| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Silicon Valley, Women, and the California Dream: Gender, Class, and Opportunity in the Twentieth Century. By Glenna Matthews. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xviii, 313 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8047-4154-9. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-8047-4796-2.)

This penetrating book analyzes a region of considerable importance that has been all but ignored by U.S. historians. Glenna Matthews focuses special attention on immigrant women in fruit processing and high-tech industries, a group whose fate "offers the best test of the reality behind the [area's] glitzy image" (p. 2). Gripping chapters trace the changing nature of multiethnic California, the importance of immigrant entrepreneurs, and the dominance of local canneries and high-tech industries, but closest to the author's heart are the persistent struggles of valley labor unions to bring justice to the area's boom-and-bust economy. Better than any previous author, Matthews documents the regional struggles of the Toilers of the World during the 1910s, Communist party organizers in the 1930s, and activists of the United Electrical Workers during the post—World War II period. Those organizations receive quite sympathetic treatment, and even an American Federation of Labor cannery local that opposed "radicals" and equal pay for women is said to have provided "families a chance to get a foothold on the ladder of ascent to building decent lives over the course of the twentieth century" (p. 80).

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