in the labor force, but it's in no way bookish. The beginning reads like the start of a novel, and her use of the first-person pronoun invites us to join Mills on a personal journey of discovery. The general reader as well as scholars in women's studies, South East Asian studies or anthropology should find the book accessible and informative.

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