A closer look at changes in women’s education, age of marriage, employment, and the reasons for the enduring value of women’s skilled domestic work. Women’s postrevolutionary legal position as second-class citizens exists in tandem with gains in women’s social status indicators: improvements in women’s literacy, later and more egalitarian age of marriage, lower fertility rates, and improved indicators of basic household consumption. Women’s stubbornly low contemporary participation rate in formal employment is complicated by the prerevolutionary prevalence of child labor, and postrevolutionary improvements in girls’ school attendance. Low rates of formal employment also mask women’s crucial contributions to household economies through social labor. Local food culture and the premium attached to women’s skilled home cooking provide the basis for social and economic networks that bypass state control. The common value of local food culture provides a foundation for social identity and a recognizable form of capital that offsets the frustrations associated with limited the opportunities of the formal market.