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I read Egyptian Made like a novel, finishing in the early hours one morning. But the women Leslie Chang describes, and the villages and factories to which she’s devoted years of attention, are unlikely to appear in any novel. Chang takes us into an Egypt outsiders have never seen, introducing workplaces that run like dysfunctional families, where cherished colleagues can betray one another and a woman’s dream of independence can collapse overnight. Chang’s lucid prose, her exacting journalistic standards, and her preference for truth over narrative conventions make Egyptian Made essential reading for anyone who cares about women in the Arab world.
— Nell Freudenberger, New York Times bestselling author of Lost and Wanted
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What do women want? What does freedom mean? How does capitalism translate through the prism of cultural expectations and pressures? Leslie T. Chang’s meticulous reportage offers Anglophone readers an intimate window into the varied lives, triumphs, sorrows, and dreams of women in contemporary Egypt—and invites us to examine both the global reach of patriarchy, and the universal nature of human ambitions and dreams.
— Anna Badkhen, author of Bright Unbearable Reality
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Exhaustively reported and researched, Egyptian Made takes us halfway across the world and inside the intimate lives of women caught between tradition and independence. Leslie T. Chang shows us how cultural, economic, and political forces impact the women she writes about in both big and small ways, and serves as an incredibly important window into their daily lives.
— Monica Potts, New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Girls
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The most insightful book I’ve read about Egyptian society. Leslie Chang has embedded herself into the lives of working-class Egyptian women through the garment factories that employ them, a technique she mastered in her earlier Factory Girls, about China. Through this peephole, she can see it all—the resentments and squabbles of the factory floor, the intimate betrayals inside homes that are essentially gilded prisons, where women can’t protest second wives without losing their children. It all reveals how Egypt works—or doesn't. Egyptian Made is a portrait of a country where tradition stagnates the economy and wastes the potential of half the population.
— Barbara Demick, bestselling author of Eat the Buddha
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The most insightful book I’ve read about Egyptian society. Leslie Chang has embedded herself into the lives of working-class Egyptian women through the garment factories that employ them, a technique she mastered in her earlier Factory Girls, about China. Through this peephole, she can see it all—the resentments and squabbles of the factory floor, the intimate betrayals inside homes that are essentially gilded prisons, where women can’t protest second wives without losing their children. It all reveals how Egypt works—or doesn’t. Egyptian Made is a portrait of a country where tradition stagnates the economy and wastes the potential of half the population.
— Barbara Demick, bestselling author of Eat the Buddha
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The most insightful book I’ve read about Egyptian society. Leslie Chang has embedded herself into the lives of working-class Egyptian women through the garment factories that employ them, a technique she mastered in her earlier Factory Girls, about China. Through this peephole, she can see it all—the resentments and squabbles of the factory floor, the intimate betrayals inside homes that are essentially gilded prisons, where women can’t protest second wives without losing their children. It all reveals how Egypt works—or doesn’t. Egyptian Made is a portrait of a country where tradition stagnates the economy and wastes the potential of half the population.
— Barbara Demick, bestselling author of Eat the Buddha
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Leslie T. Chang shows us how cultural, economic, and political forces impact the women she writes about in both big and small ways, and serves as an incredibly important window into their daily lives.
— Monica Potts, New York Times bestselling author of The Forgotten Girls