Stacy D. Fahrenthold

University of California, Davis

2025 Nikki Keddie Book Award Winner

Unmentionables: Textiles, Garment Work, and the Syrian American Working Class

Stanford University Press

“Unmentionable” in polite conversation were the undergarments produced in Syrian-American factories in the early twentieth century, but also the women and children who worked the sewing machines. Beautifully written, Stacy Fahrentold’s book presents how they fought for their precarious labor rights and negotiated the relationship with their equally Syrian-American bosses who ran businesses on a trans-Atlantic scale. She weaves together economic, social, cultural, and gender history on a single thread, assigning a great deal of agency to Syrian immigrants, laying out their material culture and entrepreneurial acumen, and how they moved in deeply interconnected worlds of labor activism and global trade.

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