"In her book, Silent Looms: Women and Production in a Guatemalan Town, Tracy Bachrach Ehlers captures the paradox of gender relations in a society that accords power and authority to men yet leaves the major burden of child care and economic maintenance of the family to women. Most monographs on Maya populations have either ignored women's contributions to the indigenous economy or, when they have included women's work, have ignored the contradiction between patriarchal ideology and observed behavior that is increasingly sharpened by the political and economic transformations taking place. "

All her life, Sugar Turner has had to hustle to survive. An African American woman living in the inner city, she has been a single mother juggling welfare checks, food stamps, boyfriends and husbands, illegal jobs, and home businesses to make ends meet for herself and her five children. Her life's path has also wandered through the wilderness of crack addiction and prostitution, but her strong faith in God and her willingness to work hard for a better life pulled her through. Today, Turner is off welfare and is completing her education. She is computer literate, holds a job in the local school system, has sent three of her children to college, and is happily married.

In this engrossing book, Sugar Turner collaborates with anthropologist Tracy Bachrach Ehlers in telling her story. Through conversations with Ehlers, diary entries, and letters, Turner vividly and openly describes all aspects of her life, including motherhood, relationships with men, welfare and work, and her attachment to her friends, family, and life in the "hood." Ehlers also gives her reactions to Turner's story, discussing not only how it belies the "welfare queen" stereotype, but also how it forced her to confront her own lingering confusions about race, her own bigotry.

What emerges from this book is a fascinating story of two women from radically different backgrounds becoming equal witnesses to each other's lives. By allowing us into the real world of an inner-city African American mother, they replace with compassion and insight the stereotypes, half-truths, and scorn that too often dominate public discourse.

From reviews of the first edition: "This intriguing study of women's role in household, town, and regional economic activity is a very revealing and important contribution to the growing literature on women and social change in Latin America.... Scholars and undergraduates interested in the Indians of Mesoamerica, and, more generally, in the changing relations of men and women everywhere, will welcome this book." -- Choice "Ehlers clearly shows the differential impact of capital penetration on women's survival strategies by social class, showing how options for some are limited, for others expanded, but changed for all. Silent Looms would be...an important book to include in courses on women in Latin America, women in development, and feminist methodologies." -- Association for Women in Development Newsletter "Ehlers weaves a lively tale as colorful as the huipiles worn by the women she studies. She embroiders the small details that bring to life a whole town of women and children." -- Latin American Research Review

Based on new fieldwork in 1997, Tracy Bachrach Ehlers has updated her classic study of the effects of economic development on the women weavers of San Pedro Sacatepe quez. Revisiting many of the women she interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s and revising her earlier hopeful assessment of women's entrepreneurial opportunities, Ehlers convincingly demonstrates that development and commercial growth in the region have benefited men at the expense of women.