Out to Work: Migration, Gender and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China

China's rural migrant labor population has increased from 20-30 million during the mid-1980s to over 160 million in 2012. About a third to half of these rural-urban migrants are women who are collectively known as "working sisters" or dagongmei.

In Out to Work: Migration, Gender and the Changing Lives of Rural Women in Contemporary China, Arianne Gaetano follows the rural-urban migration experiences of a few dagongmei who first migrated from their villages in central and western provinces to Beijing between 1993 and 2000. While the issue of rural-urban migration in China has been covered well in the news and media, this book offers a detailed and intimate look into the lives of these women from their mid-to-late teens when they migrated as single girls to Beijing to work as domestic workers and hotel housekeepers, to their mid-to-late thirties as they became seasoned dagongmei, working wives and mothers.