16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: PIMS - Polity Immigration and Society series
- Sprache: Englisch
Gender roles, relations, and ideologies are major aspects of migration. This timely book argues that understanding gender relations is vital to a full and more nuanced explanation of both the causes and the consequences of migration, in the past and at present. Through an exploration of gendered labor markets, laws and policies, and the transnational model of migration, Caroline Brettell tackles a variety of issues such as how gender shapes the roles that men and women play in the construction of immigrant family and community life, debates concerning transnational motherhood, and how gender structures the immigrant experience for men and women more broadly.
This book will appeal to students and scholars of immigration, race and ethnicity, and gender studies and offers a definitive guide to the key conceptual issues surrounding gender and migration.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 382
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Ähnliche
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Introduction: Engendering the Study of Immigration
1 The Gendered Demography of US Immigration History
Migration, Gender Ratios, and National Origins: Then and Now
Conclusion
Notes
2 The Gendering of Law, Policy, Citizenship, and Political Practice
Law, Policy, and Gender in Late Twentieth-Century Immigration
Gendered Political Practice and Political Socialization
Conclusion
Notes
3 Gendered Labor Markets
Labor Force Participation: The Native-Born and the Foreign-Born, 1900 to the Present
The Gendered Immigrant Labor Market During the Third Wave of US Immigration
The Bracero Program: Gendered Labor Recruitment in the United States during the Middle Years of the Twentieth Century
The Gendered Labor Market of Male Immigrants
Family Businesses: The Immigrant Entrepreneur
Migrant Sex Workers and Sex Trafficking
Conclusion
Notes
4 Gender and the Immigrant Family
Immigrant Families Then: The Third Wave of Immigration
Immigrant Families Now: The Fourth Wave of Immigration
Masculinity, Intimacy, and Domestic Violence in Immigrant Families
Transnational Parenthood
The Gendered Dimension of Remittances
Conclusion
Notes
Concluding Thoughts: A Gendered Theory of Migration
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
Immigration & Society series
Carl L. Bankston III, Immigrant Networks and Social Capital
Stephanie A. Bohon & Meghan Conley, Immigration and Population
Caroline B. Brettell, Gender and Migration
Thomas Faist, Margit Fauser, & Eveline Reisenauer, Transnational Migration
Christian Joppke, Citizenship and Immigration
Grace Kao, Elizabeth Vaquera, & Kimberly Goyette, Education and Immigration
Nazli Kibria, Cara Bowman, & Megan O’Leary, Race and Immigration
Peter Kivisto, Religion and Immigration
Cecilia Menjívar, Leisy J. Abrego, & Leah C. Schmalzbauer, Immigrant Families
Ronald L. Mize & Grace Peña Delgado, Latino Immigrants in the United States
Philip Q. Yang, Asian Immigration to the United States
Min Zhou & Carl L. Bankston III, The Rise of the New Second Generation
Gender and Migration
Caroline B. Brettell
polity
Copyright © Caroline B. Brettell 2016
The right of Caroline B. Brettell to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8792-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Brettell, Caroline, author.
Title: Gender and migration / Caroline B. Brettell.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, USA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003546 (print) | LCCN 2016005764 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745687889 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 0745687881 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745687896 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 074568789X (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745687919 (mobi) | ISBN 9780745687926 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women immigrants--United States. | United States--Emigration and immigration--Social aspects. | United States--Emigration and immigration--Government policy. | United States--Emigration and immigration--Economic aspects. | Immigrants--United States--Economic conditions. | Women immigrants--United States--Economic conditions. | Immigrant families--United States.
Classification: LCC JV6602 .B74 2016 (print) | LCC JV6602 (ebook) | DDC 304.8/730082–-dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003546
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
In 1972, between my first and second years of graduate school, I spent the summer in the field with Portuguese immigrants in Toronto, Canada. I found an apartment in the attic of a threestory house in the heart of Kensington Market, a neighborhood that had always been an immigrant receiving area. At the time, the Portuguese were the most recent residents. Two Portuguese families, one from the Azores and one from mainland Portugal, lived in the building. The man from the mainland told me his story of having worked in France for a while and then, hearing that life was better in Canada, he returned to Portugal and with his wife and child moved to Canada. Both he and his wife were working in Canada, although his wife had never migrated with him to France. And yet they talked about other Portuguese women who were migrating to France as they were to Canada. This is how I first became interested in Portuguese migration to France, a migration that I thought might permit more back and forth movement between the country of emigration and the country of immigration than for those in Canada. But as I talked to the two Portuguese women in the household I also realized that to date little was known about female migrants and an idea for a dissertation topic – on Portuguese migrant women in France – began to brew in my mind.
Louise Lamphere, one of my professors, had already sparked my interest in feminist anthropology, and in gender as a critical but under-examined category within anthropology more generally. At the time, she and her close colleague Michelle Rosaldo were beginning to formulate a framework for studying the lives of women in different cultural contexts, and two years later they published their path-breaking edited volume Woman, Culture and Society (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974). It made sense to me to put the broader questions of feminist anthropology together with my interests in migrant populations. With funding from the Social Science Research Council and the Social and Humanities Research Council of Canada I went to Paris for a year (1974–1975), followed by six months of research in northern Portugal to launch a study of Portuguese migrant women and of the impact of male migration on women who remained behind. After completing my dissertation, I published two monographs, We Have Already Cried Many Tears: The Stories of Three Portuguese Migrant Women (1982; 1995), and Men Who Migrate, Women Who Wait: Population and History in a Portuguese Parish (1986). With a sociological colleague, Rita James Simon, I also coedited a book titled International Migration: The Female Experience (1986), which at the time was pioneering in drawing attention to women who were movers rather than stayers.
These were early works problematizing and theorizing the role of women in the migration process and the relationship between gender and migration. By the 1990s research in this area began to proliferate as migration itself became increasingly “feminized” and globalized. Growing numbers of women, single and married, were mobile for both shorter and longer distances. South–south migrations began to coexist with south–north migrations. From the perspective of the second half of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a question that had not even been posed in 1972 is now well addressed and we know a good deal about migration as a gendered process that impacts both women and men in meaningful ways. Personally, I moved on to other questions about the migration process, but I have always kept my eyes on the anthropology of gender broadly speaking and on the research that has illuminated gender and migration. This book is a product of these sustained and continuing interests.
I dedicate this book to all the scholars, many of them women, who have brought the gendered dimensions of migration to the forefront in the period since I first explored the issue. The research of many of them is discussed and cited in what follows. But above all, I dedicate this book, with gratitude, to Louise Lamphere. Not only has she been an inspiring mentor and leader, but also a very good and lifelong friend.
Caroline B. BrettellDallas, Texas
Introduction: Engendering the Study of Immigration
Beginning in the 1970s, and emerging from the broader development of feminist analysis, scholars in several disciplines began to formulate a gendered approach to the study of population mobility, both internally and internationally. Although the geographer and statistician E. G. Ravenstein (1885) had observed gendered differences in migration patterns (women participate more heavily in short distance moves while men appear in greater numbers in longer distance mobility) toward the end of the nineteenth century, these differences were not rigorously documented or considered and women in particular remained largely invisible in studies of migration. And even as a new generation of scholars, many of them women, began to highlight the significance of gender and the role of women in migration, they were, as Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Cynthia Cranford (1999: 105) point out, met with hostility. As late as 2003, anthropologist Patricia Pessar (2003), a well-known scholar of gender and migration, was writing about the marginalization of panels on gendered and family issues at major conferences on migration and immigration. Yet, despite the resistance along the way to gender as a significant analytical category, by the second decade of the twenty-first century it is well established as vital to a full understanding of the migration process.
Some of the earliest research was focused on correcting the omission of women as subjects and hence documenting their participation as social actors in the migration process. In the European context, one can point to a pioneering volume edited by Annie Phizacklea (1983) that emphasized migration and female labor. In the United States, one might note the volume that sociologist Rita James Simon and I edited titled International Migration: The Female Experience (1986), as well as the book edited by historian Donna Gabaccia titled Seeking Common Ground (1992) in which essays addressed how different disciplines were approaching the topic of migrant women. Like much feminist scholarship of this period, this first phase of gendered migration research was characterized by a “women only” or “just add women” approach. It offered any number of descriptive analyses of women who were mobile, some of them in their own right, in pursuit of employment. Even if women were moving largely as dependants, the interest was to hear their voices about the decisions they made and how it impacted their lives. An effort was made to move away from the assumption that whatever migrant men experience is equally characteristic of migrant women.
This “women only” emphasis is perhaps best represented by an important 1984 special issue of the International Migration Review edited by Mirjana Morokvasic (1984) that was titled “Women in Migration”. One article in this issue included a statistical “first look” at female predominance among immigrants who had entered the US since 1930 (Houston et al. 1984); another, from a more historical perspective, explored the emigration of Irish women to the US before and after the famine of 1845 to 1849 (Jackson 1984); another addressed women, migration and development in the South Pacific, examining not only women as migrants but also the impact of migration on non-migratory women (Connell 1984); while another focused on stress and distress among Turkish immigrant women in Denmark (Mirdal 1984). The volume, which was divided into five sections, included several census-based quantitative analyses of female immigrants and labor market characteristics in a range of host societies including the United States, Australia, and Canada. Another section contained articles based on theories and survey research of migrant women in the labor market and included case studies of Dominican women in New York, undocumented Mexican women in Los Angeles, and Turkish women in Germany. The final section included studies of female rural to urban migration in Asia and Africa.
From these impressive and empirically substantive early beginnings, scholarship moved rapidly to a more theoretical approach that considers how gender fundamentally structures the migration process and the immigrant experience for both men and women. Gender refers to the social construction of differences between men and women and how such constructs of difference are played out in daily practices. It encompasses ideals and expectations within particular social and/or cultural contexts regarding men and women and hence ideas about masculinity and femininity – something often referred to as gender ideology. It addresses not only how gender ideologies vary from one cultural context to another, but also through time and in relation to differential processes of change that may occur over time and across space. Thus, to view migration through a gendered lens means to focus on how men and women relate to one another in theory and in practice, how their experiences might differ, and how gender roles (i.e. the particular activities and tasks that are assigned to men and women), which vary from one culture to another, might both affect and be affected by geographic mobility. It also means that we can highlight how gender is constructed by the state in relation to the laws and policies that regulate and control migration as well as processes of exclusion and inclusion that are often associated with the extension or withholding of the rights of citizenship. Thus, understanding gender relations is vital to a full explanation of both the causes and the consequences of migration. Gender must be considered in both sending and receiving contexts, not only in relation to families but also in relation to global labor markets and the wide range of institutions with which migrants interact in places of origin and places of destination.
Ironically, bringing gender fully into the study of migration, as anthropologist Jason Pribilsky (2012: 325) has emphasized, has enhanced our understanding of male migrants. Men have overwhelmingly been the focus of research on migration, but their gendered lives were rarely considered. Sociologist Chad Broughton (2008: 569) argues that what is often omitted from economic and social demographic studies of migration is how individuals make sense of the migrant experience and “how their strategic responses to economic dislocation are shaped not just by instrumental calculation but also by a knotty set of gendered cultural considerations: prevailing normative expectations and standards, social roles and obligations, and shared understandings relating to family, work, and place.” Based on his research with Mexican male migrants, Broughton reveals three masculine stances by which they can be characterized: the traditionalist, the adventurer, and the breadwinner. Broughton suggests that these men “orient gendered understandings and adopt gendered practices increasingly in relation to the specific material forces accelerated by Mexico’s neoliberal turn.” They are, like women, gendered actors in the migration process.
Gender is about inequality, specifically the inequality between men and women and hence about power and prestige differences that are gendered. Sometimes for example, women face double discrimination not only as a migrant but also as a female because gender ideologies that are rooted in patriarchy may be transported if not sometimes even enhanced in the immigrant context. Further, immigrant men, who may feel more disempowered in the public sphere or in jobs in which they have clearly experienced downward mobility, may try to exercise more control over their wives and children in the private sphere. These are just two possible outcomes in relation to issues of gender and power that can characterize the migration process and the immigrant experience. As the research on the gendered dimensions of immigration has accumulated it has become increasingly apparent that gender ideologies and the unequal distribution of power associated with them serve the interests of capitalist enterprises as well as private employers looking for domestic helpers. Both seek a docile labor force willing to work for low wages. Women immigrants often fit this bill and hence the theoretical question of whether geographical mobility is empowering, must in fact be determined empirically and is subject to variation in relation to a host of different variables and contexts.
Thus, as thinking about gender as an analytical concept has developed, attention has increasingly been paid, theoretically, to the intersections among gender, race, class, and religion (often referred to as intersectionality) as these define and influence the unequal distribution of power and the construction of difference (Brah and Phoenix 2004; McCall 2005). Researchers may choose to explore how the unequal distribution of power impacts processes of oppression or discrimination as these are experienced by men and women of various social, economic, religious, and ethnic or racial backgrounds. They might explore how class distinctions mediate the relationship between professional women of the middle and upper classes and their domestic servants. Also of significance is the question of how immigrant men are constructed as sexualized, threatening, and other in relation to their religion or ethnic background. In other words, the overarching theoretical concern, one that is taken up in this book, is how gender identities interact with other social identities in shaping the experience of immigration.
Another important theoretical consideration is the relationship among structure, agency, and gendered migration. Writing about John Higham’s early book on US immigration history, Strangers in the Land (1955), Deirdre Moloney (2012: 271) remarks on how women in particular were portrayed:
As was common in pre-1970s historiography, women lacked the agency to decide to immigrate, to participate in the work force, to mobilize politically, or even to shape their communities. In contrast, men are active: they appear as legislators and government officials, immigrant laborers, labor leaders, elites, eugenicists, writers, and nativists.
A generation of feminist history has corrected this omission. Today, for immigrants of the past and the present, we ask questions such as: To what extent can men and women who migrate be viewed as independent social actors pursuing their own goals and strategies? Do men and women make different decisions about migration (do they have different reasons for moving, for example)? How are these decisions shaped respectively for men and women by economic and political structures that are local, national, and/or global? What autonomy do women in particular have in relation to geographical mobility? Are their remittance behaviors the same? As sociologist Chad Broughton (2008: 569) has phrased it, are the strategic responses of migrants “to economic dislocation . . . shaped not just by instrumental calculation but also by a knotty set of gendered considerations: prevailing normative expectations and standards, social roles and obligations, and shared understandings related to family, work and place?”
Embedded in Broughton’s question is the assumption that the entire migration process is gendered in both its causes and its consequences. If we accept this assumption, we may find that what are identified as economic motives for migration may not be strictly economic or may be something else entirely. Thus, Dianne Walta Hart (1997) quotes the Nicaraguan woman who is at the center of her book Undocumented in LA stating that what really drove her to leave her country was “lo que dirán” (gossip), something that also drove one of the Portuguese women discussed in my book We Have Already Cried Many Tears (Brettell 1995) to leave her village in Portugal for France in the 1970s. This point about the complexity of motives for geographic mobility is further reinforced by sociologist Helma Lutz (2010: 1659) who has recently argued that “any effort to exceed economic reductionism in theories of migration needs to make perceptible migrants’ gender, their gendered obligations, care responsibilities, loyalties, family ties and the like. This may include submission to dominant gender orders as well as their modification and transformation.”
The shift from women to gender in all its theoretical complexity is captured in another special issue of the International Migration Review, published twenty-two years after the first and titled “Gender and Migration Revisited.” As the co-editors observe, the contributors to this issue demonstrate that “gender analysis is no longer exclusively limited to the analysis of families, households or women’s lives . . . Scholars now analyze gender in the lives of both female and male migrants, in the politics and governance of migration, in the workplaces of immigrants, in neoliberal or welfare state policies toward migration or foreign-born populations, in diasporas, and even in the capitalist world system” (Donato et al. 2006: 6). The essays in this special issue are written by scholars from a number of disciplinary perspectives: anthropology, geography, history, law, political science, psychology, sociology, and queer studies. These essays not only explore the bridging from one disciplinary perspective to another that occurs but also the mixed methodologies that permit aligning quantitative data (statistics) with more qualitative data (from interviews and surveys) that accesses the subjective experience and agency of migrant actors. Further, they outline how formulations of space, place, and scale on the one hand, and time and periodization on the other (the business of geographers and historians respectively) enhance understandings of “the fluidity of gender as migrants move through time as well as across space” (Donato et al. 2006: 15). Collectively, the essays indicate that in some disciplines (anthropology, history, sociology) gendered analysis of migration is well developed, while in others (law, political science, psychology) it is less extensive. The limitations to research in some fields have to do with the nature of the questions asked (what is considered important), as well as with methodologies that emphasize quantitative methods exclusively and hence sex (not gender) as a dichotomous variable. Collectively, the editors of this special issue and their contributors are calling for a more interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to migration studies broadly speaking and to the gendered dimensions of migration more specifically.
Gender and migration has become a subject in its own right and hence this book.1 While the research on gender and migration is global, encompassing a range of both sending and receiving societies, the empirical emphasis here is on the gendered dimensions of migration to the United States from any number of sending societies. However, occasional references are made to research on other global flows where I have determined that a few crosscultural comparisons help to illustrate the broader theoretical issues being discussed. While the focus of this book is on post-1965 migrations to the US, I do include an historical perspective in most chapters; specifically, to compare the gendered dimensions of migration from the mid nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with more recent flows. Finally, the focus in this book is on international not internal migration. While some scholars have recently challenged the intellectual and theoretical divides between these two forms of geographical mobility, I find it useful to keep them distinct, particularly in relation to discussions of the laws and policies that impact movement across international borders and that explicitly construct who is an insider and who is an outsider. I leave it to the reader to think about how some of the issues addressed, such as feminized and masculinized labor markets or changing gender ideologies, might equally impact intra-national (internal) movement.
This book is divided into four chapters. The first chapter deals with the gendered demography of migration. It explores similarities and differences in the male and female composition of migration flows over time. It addresses, for example, the contrast between family migrations (the Jews who came to the US in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example) and gender-biased migration streams (Mexican braceros or single Irish women, for example). Where appropriate, the narrative of the US experience is set into a global context – that is, brief comparisons are drawn between migrants who came to the US at a particular period and those who may have moved elsewhere. This demographically informed historical overview not only interrogates the theoretical debate about the so-called “feminization of migration”, but also helps to lay out a range of issues that then become the focus of subsequent chapters – immigration and citizenship laws and policies, labor markets, exclusion and inclusion – as well as myriad factors that may either constrain or encourage the migration of men and women (individual characteristics such as age, marital status, reproductive status, education; and sociocultural factors such as gender norms and ideology).
The gendered dimensions of migration are heavily influenced by immigration laws and policies of both sending and receiving societies as well as by the labor markets and opportunities of societies of immigration. Chapter 2 deals with the first issue and Chapter 3 with the second. Recently, any number of scholars (for example, Salcido and Menjívar 2012) have observed that immigration laws, and by extension citizenship laws, are hardly gender neutral although they often claim to be. Rather, they reflect the social, political, and cultural context, including the hierarchies of power and inequality, within which they are formulated. Chapter 2 discusses the legal framework of gendered immigration into the United States from the mid to late nineteenth century to the present. It also addresses issues of gendered citizenship and, by extension, the exercise of political rights once citizenship is accorded. The significance of the intersectional theoretical approach is well-illuminated in this discussion, as are the legal structural constraints that differentially impact male and female immigrants. Chapter 3 takes up the question of gendered labor markets and labor force participation among immigrant men and women. It explores the sectors of the economy and the occupational niches that have been differentially filled by foreign-born men and women in the US, both in the past and at present. Are there gendered labor recruitment strategies that influence the formation of these gendered sectors of employment? Among the topics addressed in this chapter are global care work, sex trafficking, and immigrant entrepreneurship. National contexts other than the US are occasionally introduced largely to illustrate that segmented labor markets and their impacts on migrants are a global phenomenon. Other theoretical frameworks brought to bear on this discussion are the international division of labor and agency and resistance.
Chapter 4 turns a gendered analytical lens on the immigrant family. Among the critical theoretical questions explored are: is migration disempowering or empowering to men and/or women within their families; how are gender roles and gender ideologies (ideas about masculinity and femininity) changed in the immigrant context; and what impact does migration have on social and intimate relationships in the domestic sphere? The chapter also focuses on the gendered dimensions of transnationalism. How are the gender relations and gender ideologies of transnational migrant families impacted and altered? And how does transnational migration itself impact the social and cultural constructions of gender in sending communities? The chapter demonstrates that studying migration from a gendered perspective necessitates bringing the home society and the host society into a single field of analysis. In the conclusion I summarize some of the theoretical and empirical arguments as well as point to some areas for future research.
Notes
1.
By now this topic is by no means understudied. The literature is vast, as are the number of review or overview articles and edited volumes on the subject. See, for example, Buijs 1993; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1999; Kelson and DeLaet 1999; Knorr and Meier 2000; Boyd and Grieco 2003; Pessar 2003; Sinke 2006a; Piper 2008; Lutz 2010; Pearce, Clifford and Tandon 2011; Brettell 2012.
1The Gendered Demography of US Immigration History
Beginning in the mid nineteenth century, when whale oil was a valuable commodity and a source of fuel for light, whaling ships used to depart from Massachusetts ports. They would make their way to the Cape Verdean and Azorean Islands, Portuguese overseas territories situated in the Atlantic Ocean. There they would pick up all-male sailing crews. After a few months of whaling, the ships would return to New England, including ports like New Bedford, Massachusetts. There the male crews would spend the winter. Some returned to the ships in the spring while others found alternative occupations. It was through whaling that a Portuguese immigrant presence was established in New England and that New Bedford gained its name as the Portuguese capital of the United States.1 Eventually women and children joined the settler population and by the dawn of the twentieth century the Portuguese represented 16 percent of New Bedford’s inhabitants. But by this time the whaling industry was no more and the Portuguese, men and women, had found work in factories, fisheries, and the cranberry bogs of southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod.2 In Providence, Rhode Island, Portuguese men, including Cape Verdeans, could be found working in coal and brick yards, as longshoremen and dockhands, pork packers in slaughter houses, and as operators in oyster and screw companies. Portuguese daughters found employment in lace factories, cotton mills, and laundries.3
More than a century later, with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the re-opening of the United States to immigrants, a new generation of Portuguese arrived in New England. This migration brought families, largely from the Azores, who found work in the still-operating textile mills. These immigrants made the transition from being rural agriculturalists to industrial wage workers. Wives took work outside the home to supplement the low wages earned by their husbands. In comparing this more recent migration experience with that of the beginning of the twentieth century, anthropologist Louise Lamphere (1987) describes a shift from working daughters to working mothers. This shift had a direct impact on the division of labor within the family, with men contributing more to childcare and other domestic chores.
The history of US immigration is often told through the lens of particular immigrant groups – the Portuguese, the Irish, the Jews, the Italians, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Mexicans. But how do we tell this story through a gendered demographic lens? In one sense the tale has already been told, largely based on the uninvestigated assumption that in the past the majority of immigrants were men and that if women moved it was as the dependants of men. However, once the question of how precisely women might be involved in migratory movements was directly posed, and data more closely examined, it quickly became apparent that women and girls accounted for close to half (47 percent) of all international migrants as early as 1960 and that by 2000 the proportion was 49 percent (for a total of 85 million female migrants and 90 million male migrants). By 2005, the proportion had risen to very close to 50 percent and in 2006 the United Nations reported 94.5 million international female migrants (United Nations 2006). In developed countries female migrants made up a larger portion of migrant stock (51 percent) in 2000 than in the developing world where they comprised 46 percent (Zlotnik 2003; see also Sharma 2011). These data, demonstrating that women as well as men are on the move globally, have generated debates about the “feminization of migration” (Castles and Miller 2009; Morrison et al. 2008; Zlotnik 2003) in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries.
Characteristic of this process of “feminization” is an increasing number of women, both married and unmarried, who migrate by themselves or with other unrelated migrants. This is distinctly different from historical migrations where women primarily moved for marriage or as part of a family reunification process (United Nations 2006: 22). The so-called feminization of migration has been explained by a range of factors including the absence of opportunities for paid work in sending countries; the awareness of, if not recruitment for paid work in receiving societies; the desires of women for more independence and autonomy; marital instability, including political violence, divorce and separation, that often leave women as sole breadwinners for their families; and a relaxation in the restrictions that are placed on the geographical mobility of women, whether within families and communities (in accordance with changing gender ideologies) or by sending states.
Despite a label that suggests dramatic change, some scholars have argued that an increase from 47 percent to 50 percent in the proportion of female migrants among all migrants seems minimal (Donato 2012a; Moya 2012), leading them not only to propose the phrase “shift toward gender balance” as an alternative to “feminization” (Donato et al. 2011), but also to delve more deeply into the historical record to render a more accurate assessment of the gendered demographics of population mobility (Donato and Gabaccia 2015). The result is not only a reconsideration of statistician Ernest George Ravenstein’s (1885) original and famous formulation of the gendered nature of short (more female-dominated) versus long (more male-dominated) distance moves (Alexander and Steidl 2012), but also new evidence of wide variations in the proportions of men and women who have participated in migration across time and space.
Historians Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni (2012) offer a useful and more nuanced typology by which to categorize gendered migration flows in demographic terms (Table 1.1). They argue that the shift to more gender-balanced flows for some migration streams most likely occurred before and not after 1960. They also point us to the right kinds of questions to ask of any migration flow in relation to gender: “how international migrations have been gendered, when transitions in the gendering of migration have occurred, why they have occurred, and what their consequences may have been” (p. 199).
Table 1.1Typology of Gendered Migrations
Source: Adapted from Gabaccia and Zanoni (2012)
Types of Gendered Migrations
Proportion of Females in the Migration Flow %
Heavily Male Dominant
25
Male Pre-dominant
25–47
Gender Balanced
47–52
Female Pre-dominant
53–75
Heavily Female Dominant
75
What then is the story of the respective participation of men and women (the gendered demographics) of international migration flows to the US over time? In the middle of the nineteenth century, just over 40 percent of immigrants to the United States were female, while for the rest of the nineteenth century the proportion dropped to approximately 38 percent and to 30 percent in the first decade of the twentieth century – thus verging on being heavily male dominant.4Table 1.2 presents the gender ratio of immigrants to the US between 1870 and 2012.5 After 1930, a period when immigration was restricted as a result of the National Origins Quota Act of 1924, the proportion of female immigrants began to rise. In the 1940s in particular, the proportion of women among US immigrants rose to over 60 percent, impacted no doubt by the 1945 War Brides Act which made it possible for non-Asian spouses and children of American military personnel to enter the country. Historian Suzanne Sinke (2006b: 300) points to this period as the greatest female majority immigration in US history, but also emphasizes that the War Brides Act actually reinforced the gendered intentions of immigration policy which have always tended to classify women as dependants. I return to the issue of policy in the next chapter. However, it is worth noting here that the 1940s was also a time when overall immigration waslow, something that would statistically impact the proportion of women in the immigrant population.
Table 1.2 Males/100 Females Ratio among Immigrants to the US, 1870–2012
Source: Adapted from http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/males-100–females-ratio-among-immigrants-1870–present
By 1960 and through until 2000 women comprised more than half of the foreign-born population in the US – 53 percent in 1980 and 51 percent in 1990. While in 2000 there were an equal number of immigrant women and immigrant men, thereafter the figures have hovered just over 50 percent.6 In 2008 women were granted 54 percent of all the green cards issued in that year and accounted for 56 percent of all naturalizations. In that same year there were almost 19 million immigrant women (18.9 million) in the US, comprising 12 percent of all women in the country. Close to eighty percent (78.2) of these immigrant women were of working age – between eighteen and sixty-four – compared with 82.5 percent of foreign-born men but there were more foreign-born women over sixty-five than foreign-born men. The comparable working age figures for native-born women and men were 59.8 percent and 61 percent. Twenty-seven percent of the immigrant women in the US toward the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century were born in Mexico. Of the 19.1 million immigrant men in the country at that time, 33.5 percent were from Mexico. The median age of foreign-born women (forty-two years) was higher than that of native-born women (thirty-seven) and higher also than foreign-born men and native-born men. Finally, foreign-born women over age twenty-five were less likely to have a bachelor’s degree than foreign-born men (9.5 percent compared with 12.6 percent) but slightly more than two-thirds (68.4 percent) had a high school degree compared with 66.6 percent of foreign-born men (Batalova 2009: 2–4).
In summary, the story of the gendered demography of immigration to the US is one of change over time, moving from patterns that were male-predominant to almost heavily male dominant, to female pre-dominant to gender balanced. Such changes over time are worthy of further exploration and explanation. One explanation can be found in late-twentieth-century immigration policy rooted in family reunification. Thus, Linda Gordon (2005: 806) observes that the “trends and levels in the gender ratio of the US immigrant population are now determined in large part by the spouse categories, specifically spouses of citizens (who may enter without numerical limitation) and lawful permanent residents (who are subject to an annual ceiling).”7 Another explanation can be found in labor markets, something discussed in a later chapter. Gendered mobility patterns are also influenced by the economic and political conditions in the homeland, by marital status, and by gender ideologies and the overall status of women in both sending and receiving contexts (Tyree and Donato 1985; Donato 1992, 2010; Kanaiaupuni 2000). These too are issues that will be explored more fully later in this book. However, demographically, it is important to address the impact of national origins on the proportion of males to females (the gender ratio) in specific migration streams.
Migration, Gender Ratios, and National Origins: Then and Now
Scholars have observed that if Mexican migration to the US toward the end of the twentieth century were removed from consideration, the analysis of the overall composition of the immigrant population would look decidedly more “feminized” than gender-balanced (Donato et al. 2011). In the nineteenth century, as today, the gender ratios of immigration and hence of immigrant populations have varied by national origins. For example, the absence of opportunities in their home country resulted in high rates of outmigration for single Irish women, who went to England or America. While only a third of Irish emigrants in the period between 1815 and 1844 were women, in the aftermath of the Great Famine (1845–1851) women left in numbers equal to those of men. “Famine created an environment that marginalized women economically and reduced their status in society. The virtual ending of partible inheritance, the eradication of the poorer classes among whom female labor was particularly important, the spread of arranged marriages and the dowry system, and the reduced opportunities for female wage earning combined to spur emigration” (Mageean 1997: 96).8
By the end the nineteenth century women made up more than half of all Irish emigrants. Between 1885 and 1920 close to 700,000 young and mostly unmarried Irish women left their homeland (Nolan 1989). “They were the only significant group of foreign-born women who outnumbered men; they were the only significant group of women who chose to migrate primarily in female cliques. They also accepted jobs that most other women turned down” (Diner 1983: xiv). Historian Donna Gabaccia (1994: 30) has observed that in 1910 only 17 percent of Irish women came to the US with nuclear families. In fact, it was common for young unmarried Irish women to be sponsored by a female sibling and then, when they had saved up enough to marry, to in turn send passage for another sibling or relative to emigrate to America.
Women came to represent 52.9 percent of the Irish immigrant population in America. By contrast, the Jews who were pushed out of Eastern Europe and Russia by pogroms and other forms of discrimination and persecution were more likely to leave in nuclear family units, although men still outnumbered women. During the first decade of the twentieth century, women comprised 43 percent of all Jewish immigrants to the US (Joseph 1914). For these Jews, their departure was permanent and their goal was to build a new life in America. The writers Mary (Mashke) Antin, author of The Promised Land, and Anzia Yezierska, author of Hungry Hearts and The Breadgivers, offer good examples of these family migrations. Antin was born in a shtetl in what is now Belarus to a well-to-do family of Jewish shopkeepers. In 1891, when she was nine years old, and in the context of the pogroms in Russia, her father left for Boston. His family joined him three years later. Yezierska, born in 1885, came with her family to the US from a shtetl in Poland. They settled in the lower East side of Manhattan in the early 1890s. She was sent to work in a sweatshop but eventually earned a scholarship to Columbia University.
By contrast with an Irish migration that verged over its history on being female predominant, and with a Jewish migration that approached gender-balance, the Italian migration stream to America in the late nineteenth century was heavily male dominant – between 1880 and 1910 approximately 80 percent of Italians entering the US were men. In the period between 1911 and 1920, the proportion of Italian women rose to 31 percent; from 1921 to 1930 the proportion was 39 percent. When Italian women emigrated it was generally as followers and dependants (wives, daughters, sisters) rather than as independent single women. Historian Miriam Cohen (1992: 39) has labeled the migration of Italian women to the US a “delayed migration” – they arrived, if they arrived at all, on average fourteen months after the men. For Sicily in particular, women and children comprised less than 15 percent of all migrants prior to World War I. “Sicilian women sailed overseas in greater numbers than women from Calabria, Greece, or Spain, but even they never made up more than one-third of the emigrants who left before 1925” (Reeder 2003: 5).
Italians were economic migrants who often left their homeland with an expectation of return; hence, the initial decision was to leave their families behind. Their wives, known in Sicily as “white widows” (Reeder 2003), assumed the management of the family farm and experienced a repositioning of their status in civil society.9 It has been estimated that as many as 1.5 million Italian immigrants returned to Italy in the period between 1900 and 1914 (Caroli 1973: 41). One historian has noted that unlike the Russian state, which permanently expelled particular national minorities (like the Jews), the Italian state worked hard to retain the allegiance of nationals who were abroad by encouraging temporary migration, fostering ties with families left behind, and facilitating remittances and return (Friedman-Kasaba 1996). But as the twentieth century began to unfold more and more Italian men, husbands and fathers, abandoned the idea of return and began to encourage their families to join them.
