In Syndicate Women, sociologist Chris M. Smith uncovers a unique historical puzzle: women composed a substantial part of Chicago organized crime in the early 1900s, but during Prohibition (1920–1933), when criminal opportunities increased and crime was most profitable, women were largely excluded. During the Prohibition era, the markets for organized crime became less territorial and less specialized, and criminal organizations were restructured to require relationships with crime bosses. These processes began with, and reproduced, gender inequality. The book places organized crime within a gender-based theoretical framework while assessing patterns of relationships that have implications for non-criminal and more general societal issues around gender. As a work of criminology that draws on both historical methods and contemporary social network analysis, Syndicate Women centers the women who have been erased from analyses of gender and crime and breathes new life into our understanding of the gender gap.

In Syndicate Women, sociologist Chris M. Smith uncovers a unique historical puzzle: women composed a substantial part of Chicago organized crime in the early 1900s, but during Prohibition (1920–1933), when criminal opportunities increased and crime was most profitable, women were largely excluded. During the Prohibition era, the markets for organized crime became less territorial and less specialized, and criminal organizations were restructured to require relationships with crime bosses. These processes began with, and reproduced, gender inequality. The book places organized crime within a gender‐based theoretical framework while assessing patterns of relationships that have implications for non‐criminal and more general societal issues around gender. As a work of criminology that draws on both historical methods and contemporary social network analysis, Syndicate Women centers the women who have been erased from analyses of gender and crime and breathes new life into our understanding of the gender gap.

Cosmopolitan Sex Workers is a groundbreaking look into the phenomenon of non-trafficked women who migrate from one global city to another to perform paid sexual labor in Southeast Asia. Through a new, innovative framework, Christine B.N. Chin shows that as neoliberal economic restructuring processes create pathways connecting major cities throughout the world, competition and collaboration between cities creates new avenues for the movement of people, services and goods. Loosely organized networks of migrant labor grow in tandem with professional-managerial classes, and sex workers migrate to different parts of cities, depending on the location of the clientele to which they cater. But while global cities create economic opportunities for migrants (and depend on the labor they provide), states react with new forms of securitization and surveillance. As a result, migrants must negotiate between appropriating and subverting the ideas that inform global economic restructuring. Chin argues that migration allows women to develop intercultural skills that help them to make these negotiations. Cosmopolitan Sex Workers is innovative not only in its focus on non-trafficked women, but in its analysis of the complex relationship between global economic processes and migration for sex work. Through fascinating interviews with sex workers in Kuala Lumpur, Chin shows that sex work can provide women with the means of earning income for families, for education, and even for their own businesses. It also allows women the means to travel the world - a form of cosmopolitanism "from below."

The active role of women in the labor force is not limited to recent decades, or even to the last century. As William Chester Jordan amply demonstrates in Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies, women in premodern times played an integral part both as a source of labor and as participants in lending and borrowing. In this wide-ranging and provocative study, the author assesses the overall significance of women's work in medieval and early modern Europe, and in colonial and postcolonial societies. While earlier studies have concentrated on women in agriculture or craftwork, Jordan investigates consumption lending and borrowing among women in the European Middle Ages, female investment in early modern Europe, and, in a final section, the role of African and Caribbean marketwomen and their provision of and access to credit. By viewing the historical situation, Jordan sheds light on contemporary concerns about commercialization, the transformation of rural society, and industrialization. He provides a historical and comparative context for some of the current issues that plague the twentieth-century female work force. By understanding the role of gender in such an important aspect of traditional life as credit relationships, Jordan advances an ongoing reexamination of the issue in general. This work will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval and early modern European, African, and Caribbean history; anthropology; and women's studies.

Drawing on a broad range of historical and sociological literature, this book traces the everyday gambling experiences of a diverse group of women. It provides fascinating and original insights into the pleasures afforded to women through their gambling participation and draws on a variety of feminist literature to understand women's motivations and experience of play, and to examine the ways in which women negotiate their right to gamble without reprimand. Since gambling tends to be framed within moral discourses of danger and excess, this book offers a defence of women's decisions to gamble against an often hostile backdrop. It rewrites claims that gambling is 'meaningless' and reckless spending, by pointing instead to the highly complex strategies that women who gamble employ. Importantly, it adds to contemporary feminist debates about women's leisure by showing how women seize control of their lives in order to carve out a time and space for the pursuit of pleasure.

With the creation of the modern nation-state in the Middle East and North Africa, women have been and continue to be manipulated to represent a cultural ideal of perfect womanhood. This is often greatly at odds with the realities of women's lives and aspirations. However, individual women, through careful manipulation of gender relations, often succeed in casting aside the culturally accepted bonds which diminish their lives.Even so, women in groups are deemed unacceptable unless they conform to state mandates. In many countries in the Middle East, women are only legally permitted to form groups which are charitable organizations concerned with the welfare of the disabled or the handicapped. Clearly women in groups are perceived as a threat by the state.This challenging book examines the nature of the relationship between both women and the state and men and the state. It presents a balanced mix of theoretical and empirical research which analyzes both the formal and informal ways in which women have organized themselves, and been organized, in Arab society.