Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California, 1997. xvi + 419 pp. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper.

If you are looking for a book about the relationship between gender and technology in the conventional sense—machines, science, manufacturing—you might be disappointed by Francesca Bray's Technology and Gender. What Bray offers instead is a sweeping analysis of how the objects encountered in daily life gave meaning to women's experience during that long period known as “late imperial China” (1000–1800). The work will certainly become a classic in Chinese women's history, but it also deserves to be read by a much larger audience, including those interested in subaltern studies, economic history, and the current debate about world-systems history.