In 1982, twenty thousand Chinese-American garment workers -- mostly women -- went on strike in New York's Chinatown and forced every Chinese garment industry employer in the city to sign a union contract. In this pioneering study, Xiaolan Bao 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.

Bao conducted more than a hundred interviews, primarily with Chinese immigrant women in the Chinatown garment shops and garment-related institutions in the city. Blending...