ABSTRACT
After the 1975 defeat of the United States-backed Cambodian government of Lon No1, following a five-year civil war, the victorious Khmer Rouge or "red Khmers" renamed Cambodia, Democratic Kampuchea (DK). The specific plight of women in the period has not been the focus of research, though there are data available on aspects of social change, women's physical and mental health, sexual violence, and women's roles in the revolution. Cambodians have benefited from the years of peace; women are again central to kinship networks, though these are fragmented from the loss of life in the DK years. In the village where Ebihara had conducted ethnographic research in 1959–1960 only half of the people she had known survived the regime, and some 40 percent of adult women were widows. Women in post-revolutionary Cambodia also went to work in factories. According to Ministry of Industry statistics, there were 7,137 women among the 10,693 employees in factories in 1992.
