Fields, Forest, and Family: Women's Work and Power in Rural Laos Book

After the Vietnam War, Laos experienced more than a decade of socialist reorganization, follow by economic liberalization in the late 1980s. Laotian women had traditionally sustained the household and local economy with their work in field, forest, and family, but these political and economic changes markedly affected the context of rural women’s prevailing sources of power and subordination. In this richly detailed volume, Carol Ireson draws on ten years of fieldwork and research to explore this metamorphosis, focusing on the ways women from three major ethnic groups—the lowland Lao, the Khmu, and the Hmong—have responded differently to these changes.