Based on a five-year study of twenty-eight young, unmarried working women during the early stages of Hong Kong's labor-intensive industrialization, this classic ethnography opens up the question, Does earning money give women power and improve women's position in their families?

In Working Daughters of Hong Kong Janet Salaff demonstrates the power of the Chinese family to direct its working daughters' material contributions to the family within the burgeoning Hong Kong industrial economy. Depicting the impact of industrialization upon family relationships and the fabric of local society, she concludes that although the effects of industrial employment resonate throughout the lives of working women, strong bonds of loyalty and obligation to family are sustained by all the subjects.

This edition features a new preface by the author on the Hong Kong working environment on the eve of transition, as Hong Kong prepares to be reincorporated into China in 1997.