Women, Gender and Labour Migration

Historical and Cultural Perspectives

Pamela Sharpe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134586639
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Approximately half of all migrants today are female. The contributors to this volume consider the ways in which attention to gender is moving debates away from old paradigms, such as the push/pull motivation which used to dominate the field of migration studies. The authors consider women's experience of migration, especially in long distance, transnational moves. They examine the extent to which labour migration is a social and strategic decision for women.

1
Introduction
Gender and the experience of migration

Pamela Sharpe

Migration trends and twentieth-century history

A surge of human migration might be seen as one of the outstanding social phenomena of modern history. While history teaches us to be wary of modernising narratives, every type of statistical evidence and contemporary comment provides a firm basis for the sense that migration has become more pervasive as an element of society. Seemingly no region is now untouched by the widening and deepening reach of the migration process. Yet there is still a popular perception that migration is somehow a disruption or a historical aberration. It remains the task of historians to show just how enduring migration has been through time.¹

The twentieth century has marked a turning point towards far greater female migration over long distances. In fact, the enormous increase in the female labour force has partly resulted from the greater number of women migrants.² Today women account for approximately half of all global migrants. In terms of labour migration their numbers have expanded in all areas other than construction or heavy industry.³ Men comprise the majority of migrants to developing countries and those reliant on migrant labour, but to developed countries and those that are suitable for permanent settlement, the greatest number have been women. The largest number of legal migrants in the world still go to the United States, and there women have predominated in migration flows since the 1930s. Nevertheless, it is important to make gender distinctions within the developing countries, rather than categorising them together. Historically, migration in Africa, south and southeast Asia and the Caribbean has been male-dominated, whereas in Latin America there have been more women in migratory flows. However, as some of the studies mentioned here will show, women’s migration has been increasing within Asia and the Caribbean.⁴ In Asia an increasing proportion of this migration consists of autonomous females. The estimated 10,000 Filipino maids who congregate in Statue Square in Hong Kong every Sunday, could be no better illustration of this.⁵

Before progressing very far, however, it is necessary to review what labour migration actually comprises in the contemporary world. In considering the experience of migrants since the Second World War, it is difficult to characterise much of the movement as purely labour migration. This does not simply reflect the fact that straightforward Marxist interpretations are no longer adequate and we must now apply a more sophisticated label to the migrant labourer. The war created an enormous number of refugees and expelled persons who eventually settled in occupations in other countries, but had a more complex history than that reflected in the label ‘labour migrant’. Again, in the last quarter of the twentieth century,

Unfortunately in the grim 1970s and 1980s labour migration became increasingly hard to separate from the torrents of men, women and children who fled from, or were uprooted by, famine, political or ethnic persecution, war and civil war, thus forcing the countries of the First World equally committed (in theory) to helping refugees and (in practice) to preventing immigration from poor countries, with severe problems of political and legal casuistry.⁶

Whereas poor countries have many people keen to take up jobs in rich countries, wealthier nations have a demographic structure now weighted towards the elderly and low birth rates. The dilemma these countries face is whether they should allow immigration, thus risking political problems, or simply close down the shutters. Until recently the United States, Canada and Australia have been most willing to take up the challenge of immigration whereas European countries have been more restrictive but, nevertheless, with the opening of boundaries within the European Community, these ‘old world’ nations are now as multicultural as migrant- settler societies of the New World. One effect in all these countries, however, has been an upturn in illegal, temporary and restricted migration resulting in many human rights quandaries and a perception that immigrants or refugees are second-class citizens. As a result asylum-seeker issues—affecting just as many women as men—have become one of the outstanding political and social justice problems of our day. The difficulties of categorising modern-day migrants as labour migrants is apparent, but, as we will see, historical analysis of women’s migration suggests that a broadening of the definition should apply more generally through time.

Looking to the future, with a shift away from heavy industry but towards global capitalism within advanced countries, the movement of workers for manual jobs is less likely to be needed and access to cheap labour overseas may be at a greater premium.⁷ Meanwhile, a revolution in transport and communications, and the increasing disparity between earnings in rich and poor countries, makes a ‘transnational’ existence far more common than has been the case before. As the studies in this book show, however, it is not the case that, as some anthropologists seem to assume, transna- tionalism can be viewed as an entirely new invention of modern societies. As Gabaccia’s chapter in this book shows, in the huge nineteenth-century migrations to the United States, Italy’s men and women provide us with an early example of transnational lives involving the construction of family economies that crossed national borders. Transnationalism can have a special impact on the way we view women’s labour migration. As Momsen describes migration in the Caribbean,

for women, migration is not a matter of people leaving the island to live and work but a matter of extending the domestic unit, so that it includes people working in migration destinations, in some cases thousands of miles away. The idea of the household, not necessarily being a residential unit, but rather a tight network of exchanges of support seem to be commonly accepted on most island communities.⁸

Some of the countries that historically produced many migrants are now receiving them. Italy, historic provider of the great migration flows to the New World in the nineteenth century, is now the destination for many Africans.⁹ In mid-2000, thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans were found to be following the old routes of Moroccans across the Mediterranean to Spain.¹⁰ In one reported case, Maria and her three-month-old daughter were arrested, eight months after she left her Nigerian village to trek across the Sahara. She remarked that the birth of her daughter had not been easy and commented on the dangers that women faced on such long journeys, such as being raped by bandits or border guards. Was it the pregnancy that had driven Maria from her home? Or was it the perception of better economic conditions elsewhere? Or were her motives entirely different? Maria’s astonishing migration apart, this book will reveal many stories, not all are so dramatic but they are similar in that they reveal reasons for women’s migration that are mixed and cannot readily be defined as labour migration: they are perhaps partly political, partly social and partly economic. Nevertheless, one aim of the chapters presented here is not to lose sight of the individual when describing the lives of migrants within an overarching global system.

Female labour migration in historical perspective

The sheer numbers of people involved justifies historical analysis of migration. Before the First World War, some ten million labourers migrated across international boundaries within Europe and another forty-one million went to the Americas.¹¹ Migration has made a major impact on urbanisation and since 1950 the proportion of the world’s population who live in cities has more than doubled. In all but the poorest of developing countries, the urban population exceeds the rural. Yet the urbanising impulse, and the role of migrant labour in that, has a much longer heritage.

With some significant exceptions, most of the chapters in this book consider women’s historical experience of migration using both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The contribution of economic historians is to make an assessment, with some specificity, of the population of female migrants, the money they took with them and other measurable aspects of the migration experience. As Wegge shows, this has some surprising results, such as the number of wealthy widows who migrated to the United States. The book considers long-distance migration, but none of the chapters focuses on citizenship. Indeed, national boundaries sometimes seem non-existent between the micro-level of women’s lives in their neighbourhoods and the global sphere of their movements.

It appears that until the mid-1980s the circumstances of female migration were little discussed by anthropologists, sociologists or policy makers. Since then substantial accounts have been written about the invisibility of the female migrant and the ingrained assumption that the typical migrant was young, single and male with economic motivations for moving.¹² The migration of women was assumed to be for family reasons, to accompany male migrants. And there has been a perception (if not always an actuality) that women and children predominate in refugee flows. Some of the mid-1980s recognition that many women were, and probably always had been, autonomous migrants came from analysis of the contemporary situation. In the United States, over 28 per cent of those women who migrated under occupational preference categories in the 1970s entered with highly skilled occupations such as nurses, managers, teachers or administrators. Of course, some of this skilled migration is impossible to ascertain from national statistics. In Australia, for example, the Bosnian woman who has entered as a refugee might be working for a cleaning agency until she finds a job in her previous profession as an economist. Some professional Filipinos, working outside the country, also earn more as migrant domestic workers than in their own occupations. As Kelson and Delaet comment ‘Clearly many women migrated to fulfil labour needs in low-wage job sectors. Nevertheless, these figures also indicate that a significant number of women migrated to perform skilled jobs with higher wages’.¹³

As Delaney points out in his chapter, the historical study of gender- specific migration was adopted from the social science disciplines and has only recently been seen as a valid subject of historical analysis. It is also the case that the approach to female migration has been a series of case studies, with few attempts at synthesis, and this book is no departure from this trend. As Doreen Indra remarks in her recent collection about forced migration, there is a central issue of ‘a tension in dealing with the universal versus the specific concerning gender and forced migration through time and space’.¹⁴ This comment is equally applicable to voluntary migration. As Gabaccia observed in 1996, ‘historical studies of international female migration scarcely exist’.¹⁵ Those studies that have been carried out have an overwhelming emphasis on the great migrations to North America, and this book will widen the geographical focus of this academic enquiry.

The emphasis here will be on long-distance migration rather than the movement between village and town that was commonplace in early modern and, especially, industrialising Europe.¹⁶

As these chapters show, and as is particularly stressed by Harzig in Chapter 2, the emphasis is no longer on the mere existence of female labour migrants but rather their historical agency and the wider context of their migration. Henrietta Moore has written of anthropological studies of female migration:

it is important to note that migration is often not a single discrete event, but part of a strategy for coping with economic change, an opportunity which depends on multiplex links being established between rural and urban areas¹⁷

Many women who are resident in towns in fact form part of a wider family group based in rural areas. Izzard’s study of Botswana showed that over a third of the women she interviewed received money, goods or food from their daughters who were working in towns, mainly because they were looking after their daughters’ children.¹⁸ Moore concludes that,

the significance of recent research on female migrants, in Africa, is the emphasis on the importance of mother-daughter links across the rural-urban divide, as part of strategies of household survival.¹⁹

Moore’s remarks have wider relevance than the African case. Within migration studies, historians can still learn to shape their investigations by listening to other disciplines and considering evidence from a range of countries and cultures.

In fact, several of the chapters in this book, but particularly those by Sarasúa for Spain and Hunter and Nagata for Japan, show that both male and female migration reflects not just individual motivation but also family strategies. Hunt...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Routledge research in gender and history
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Maps
• Plates
• Tables
• Contributors
• Note on the Japanese text
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1: Introduction: Gender and the experience of migration
• 2: Women migrants as global and local agents: New research strategies on gender and migration
• 3: Leaving home to help the family?: Male and female temporary migrants in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain
• 4: Labour migration, family and community in early modern Japan
• 5: Women and long-distance trade migration in the nineteenth- century Netherlands
• 6: Nowhere at home?: Female migrants in the nineteenth- century Habsburg Empire
• 7: Gender, family, work and migration in early nineteenth-century Scotland
• 8: Wives or workers?: Single British female migration to colonial Australia
• 9: A historical perspective on female migrants: Motivations and strategies of nineteenth-century Hessians
• 10: When the migrants are men: Italy’s women and transnationalism as a working-class way of life
• 11: Gender and twentieth- century Irish migration, 1921-1971
• 12: Maids on the move: Images of femininity and European women’s labour migration during the interwar years
• 13: Female migration and the farm family economy in interwar Japan
• 14: Migrancy, marriage and family in the Ciskei reserve of South Africa, 1945-1959
• 15: Women and migrants: Continuity and change in patterns of female migration in Latin America
• Bibliography