This book examines the debate about the effects of industrialization and paid employment on gender inequality, based on the author's studies of women industrial workers in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Safa focuses on three areas of these women's lives: wages and working conditions; the family, life cycle, and household composition; and political consciousness and participation in unions, political parties, and other mass organizations. She finds that women workers have been more effective in challenging their subordination in the home than they have been in the workplace and in relationship to political parties or the state. This finding challenges feminist theories that locate the sources of women's inequality solely in the family, suggesting that the myth of the male breadwinner still prevails in the workplace and in state policy.