This study is about the employment experiences and the family lives of married women in Taiwan’s satellite factory system. It analyzes how Taiwan’s “economic miracle” comes about in a local and daily way through the work and family lives of married women. From the theoretical perspective, it explores the intersections between capitalist logic and patriarchal practices, the interplay of class formation and gender stratification, and the linkage between the individual, family/factory, state, and global restructuring. The book’s title,Living Rooms as Factories (Keting Ji Kongchang), is taken from a slogan employed by the Taiwanese government in its developmental programs that...

Taiwan is an island in the Western Pacific, about 700 miles southwest of Japan, 50 miles north of the Philippines, and 90 miles east of the China coast. Of its area of nearly 36,000 square kilometers, only about one-third is arable. Limited natural resources and a large population made Taiwan an ideal candidate for a labor-intensive export-led economy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when manufactured goods from the Third World gradually caught on in the global market.

Before people in Taiwan themselves became active players in the global economy, several alien powers had conquered Taiwan in their attempt...

The kmt state has been and continues to be a patriarchal state. Its conservatism and antifeminism have been evidence since the kmt came to power in 1927. Even after it fled to Taiwan, the kmt continued to advocate patriarchal values and to sponsor programs and projects that perpetuate women’s familial roles. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, through the Women’s Department and the Chinese Women’s Anti-Aggression League, a semiofficial organization, middle-class women were encouraged to take part in voluntary activities such as sewing clothing for military personnel and collecting or donating cash, clothes, and food for needy military dependents....

When I first enquired about Taiwan’s satellite factories, people told me what they had seen or experienced.

There was a factory in the next building. They made caps for Kungnan [a large sportswear factory in Taiwan]. My next-door neighbor used to sew logos on the caps. Her living room was really a mess. Every time I visited her, she was on the machine.

… [Have you ever thought about doing it too?]

Yes, I did. But my kid was too small. At that time, my sister’s office mate was looking for someone to baby-sit her newborn baby. I ended up...

So far, we have discussed the sociopolitical environment within which married women are employed as well as the organization of the satellite system in terms of gender. Now it is time to examine more closely the mechanisms through which married women are molded into mothers, wives, and daughters-in-law on the one hand, and waged, unwaged, and causal workers on the other. I will use women’s stories of their first years of marriage to illustrate how women themselves understand and reflect upon their own experiences of this conversion process, and then discuss the clash between women’s gender and class identities.

Before...

As a supplier of inexpensive manufactured goods in the world market, Taiwan has as its main concern the effective conversion of labor power into labor for its satellite factories. Technological innovation and upgrading, which are essential to increase productivity in craft-based production, are only marginally relevant in Taiwan’s non-craft-based satellite factory system. From the owners’ viewpoint, profit is prìmarily correlated with the productivity level of the workers. The level of labor control is intensified because many Taiwanese manufacturers are involved in seasonal trade. There is a clear distinction between the slack season and the peak season for factories producing Christmas...

Owners make every effort to establish social ties with their employees in order to disguise the materialistic aspects of employment. In defiance of the oppressive labor practices to which they are subject, the workers, for their part, employ tactics that are informal, individualized, and clandestine. None of their struggles aim to challenge the satellite factory system as such. Nor do they take an organized and confrontational form. Just the same, the workers’ actions to mitigate excessive claims on their labor reveal a systematic pattern.

Studies of labor politics typically focus on organized, collective, and confrontational actions. Viewed from this perspective,...

In contrast to South Korea and Singapore, which built their recent economic prosperity on large factories in export processing zones, Taiwan based its “economic miracle” on small-scale, family-centered, export-oriented satellite factories in local neighborhoods. The KMT’s development policy, represented by Living Rooms as Factories, promoted a system of manufacturing that draws upon married women’s productive and reproductive labor. Although many of the first cohort of Taiwanese factory daughters left large factories upon marriage, their careers as factory workers were not terminated, as suggested by the concept “part-time proletarian” proposed by Gates (1987). Under the satellite factory system women are simultaneously...