Author: Safa, Helen Icken
Title: The Myth of the Male Breadwinner : Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean
Description: Boulder [CO], Westview Press, (1995). orig.wrappers. 23x15cm, xvi,208 pp. PAPERBACK.. ISBN: 0813312124. Minor rubbing. VG. ¶ Today there is a growing debate about the effects of paid employment on women. Some observers argue that paid employment is the key to gender equality because it raises womens class consciousness and reduces their isolation within the home and their dependence on a males wages. Others suggest that paid employment merely increases womens burden and reinforces their subordination, locking them into poorly paid, dead-end jobs. This book examines the debate through studies of women industrial workers in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. The percentage of women in the labor force has grown rapidly in all three countries since 1970, but each country represents a radically different model of development. Puerto Ricos Operation Bootstrap was a forerunner of other industrialization by invitation strategies in the region, and the Dominican Republic represents a classic case of recently initiated, rapidly growing export manufacturing under the Caribbean Basin Initiative. Socialist Cuba continued to rely on sugar exports as a source of foreign exchange and on import substitution industrialization for the domestic economy. However, Cuba has made special efforts to incorporate women into the labor force and has made womens equality a key goal of its revolutionary strategy. The book focuses on three areas of these womens lives: wages and working conditions; the family, life cycle, and household composition; and political consciousness and participation in unions, political parties, and other mass organizations...." - publisher's description.

Keywords: 0813312124 Economic Anthropology, Caribbean, Labor Sociology, Women, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, ,