The simultaneous processes of secular state-building and state-led industrialisation resulted in a new ideology of women's labor in Turkey in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. As the country moved away from protectionist, state-led industrialisation in the post-war period, female industrial labor received increasing and contradictory attention from policy makers, employers, the new trade union movement, and middle-class feminists. On the one hand, there emerged an idealized image of factory women that emphasized their productive potential by metaphorically linking them with technology and mass production. However, this proud, progressive message was counterbalanced by an anxious, conservative view of young women's work—one that criticized factory girls’ consumption choices as posing a threat to respectable femininity. Weaving together lines of inquiry such as the change in industrialisation policy, women's access to technology, the sexual division of labor, and the emergent consumption patterns, I unpack the tropes of working-class productivity and femininity against the backdrop of the post-war expansion of capitalism in Turkey.

From the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–1960 onwards, China's urban neighbourhood workshops and services mostly hired women. The GLF marked the beginning of a large-scale and irreversible trend towards near universal employment of women in China's cities. By the end of the Mao era, about 42 per cent of women working in industry were employed in “collectives” that were largely developed from urban neighbourhood industry. This article takes Shanghai as a case study to examine this type of employment for women in China. It documents the origin and development of the institution, explores the nuances of state–labour interactions at its site, and argues that as far as the enduring effects of women's participation in the workforce are concerned, the disastrous GLF was indeed the initiator and in this respect may well be seen as a blessing in disguise.