82

IMR

Volume 40 Number 1 (Spring 2006):82103

2006 by the Center for Migration Studies of New York. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-7379.2006.00004.x

Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK IMRE INTRENATIONAL MIGRATIONREVIEW 0197-9183 2006 by the Center for Migration Studies of NewYork Spring 2006 40 1Original Artical

isroiicai iisiicrivis wriiwariowai iciariow iviiw

Gender and Migration: Historical
Perspectives

1

Suzanne M. Sinke

Floride State University

Gender has become a category of concern for many historians of migration
in scholarship of the 2000s. This article notes a variety of factors which
made it possible and likely for historians to turn to questions of gender.
The article surveys historiography on migration and gender as it developed
in the late twentieth century and explores some current directions in this
scholarship, on a variety of geographic scales: global, national, and local.
It emphasizes the need for longitudinal analysis in any study of gender
and migration, and notes some approaches to the concept of time used by
historians.
Peruse Dirk Hoerders

Cultures in Contact

(2002), a prize-winning historical
overview of global migrations during the last millennium, and you will nd
throughout close attention to gender dynamics. Not only are migration
systems characterized as predominantly male or female, but the author suggests
how the interplay of individual circumstances, familial relationships, larger
economic cycles, and existing circuits of knowledge and transportation are
gendered and how that interplay encourages or discourages certain types of
migration at particular points in time, in particular places, and even at times
for particular individuals. As an example of global history,

Cultures in Contact

is a far cry from Arnold Toynbees

A Study of History

(1948), a 12-volume
chronicle of civilizations in which women, let alone gender analyses, do not
appear, or even from Immanuel Wallersteins

The Modern World-System

(1974,
3 volumes), to which Hoerder pays intellectual homage. In some ways,

Cultures
in Contact

most calls to mind the early work of geographer E. G. Ravenstein
(1885) with his laws of migration, written in the 1880s both for its striving
toward an inclusive denition of migration and for the attention it pays to men
and women in migration circuits, though Ravenstein viewed women as primarily
involved in short-distance migration compared to longer-range migration for
1
The author would like to thank Donna Gabaccia for extensive assistance as a commentator and
editor. She thanks the other members of the SSRC gender and migration group for comments
on drafts of this article, and the anonymous reviewers for the International Migration Review for
thoughtful and useful commentary.
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men, a point that Hoerder disputes. Yet Hoerder also echoes Ravenstein in
seeking patterns and in building theory hallmarks of social science
methodology shared across the century and across disciplines.
Not all historians in the early 2000s are as attentive to gender as Hoerder.
Nor are all as committed to the methods and theoretical concerns of the social
sciences or to global analysis as he is. Still, historical studies of migration
whether at the global, national, or local level have increasingly turned to gender
analysis in recent years, in part because so many scholars in this eld are now
convinced that gender analysis results in a better understanding of the past.
This article begins by offering some tentative explanations for the relatively
rapid integration of gender into historical studies of migration. It then traces
how that integration occurred through a changing sequence of interdisciplinary
dialogues. While it presents an upbeat account of the benets of interdiscipli-
narity, it also acknowledges cases where pioneering historical research ndings
failed to travel across disciplinary boundaries. Finally, the article points to a
number of current directions in historical scholarship on gender and migration,
drawing examples from both national and global studies published during the
1990s. Throughout, the focus is on migration conceived here as an important
type of human movement rather than on race, ethnicity, identity, or immi-
grant adjustment to the countries where they settle. Throughout, too, the focus
is on what makes history distinctive as a discipline, and thus on what historians
can best contribute to interdisciplinary dialogues about gender and migration.

HISTORY AS A DISCIPLINE: OPENING THE WAY FOR GENDER
ANALYSIS

Why has gender analysis achieved arguably mainstream status in the historical
study of migration? Here, I briey point to a number of distinctive characteristics
of history as a discipline positioned between the social sciences and humanities,
its ndings typically reported in accessible language for broad audiences.
In an epistemological sense history is at times both humanity and social
science. It draws from and critiques both, sometimes simultaneously. Few his-
torians have the opportunity to generate their own sources we may collect,
compare, discover, and arrange, but only for the recent past can we directly
observe or ask questions of living informants. The necessity to use texts and
other materials that have survived in specially maintained archives continu-
ously inspires historians to experiment methodologically and to borrow con-
cepts, including gender (a term rst used in linguistics and the study of
language), from other disciplines.
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Unlike their counterparts in other social sciences, however, historians feel
less driven to theorize on the basis of their research; instead, many still prefer
to report their research in the form of stories that seek to explain or give mean-
ing to the past rather than to predict future outcomes. Narrative the story
in history remains central to many historians sense of disciplinary craft.
The narrative form for conveying research ndings allows historians to address
broad readerships, especially when they avoid writing in the less accessible
vocabularies (jargon) that are more typical of research in highly theorized
elds. History claims a particularly wide audience in the pre-collegiate school
system, and in the realm of public history, where practitioners interpret histor-
ical events for a general public in museums, historic sites, and other venues. A
broadly used term such as gender or globalization can be useful in historical
narratives even if theoreticians debate its usefulness and meaning. Even those
historians who, like Hoerder, see themselves as social scientists, are unlikely to
report on their research as many social scientists do, by offering separate sub-
sections of theory, data, experimental methods, or results to do so would
destroy the narrative or story line that appeals to general readers.
Neither an art nor a science, history is a discipline of malleable boundaries
and eclectic methodologies. In the Social Science History Association historians
meet with sociologists and anthropologists and often work with the same
concepts for analyzing international migration whether assimilation theory
or transnational theory. Historians not only participate in interdisciplinary
elds such as American studies (where issues related to literature, language, and
meaning are also pursued), and in newer interdisciplinary programs such as
ethnic studies and womens/gender studies, they typically play critically impor-
tant roles in the creation of all these interdisciplinary elds and professional
associations. In many disciplines, interdisciplinary work is the exception, but
in historical study of international migration it is closer to the rule. A quick
overview of its development points to the importance of interdisciplinary
dialogue and methodological eclecticism in the development of gender analysis
in the history of migration.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF GENDER ANALYSIS IN THE HISTORY
OF INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION

Historical research on international migration has at least since the 1970s
included both studies of women immigrants and analyses of gender and gender
relations. An upsurge in migration after 1965, the rise of the so-called new
ethnicity and identity politics in the United States, and the birth of a new
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feminist movement in the late 1960s all coincided with a large number of
young women entering graduate studies with the intention of becoming
professional historians. Once in the academy, young historians encountered
growing enthusiasm for critical research approaches that emphasized the so-
called bottom up methodologies of social history; these employed both
quantitative and ethnographic methods and focused on the lives of persons
who had traditionally been excluded from historical narratives, including
women, immigrants, racial minorities, and working-class peoples generally.
For those who called themselves immigration historians of the United States,
the Chicago School of Sociologys linear model of inexorable assimilation
served as a main target of critique, most clearly articulated in Rudolph J.
Vecolis article (1964) about Italian

contadini

(peasants) in Chicago. This was
true also in Canada, where migration scholars had uncritically imported the
ideas of the Chicago sociologists (Iacovetta, 1995).
By the1970s, feminist historians of migration were engaged not only in
developing a critique of a scholarly literature that treated all immigrants as
genderless men but were participating also in a number of interdisciplinary dia-
logues. Some were busy uncovering immigrant womens voices through oral
historical methods (Krause, 1978), consolidating their ties to the humanities,
literature, and activist agendas for empowering women through consciousness-
raising. Another strand of investigation, associated most closely with Joan Scott
and Louise Tillys

Women, Work and Family

(1978), coupled economic models
drawn from Marxist thought with anthropological theorizing about the
division of public from private spheres of life. Scott and Tilly (along with the
students they inuenced) focused on the lives of women migrating from the
subsistence-oriented European countryside to industrializing, urban commu-
nities in Europe and the United States (Smith, 1985; Cohen, 1993). Perhaps
the best exemplar of uniting several of these strands in the United States was
Tamara Harevens (1982) work that utilized quantitative analysis together
with oral history in order to found the eld of family history. The work of
Hareven and others demonstrated that, contrary to early fears, it was in fact
possible to learn nearly as much about womens as mens lives from nominative
sources.
Although focused on relationships, families, and households, often in
what we would today call transnational (or village-outward) perspective, his-
torians such as Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (1977) and Donna Gabaccia (1984)
did not present a sustained critique of existing, and typically nation-based, the-
ories of migration and adaptation or of woman-focused history. Furthermore,
although they clearly borrowed from anthropologys interest in sex and age as
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organizers of all human life and relationships, few feminist historians used the
term gender to describe their analytical interests until the 1980s, even when
they documented social relations between men and women within families and
households, in schools or social welfare institutions.
Between 1975 and 1990, historians and sociologists inspired by womens
history and working within interdisciplinary elds such as American studies,
ethnic studies, and women/gender studies produced pioneering works on
immigrant women from Asia and Latin America (Glenn 1986; Zavella, 1987;
Yung 1995). Some of the best of the early work on immigrant women by his-
torians working from within the new elds of ethnic studies and womens stud-
ies appeared in Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki Ruizs collection,

Unequal Sisters

,
rst published in 1990; this book quickly became one of the most widely used
textbooks among historians of women in the United States. Work on minority
women, along with foreign-born and working-class women, soon succeeded in
deconstructing prevailing notions of a unitary or essential and middle-class
American womanhood. Around the same time, scholars of European migrant
women in the United States also began challenging a monolithic white womens
experience, a stream of research that persisted even after 1990 (Seller, 1981; Diner,
1983; Gabaccia, 1994; Sinke, 2002). Historians became interested in differences

among

women well before deconstruction theory became well known; never-
theless, their work undermined what appeared as the main rationale for separate
studies of women and men as immigrants and as workers. At the same time, as
several feminist critics noted, new surveys of U.S. immigration history, such as
John Bodnars

The Transplanted

(1985), failed to acknowledge or to incorporate
the considerable body of new research already completed on women immigrants,
except as it contributed to an understanding of immigrant wage earning.
By the mid-1980s, research on migration was also becoming more
international. Here, too, we can point to an interdisciplinary dialogue devel-
oping between anthropologists and sociologists (Simon and Brettell, 1986)
and historians (Gabaccia, 1992). Work also began to appear on migrant women
beyond the North American context (Phizacklea, 1983). This early develop-
ment of interdisciplinary and international eld-building seems to have gone
largely unnoticed outside of womens studies, and it was later practically
eclipsed in the explosion of popular and theoretical discussions of gender and
transnationalism of the mid-1990s. Many scholars working on immigrant
women, gender, and migration in the years around 1990 thus experienced a
sense of isolation (Gabaccia, 1991). For a newer generation of feminist scholars
entering the academy in the late 1980s and 1990s, the growth of interest in
cultural history and the history of ideas and identity, coupled with Joan Scotts
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(1986) inuential call for the analysis of gender as a system of power relations
and as a way of representing power relationships, seemed to offer an escape
from the isolation or ghetto of woman-focused studies. Once again in the
1990s, historians of migration looked to other disciplines, often in the human-
ities, and to the new eld of cultural studies, for methodological inspiration in
applying to the study of past migrations this newer understanding of the mean-
ing of gender and gender relations.

NEW INTERDISCIPLINARY DIALOGUES ON GENDER AND
MIGRATION: THE GLOBAL, THE NATIONAL, THE LOCAL

As a discipline, history had its own rigidities and these became particularly
visible as discussions of globalization and transnationalism emerged in the
1990s. For historians of migration a phenomenon that typically crossed
national boundaries the organization of the discipline around national elds
(notably in the modern era) has been problematic. A student who does not
follow chronological and regional criteria risks never getting into a graduate
program (for lack of an advisor) and more importantly risks the chance of not
getting a tenure-track job, for until the late 1990s practically no positions existed
outside national paradigms. Even today the vast majority of positions in history
are both region- and time-specic, although positions requiring expertise in
world history or in several world regions continue to increase in number.
The owering of theoretical interest in global, international, and trans-
national approaches to migration in the 1990s was a welcome development to
those interested in women and in gender, but it was also one that challenged
them to examine gender in a wide range of locations. No longer would his-
torians examine gender mainly or exclusively through study of immigration to
North American nations, or through analyses of gendered adaptation to single
national states. Instead, analysis of gender is pursued at a variety of regional,
global, and transnational levels. The remainder of this article examines a selec-
tion of historical literature that illustrates both the wide range of interdiscipli-
nary dialogues in which historians continue to participate as well as the varied
geographical scales of analysis obvious in recent writing. In order to highlight
the centrality of the past and change over longer time periods to the discipline
of history, this selection privileges examples from studies of migrations and
cultural contacts that preceded the twentieth century. In doing so, the discussion
that follows slights the by-now exceptionally rich literatures on ethnicity, race,
and gender and on identity of immigrants and migrants in the United States
(and a few other individual nations such as Canada, France, and Australia)
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topics that have been of considerable interest to scholars in American stud-
ies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and critical race studies. Readers interested
in pursuing the migrations of the recent past can nd a bibliographic guide
in Hofstetter (2001).
Historical demography provides a rst example of an interdisciplinary
endeavor that has changed dramatically in recent years, both in response to
gender analysis and to the increasing availability of historical population data-
bases. Scholars of family and community history had long put together snap-
shots of populations where village and church records, family registers, and
other types of population data existed. Historians using these records identied
basic types of families using categories borrowed from anthropology. Historical
demographers have studied the life courses of the mobile and documented not
only who migrated but changing gender ratios among the mobile.
For example, the current Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)
International project, which by late 2003 had linked historical census samples
from China, Colombia, France, Kenya, the United States, Mexico, and Vietnam,
provided basic demographic data on family patterns and mobility for at least
a limited number of points of time in the past. The slave trade database created
by the W.E.B. DuBois Institute illustrated another way of creating an accessible
past for a group of migrants who otherwise left few if any traces in the historical
record. Demographic data form the baseline for many social histories of gender
and provide a way of testing hypotheses generated from other, less systematic
types of sources.
Robert McCaa, one of the IPUMS coordinators, illustrated some of the
possibilities of connecting demographic data to track gendered changes in fam-
ily patterns in his Marriageways in Mexico and Spain, 15001800 (1994).
He highlighted ages and rates of coupling for men and women and traced
childbearing patterns across time. He suggested that the Amerindian norm of
almost universal pairing around puberty for women and also in the teens for
men shifted over time, though it never fully converged with the Spanish pat-
tern colonial authorities tried to impose. Prenuptial intercourse and the
absence of formal marriage remained much more prevalent in the American
setting, meaning much higher rates of natural unions, cohabitation, and con-
cubinage, especially by late in the colonial era. For Spain, McCaa rst demon-
strated signicant regional variations, with migration to the colonies (of men,
though much less often of women) from the areas with some of the lowest ages
at marriage, which meant the early twenties as opposed to late twenties. McCaa
went on to describe how colonial policies against polygyny and promoting Catholic
marriage norms made inroads among parts of the colonized population, at least
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as reected in family data. Highly correlated also were for shifts to greater
rates of illegitimacy after the legal reforms of 1803, which made it almost
impossible for women to sue for breach of promise, a legal standard that was
subsequently enshrined with independence through many Latin American
national statutes. Here, historical demographic research illuminates not only
the gendered migration of colonial ofcials, with its consequences for

mestizaje

(mixing), but also for gendered ideals of marriage.
Demographic patterns could also highlight developments for further
study. One of the striking ndings of the slave trade data was that particular
regions exhibited distinctive sex ratios, and that these changed over time.
Joseph E. Inikori suggested in 1992 that foreign slave traders held primary
responsibility for the pattern of more men than women crossing the Atlantic.
Africans, Inikori suggested, could not compete economically and thus settled
for more women for the domestic slave trade. G. Ugo Nwokeji (2001), while
agreeing with the premise that Atlantic slave traders sought more men than
women, suggested that African conceptions of gender were clearly related to
which persons became slaves in the rst place. Data from the Bight of Biafra,
where men were key to agricultural production for some native groups,
demonstrated much higher rates of sending adult women across the Atlantic
than from other port regions. Nwokeji also contrasted the means by which people
became slaves warfare, judicial process, kidnapping, sale as producing different
ratios of men, women, and children. Nwokeji worked both with demographic
evidence on the slave trade and with the ndings of qualitative and ethno-
graphically inuenced historical studies of the region, such as Sandra E.
Greenes

Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast

(1996).
Likewise, Sucheta Mazumdar (2003) relied extensively on anthropolog-
ical insights and concepts of family structure in changing economic circum-
stances to help explain the demographic imbalance in male to female migration
from the Punjab, Sind, and Guangdong in the nineteenth century. What cir-
cumstances produced such an extensive outmigration of men, particularly
young men? In contrast to some who focused on the problems faced by Asian
women in migrating to North America, Mazumdar demonstrated instead that
even where women faced little opposition, they rarely migrated from these
areas. Womens local economic roles made it much more likely that households
and families could spare men, and that men would perceive better opportuni-
ties elsewhere (Mazumdar, 2003). On this point Mazumdar added to the
already extensive literature that describes which persons are most likely to
migrate depending on type of family system. Whether for Japan or Sweden,
demographic evidence typically identies noninheriting sons in systems of
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primogeniture as some of the most likely migrants in the past (

e.g

., Hayami and
Kurosu, 2001; Wall, 2001).
Generally, one of the most signicant ndings of studies of European and
North American migration based on population sources has been the ubiquity
and normalcy of migration across time. The same sources, however, typically
identify different patterns for young men and women, and yet others for those
who move later in life (Moch, 2003). They also note differently gendered pat-
terns for forced migrations, refugee ows, and for movements within specic
occupational niches, as well as change over time as economic conditions and
state policies change. The eclectic combination of historical demographic
method with anthropological terminology and insights continues to be a fruit-
ful one for historians of gender and migration.
Unfortunately, demographic studies have not yet openly questioned or
explored gender as constructed categories of meaning or considered seri-
ously what actually constitutes man or woman at particular points in time
or described how designations of male and female change in population
statistics over time. Nonetheless, demographic work includes enough data on
individuals that they may be helpful in understanding the categories of male
and female themselves. In a meta-narrative of racial miscegenation published
in the

American Historical Review

, Patrick Wolfe (2001) suggested different
outcomes of racial categorization based on the histories of four colonized
peoples. Could such a meta-narrative be discerned for gender systems?
Anthropologist Ann Stoler (2001) (who also teaches history) has suggested
some of the ways intimate relationships reinforced power in a variety of
colonial settings. Her attention to gender categories and how these categories
were maintained, based on insights from cultural studies, offers rich suggestions
for further research by historians of migration.
A second line of research and one that provided important frameworks
for cross-regional comparison has centered around the labor migrations of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Typically inspired by tradi-
tional Marxist or world system analyses of production or markets, motivations
for migration in this body of work are typically considered to be economic,
even when viewed through some version of a feminist-socialist framework.
Moreover, at least some of this research has incorporated the concept of social
reproduction and explored what some scholars now term carework within
these migrations. The research ndings of the Italians Everywhere project,
led by Donna Gabaccia, Franca Iacovetta, and Fraser Ottanelli, provides a
number of examples of this interdisciplinary and transnational approach. By
combining both studies of sending areas for major migrations and insights
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from many receiving countries on several continents, the project avoided many
of the pitfalls of a national approach, while still acknowledging the power of
national states to shape and to restrict human movements and gendered pat-
terns of incorporation.
In

Women, Gender, and Transnational Life

, edited by Gabaccia and
Iacovetta (2002), many contributors highlighted the conicting visions of
proper womanhood and of feminist ideals encountered by men and women at
both ends of migration paths that were often circular and repetitive. Caroline
Waldron Merithew (2002) suggested that some Italian immigrant women
promoted a transnational idea of anarchist motherhood. This trope builds
on Linda Kerbers (1980) pioneering work on republican motherhood the
concept of creating a political role for white women in the early United States
by stressing their role in raising children to be good citizens. In Merithews
vision, women made connections with anarchists in other countries, trans-
lated childrens books and read materials from various national sources, and
generally supported the anarchist ideology.
Patterns of emigration (and sometimes return) have also become a topic
of interest broadly in historical studies of Europe. Those left behind by male
migrations also found themselves in a world of change according to several
contributors to

Women, Gender, and Transnational Life.

Linda Reeder chroni-
cled the clear shift in education and consumption patterns of some Sicilian
women with migrant husbands, bringing them into contact with the state in
unaccustomed ways. In her larger work,

Widows in White

(2003), she demon-
strated the nature of transnational fatherhood in an era when it was typically
fathers who left wives and children to earn wages elsewhere. Such works invite
the exploration of comparable cases in other times and places. Andreina De
Clementis (2002) description of shifts in continental Italy which placed greater
demand for cash on the family while leaving women responsible for subsistence
production and much agricultural work has parallels in the situation described
by Sucheta Mazumdar for Guangdong and Punjab migrations of the nine-
teenth century as well. These cases suggest which family members could best
be spared from various tasks, inuencing who would migrate and who remain.
How did notions of maleness and femaleness alter as migrants encountered
differently gendered patterns of employment and education, and new ideo-
logies of politics and appropriate moral behavior? Gabaccia and Iacovetta
(2002) demonstrated that women were active in labor migrations, including
skilled labor migrations, crossing the northern border into France at the turn
of the twentieth century to work in textiles and recruiting others to follow. The
work of Jos Moya (2002) on labor ideology and its relationship to womens
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participation in his case study of anarchism in Buenos Aries demonstrated how
gender ideologies moved within and through spurts of labor organizing. So did
Michael Miller Topps work (2001) on Italian American syndicalists, which
examined contesting visions of manhood developing out of transatlantic
migrations as well as local conditions in North America.
Another type of study of migrant labor and gendered norms comes from
community studies, which in the past were more typically focused on a single
sending or receiving country. One example is provided by historian Marlou
Schrovers study of German migrants in nineteenth-century Utrecht, which
examined marriage patterns, geographic distribution, and occupational struc-
ture of the German-born population in the long-standing German-Dutch
migration (Schrover, 2002). Even more useful for comparative purposes is
Christiane Harzigs

Peasant Maids City Women

(1997). Harzig brought
together scholars of Polish, Irish, Swedish, and German migration to answer
similar questions about background prior to migration and experiences after-
ward for those who went to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The combination of close attention to local conditions prior to
migration and then in Chicagos ethnic neighborhoods distinguishes this from
other multigroup studies (which typically paid more attention to differences
between groups). The authors concluded that prospects for better wages,
marital opportunities, and family advancement were common themes for
all the immigrant groups studied, though some gendered variations in speed
of marriage, church participation, and occupational prole related to pre-
migration experiences. Striking in this study are the number of ways that
women helped establish community life, from parochial schools and churches
to labor and philanthropic groups, creating a kind of ethnic public sphere,
apart from the state and from institutions founded and run by English-
speaking Americans.
As this study suggests, domestic service was the primary paid occupation
for women in all the groups studied in Chicago, as it was for many migrant
women in North America until the enactment of immigration restriction in
1924, and even thereafter for the many groups of women who faced racial
barriers to work in other occupations. Domestic service, now increasingly
understood as a form of carework, has itself become an arena of intensive
interdisciplinary research and dialogue for students of gender and migration.
While scholars have agreed in seeing domestic service and caring as tasks that
are gendered female, they offer sharply different interpretations of this fact,
depending both on the racial exclusions that shaped work in this arena and on
how premigration experiences shaped immigrants perception of domestic
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work. For women such as many of those in Harzigs study, who had been in
domestic service prior to migration under far worse conditions and at much
poorer wages than they would earn in Chicago, work as a domestic in the
United States seemed a positive economic and social move. Other studies of
northern European women working as domestics in North America in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have reached the same conclusion.
For those who anticipated late marriage (if any), domestic service at better
wages combined with better marital prospects proved particularly attractive.
For southern and eastern European immigrant women at the turn of the
century and for Asian and Mexican domestics across the twentieth century, by
contrast, domestic service more often appeared as an unattractive option for
paid employment one that was difcult to combine with family life in settled
communities and one that white immigrant women more than immigrants
from racialized minorities were able to reject and to avoid.
As they focus more on carework as a form of labor, historians increasingly
question whether they should consider wife and husband, too, as occupa-
tional categories when studying migration. The desire to become a wife or
husband certainly provided a potent incentive for voluntary migration in the
nineteenth century, and caregiving within families and kin groups certainly
involve both paid and unpaid work on both ends of the migratory trajectory.
Those interested in the creation of the categorization of waged and unwaged
labor, and in the way racial and ethnic stereotypes determine who should
perform caregiving increasingly refer not only to the international market for
marriage and caring labor, but also to the practices of transnational parent-
hood. Catherine Ceniza Choys work (2003) on the more recent migration of
Filipina nurses to the United States, along with much work on migrating ser-
vice and care workers from Latin American and Asia, also link imperial and
racial histories in gendered fashion, as does the newly emerging literature on
transnational adoption.
With the growth of interest in cultural history in the 1990s, studies of
migration have increasingly featured analysis of gender systems that not only
come into contact with migration but often come as well into conict. Sinkes
study (2002) of nineteenth-century Dutch migrants, how they adjusted their
vision of familial roles once they moved to the United States, and how they
undergirded patriarchal privilege (where patriarchy meant fathers with signif-
icantly more decision making power in the family than mothers or children)
highlights conicts between European and American notions of appropriate
gender and family behavior and relationships. A different kind of adaptation
awaited the group of Dutch migrants most of them traveling as individuals
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rather than in family groups who went to the East Indies colonies of the
Netherlands during the same period.
In other historical cases it has been borders and not people who have
moved, imposing changed yet rmly gendered legal rights and cultural con-
cepts on local populations. Examples of the resulting conicts in gender ideo-
logies can be drawn from studies of Pakistan in the 1940s or the U.S. Southwest
in the 1850s (Ansari, 1999; Gonzlez, 1999). A further literature on migration
focuses on those who moved

because

borders shifted. Allen Isaacmans study of
(2000) Chikunda focuses on a group he calls the transfrontiersmen. These were
men who ed slavery and other forms of service in the late 1800s. Moving
illegally or extralegally in many cases, these men sought a permanent break with
the conditions and locations that had sparked their migration. Such groups of
men with practically no women among them existed not only in Africa, but
also in South America, the Caribbean, and China. Isaacman suggests some
parallels among all these cases of men without women as well as describing a
particular form of masculine incorporation and adaptation in the Chikunda
case (Isaacman, 2000). Their lives might also be compared to gendered studies
of the more traditional, and voluntary, Italian labor migrants studied in the
1980s by Robert Harney.
One topic central to current theories of transnationalism that still needs
more attention from historians as it is related to gender is the technology of
communication and transportation. Historians could be inspired and excited
by Sarah Mahlers (1995) and others work that shows family and community
communications in the contemporary period as gendered phenomena. Inter-
ested in the longer term, however, historians tend to see recent technological
change as developing from past transnational practices in a more or less con-
tinuous fashion rather than emphasizing a sharp disjuncture between past and
present. For example, a World War II military wife interviewed by Sinke recalls
writing and receiving letters from her family in England twice a week in the
1950s, making phone calls in addition starting in the 1960s, and visiting
regularly every few years once airfares seemed affordable and ying felt safer.
This woman exhibited what to her seemed appropriate and frequent use of
communication and transportation technology. She considered her ties to her
English relatives strong (she still writes twice a week), and though she ofcially
became a U.S. citizen, she still referred to herself as a Brit. Like most women
of her generation, however, she never learned to use e-mail or a cell phone.
At a recent conference on emigrant letters, Jane Harrison, a historian
with the Canadian Postal Museum, pointed out that in French Regime Canada
people (based on their own accounts found in letters) considered it good
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communications if they could get one letter across the Atlantic during the summer
sending duplicate copies with outgoing ships and receive a reply in time to
respond before the last ship sailed that year: an exchange of one letter per year.
Despite this slow communication, French governmental ofcials ruled their
colony in accordance with the desires and needs of the metropole: merchants
did their business, and families maintained their connections. Taking such dif-
culties in to account, historians of communication in North America have
dubbed the era when regular mail service came into being the early 1800s
as an early revolution in communications ( John, 1995). The degree to which
this also made it possible for people to write across borders was not central to
earlier research, but the access to communication based on gendered norms
appears a fruitful area for exploration. Who could communicate with whom,
under what conditions? Who could travel, and under what conditions? Sinkes
research on German-language letters from America demonstrated that by the
mid-1800s a fair number of male migrants who had decided it was time to
marry were writing back to their homelands for spouses. The combination of
access to mail service and higher literacy rates (though there are also letters by
those who could not write) opened greater opportunities for marriage across
the relatively open borders of that time period (Sinke, 2006).
Closely related to communications were evolving links of transportation,
and gendered access to them. Marianne Wokeck (1999) identied the early
1800s as a critical period in the organization of trans-Atlantic migration.
Unlike the slave trade, which developed specialized vessels much earlier, in this
period ships designed for the transport of (primarily voluntary) migrants began
to ply the Atlantic. Scheduled departures and clearer provisions of space and
water cut the cost and uncertainty of trans-Atlantic crossings, making it a less
risky business. To what degree transportation options and risks operated as
lters not only of age but of gender remains an area for exploration. Contem-
porary work on families that place greater restrictions on young women trying
to cross borders without papers (compared to men) have their counterpart in
studies of past populations where parents were reluctant to allow daughters to
migrate alone due to the physical and sexual risks they believed accompanied
womens autonomous travels.
Fears of females at risk (generally related to ideas of morality, though also
to family responsibility) were not always unfounded, as historians of sexuality
are now beginning to demonstrate. Anxieties about young women being
tricked into prostitution produced a white slavery scare in the late nineteenth
century and again at the turn of the twenty-rst century with its concerns
about sex trafcking. Each concept expressed a particular vision of mobile
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womens sexuality and vulnerability. In the case of the late nineteenth century,
the denition of a victimized woman was sometimes so broad that almost every
woman traveling alone was subject to policing during the migration process;
this in turn discouraged the independent movement of women and worked to
enforce the moral vision of receiving societies on sending ones.
Deeply invasive questions and examinations of bodies crossing borders
could uphold one set of family ideals and one notion of proper gender
relations over others. Morals and health frequently intertwined in the border
ritual of examination. Eithne Luibhid (2002) has illustrated how at U.S. ports
of entry, racial, gender, ethnic, and class identications determined whether
one would face examination for potential crimes of moral turpitude or
inappropriate gender behavior (2002). In the twentieth century similar
examination questioned the entry of migrants who appeared too feminine
(if male) or too masculine (if female). Studies like Erika Lees analysis (2003)
of Chinese immigration continuing in the face of legal barriers have illustrated
the importance of understanding both practices of control (as opposed to the
laws themselves) and the impact of restrictive policies on ethnic and gender
relations over time.
The history of prostitution and of migrants participation in prostitution
has remained a contentious and continuing theme of interdisciplinary research
in the 1990s. As Timothy Gilfoyle suggested in his 1999 survey, many works
have focused either on the social organization of commercial sex, or (following
cultural and literary models) have examined the symbolic and discursive
representations of sex workers and morality. In the former category, numerous
studies link encroaching capitalist and colonial systems and the loss of subsis-
tence, to increased work in prostitution. Prostitution in these studies mirrors
other labor relations, including domestic service, as a dimension of rural to
urban migration, comparative labor opportunities, and the social char-
acteristics of prostitutes and clients.
Thomas Orums (2001) study of Jewish women from Eastern Europe
who became women of the open door in the Amazon basin during the rubber
boom demonstrates that professional prostitutes from the Pale evaluated
options and chose to transfer to a new work location, one where their Euro-
pean background (or light-colored skin) was a major asset, and where wages
typically were higher. Women who sold sex also provided other services in some
cases, as described by Tshidiso Maloka (1997) for early twentieth century
Basotholand. Maloka argued that women sometimes escaped patriarchal con-
trol by providing sex, food, beer, lodging, and entertainment to migrant men
for a price. In general the provision of female services in areas of large-scale
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male migration, particularly in rural extractive industries, has become of more
interest to historians in recent years, and now includes attention to same-sex
relationships in some cases, as in the

bukhontxana

[typically translated as
mine marriages] of adolescent boys and adult men in South African goldelds
(Harries, 1994).
By contrast, historians (and others) who have studied sexual service in the
context of military relations or tourism rarely present positive images of such
work. Yoshiaki Yoshimis (2001) study of sexual slavery in World War II Japan
(which appeared in English not long after the Japanese government agreed to
compensate a number of Korean comfort women) exemplies this trend.
Other works from Maria Hhns

GIs and Fruleins

(2002) to Ji-Yeon Yuhs

Beyond the Shadow of Camptown

(2002) document the social costs to women
of associating with foreign military men; such studies suggest how inter-
personal relations in these contexts mirror relationships between national
states of vastly differing power, as political scientist Cynthia Enloe (2000) has
suggested. By contrast, however, military men on temporary assignment in
countries outside of their own (like male sex tourists) have rarely received as
much attention as migrants as the local women who move to areas around
military bases and tourist resorts in order to sell sexual services to them.

CONCLUSION

One of the most common experiences for historians of migration and gender
when reading contemporary studies by social scientists is a feeling of dj vu
similar patterns, common experiences, slight variations on a theme. As Nancy
Foner has noted in

From Ellis Island to J.F.K.

(2000) and more recently also
in

In a New Land

(2005), there certainly are new elements to migration and
immigrant life at the turn of the twenty-rst century. But there are also many
patterns of the past including gendered patterns that continue. One of
these continuities would appear to be the power of gender to determine who
migrates (and how), to channel men and women into differing occupations
and familial relationships, and to create conicts over proper male and female
behavior as cultural and discursive boundaries are crossed by human beings on
the move.
While historians and social scientists can often agree on the importance
of gender analysis in the study of international migration, it seems important
to note how historians concern with temporality and change over time makes
their analyses of gender and migration distinctive. Social scientists studying
migration have become increasingly aware of how migration links many
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geographic spaces and many social positions, requiring analysis through
multiple scales of analysis. But for historians, the past is not simply another
place or scale of analysis that can be compared to the present without con-
sidering how the two are also related or connected. Migration develops through
time as well as across space.
Even more important, time is not a unitary category for many historians.
From early works of the

Annales school to E. P. Thompsons descriptions
(1967) of clock time, historians have emphasized differences in peoples per-
ceptions of time, including time as it is experienced during migration. For
those studying gender and migration, the most useful example of differing
notions of time, and their intersection, comes from Tamara Harevens analysis
(1991) of networks of French Canadians and other immigrant peoples entering
textile work in a New England mill town. For her study of the Amoskeag mills,
Hareven (1982) amassed an oral history collection from approximately three
hundred workers as well as demographic data on thousands more. Using these
two very different types of sources, Hareven examined the life course of three
generations (itself a temporal concept) of mill workers in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Harevens analysis of immigrant workers family
economies acknowledged that in explaining employment patterns, what she
called family time (e.g., the number of children or siblings and their ages)
might have as much or even greater salience as industrial time (the business
cycle of the local textile industry). Hareven, in other words, examined several
levels of experiential time against a backdrop of longitudinal data.
Cataclysmic events, such as war and genocide, obviously trigger migrations,
but so too can mundane but upsetting changes in the personal life course.
Julianna Pusks (2000), in a study of Hungarian migrants from one village in
the early twentieth century, noted that while general economic conditions and
information set the stage for migration, it was changes within the cycle of indi-
vidual and family development the arrival of a stepmother or the breakup of
an engagement that provided the nal impetus for migration from the village.
How migrants order their own temporal perceptions of migration of a
far-away past and a contemporary here and now or through the simulta-
neity of transnational communication may be gendered in ways historians have
yet to understand. So may the degree to which family time, migration time,
and the timelines of national states can be reconciled with the temporality of
individual biographies, life courses, and family and generational change and
development. Whether or not social scientists ever come to appreciate the
narrative the story in history they might want to consider the ways in
which historians modes of explanation and of causation open new paths to
Hisroiicai Piisiicrivis 99
understanding the gendering of migration across time as a complement to
analyses of migrations across space.
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