8 h 30 – 10 h 30 : Expériences et trajectoires genrées/ The Gendering of the Migration Experience

Discutant : Paul-André Rosental, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Centre de recherches historique (Paris, France)

• Michael G. Esch, Centre Marc Bloch de Berlin (Allemagne), Trajectoires sociales d'hommes et femmes immigré/e/s de l'Europe de l'Est à Paris, 1900-1940 [Social Trajectories of East European Men and Women in Paris, 1900-1940].

Les débats récents sur les „meurtres d’honneur“, commis par des musulmans immigrés ou de la seconde génération pour châtier les comportements trop modernes ou trop émancipés de leurs sœurs et filles ont mis au premier plan la relation de deux sujets qui intéressent les recherches migratoires depuis assez longtemps. D’abord, il s’agit – sans le dire – d’une discussion sur les rapports entre l’immigration de femmes – préférablement issues de sociétés „arriérées“ et décidemment patriarcales – et leur émancipation des contraintes traditionnelles dans des familles immigrées qui s’accrochent à une mode des vies et des valeurs importées de leurs sociétés d’origine d’une façon apparemment inchangée. Ainsi, cet aspect, formulé p.e. par Nancy Green en 1981, se lie à la réclamation par la majorité des acteurs publiques d’une intégration qui ressemble plutôt à une assimilation culturelle au fur et à mesure complète. En conséquence, non seulement envers les immigrés, mais aussi envers la société entière une image culturellement et – ce qui en est plus – socialement très spécifique des rapports entre femmes et hommes (ainsi que des deux envers la société) semble sans alternatives : Ceux des classes moyennes instruites et assainies financièrement. Il semble en revanche fort utile d’examiner de plus près les trajectoires sociales de ces hommes et femmes immigré/e/s ou issu/e/s de l’immigration qui sont disposés à quitter leurs milieux, appréhendés comme trop étroites et trop obligeants, et d’améliorer, de leur point de vue subjectif, leur vie.
L’intervention proposée ici s’intéresse pour différents milieux d’immigrés de l’Europe de l’Est à Paris dans les premières décennies du XXe siècle. Elle examinera d’abord quelles stratégies pour façonner sa vie sont disponibles dans les différents cadres sociaux et quelle est leur signifiance spécifique. En attribuant à chaque entité sociale le choix de rester dans sa situation (et son milieu) sociale ou de la changer, voir améliorer, ce sont notamment les comportements déviants et leurs résultats qu’il faut prendre en considération, et les reconnaître et analyser sur l’arrière-plan du cadre socioculturel façonné par l’environnement social qui forme l’horizon des acteurs. Pour y arriver, il est nécessaire de mettre en valeur le caractère socioculturel général des milieux en discussion. Ce caractère est construit par deux aspects : Par les caractéristiques sociales et culturelles du milieu et par les prédispositions culturelles des migrant/e/s liées aux sociétés d’origine, mais transformées par les exigences ambivalentes d’une vie précaire dans le sens d’appartenance garantie.
L’intervention démontrera que, à l’extérieur des modes de vie caractérisés par un fonctionnement sans accroc dans la société d’accueil et dans les milieux immigrés, les stratégies et leurs résultats s’étendent de l’avance sociale classique jusqu’à la criminalité. L’issue dépend, voilà l’hypothèse, en même temps de la situation sociale du départ et du gendre. Pour les hommes, la carrière professionnelle et assimilée (ou assimilante) était largement acceptée par les milieux immigrés ainsi que par les sociétés d’accueil (y inclus les acteurs administratifs), en considérant, bien entendu, certaines conjonctures bloquant l’accès aux professions spécifiques sans jamais les fermant complètement. Cette carrière cependant n’était en général réaliste que pour les descendants des classes moyennes. Pour les autres, les jeunes immigrés des classes laborieuses, c’était plus souvent que non la carrière criminelle qui offrait la possibilité d’éviter une vie dans des logements étroits et ténébreux qui oscillait entre un travail physiquement exigeant et intellectuellement peu stimulant où l’avance imaginable consistait à s’établir comme artisan tailleur, casquettier, petit commerçant ou bien comme chauffeur de taxi. Pour les femmes, le choix existait similairement entre une carrière professionnelle dans les professions libres au mesure que ces professions n’empêchaient pas la qualification des femmes pour ces professions et l’effort de s’établir, le plus souvent comme petite commerçante sinon, – dans le IV arrondissement – comme marchande ambulante. On trouve aussi, même parmi les femmes juives, celles dont les efforts de se libérer des contraintes familiales résultaient dans une carrière criminelle – soit comme maîtresse d’un criminel immigré ou non, soit comme prostitué. Il semble évident que la signifiance des différentes trajectoires dépendait de l’horizon social et culturel des individus, mais au fond il s’agit avant tout les possibilités offertes par les milieux qui formaient ces trajectoires. La prostitution de femmes immigrées, par exemple, ainsi que l’effort d’une avance sexualisée (comme par une femme immigrés qui couche avec un homme parce qu’il lui a promis de l’emmener en Argentine) était beaucoup plus important à Clignancourt et à St. Gervais que dans les quartiers riches du VIIIème ou XVIème arrondissement. Dans le même sens, des femmes ayant préférées une carrière professionnelle (le plus souvent comme médecin, rarement comme avocate) au mariage se trouvent plutôt à l’Ouest de Paris. Il en est de même, bien entendu, pour les hommes.
On est habitué de comprendre une criminalité d’étranger comme indicateur d’une intégration manquée. Cette compréhension populaire (et hautement protégé par le discours public) a deux défauts. Primo, il n’existe une criminalité d’étrangers – formule imputant une spécificité basée sur les caractéristiques propres à l’immigré/e – que dans les contravention contre les lois spécifiques n’appliquées qu’aux étrangers. Secundo, le criminel étranger (plutôt que l’étranger criminel) n’importe pas en première ligne ces comportements poursuivis comme non souhaitable, mais il/elle les apprend dans son habitat et les s’approprie. Le même est vrai pour les carrières garantissant un statut social moins précaire, p.e. dans les professions libérales. C’est en ce moment, après l’appropriation accomplie des modèles sociaux produites dans les différents milieux sociaux de la société d’accueil, que les spécificités de l’existence d’immigrés entrent dans les jeux : Elles forment des chances ainsi que des obstacles pour la forme concrète de ces carrières et pour leur réussite ou échec.
L’intervention propose donc d’analyser les trajectoires d’avancement social dans un sens très large, de les mettre en relation non avec l’idéale régnante l’imaginaire la société majoritaire, mais avec les conditions générales et les milieux spécifiques éprouvés, appropriés, puis interprétés et reconstruits par les immigrés, en considérant en même temps leur spécificité sexuelle.

• Hilary-Anne Hallet, Departments of American Studies and History
Rutgers University), Women's Migration and the Making of Early Hollywood. [Migrations féminines et naissance d’Hollywood].

Scholars have yet to reckon with the gendered migration sparked by the American film industry’s relocation to Southern California. This fact can be partially explained by the lack of attention devoted to the larger historical currents that helped to propel women to the West Coast to work in the movies. Historians have all but ignored the important role that the American film industry played in shaping migration to twentieth century Southern California, even as film scholars have slighted how the region’s distinctive settlement impacted both the social landscape of, and public perceptions about, Early Hollywood. Yet during the 1910s and 1920s, motion pictures became both Los Angeles’s largest industry and the strongest magnet drawing new migrants to the region as the explosion of print surrounding the industry’s new home first lodged the idea of “Hollywood” in the public’s imagination. In the single decade between 1915 and 1925, American film production relocated to Los Angeles and the city’s population soared by 300%, becoming the West’s largest urban center in 1922. Hollywood’s coming of age in the City of Angels produced a boomtown with distinctive patterns of sex, age and wage earning. Rather than an environment where young, single men predominated—as has often been the case with boomtowns—the city’s streets teemed with women. Women’s abundance was not the only noteworthy characteristic that showed up on local census maps. Nearly one in five was a “divorcee” or widow. This fact, in turn, helped to account for the city’s record-braking number of single, wage-earners between the ages of twenty-five and forty-four; women who worked when the demands associated with the bearing and raising of children were greatest.
This paper explores both the institutional contexts and the imaginative constructions that helped to produce this demographic reality, concluding by pointing to the troubles that arose over the feminization of the industry’s terrain. In doing so it aims to reveal not just how women’s migration was central to the making of early Hollywood, but how it impacted the cultural battles that erupted along the frontier of mass culture regarding the larger question of how far women’s emancipation should go.
Working women were at the center of the film industry’s expanding fan base in the years in which Hollywood became Hollywood. Accounts of this transition have long detailed a dramatic audience shift that centered on class and ethnicity, leaving out how most at the time considered the sex of Hollywood’s movie-goers their most noteworthy characteristic. During the 1910s many calculated that women were a negligible presence in the movie audience. By the early twenties, some estimated they occupied seventy-five percent of seats. Such conclusions were most likely inflated; reliable statistics on the question are scarce. Yet, during the half-decade before 1920, movie theatre promotions offering everything from child care to beauty products and story lines focused on the dashing and romantic exploits of women and men on screens displayed efforts to design a fan culture pleasing to feminine tastes. Many came to believe the industry’s good fortune demanded catering to the female trade. In order to make a wish into a reality, decisions were often made according to the desires of an idealized, “fanatic” female film spectator.
At the core of Hollywood’s development was the promotion of the city, the industry, and the way of life increasingly associated with both, as a frontier peculiarly open to women’s ambitions to remake the meaning of feminine success and good fortune. The stories spun by industry publicists and mainstream journalists first shaped this imaginary in a manner that displayed the impact of the period’s broader feminist ferment. The first fan magazines like Photoplay, aimed at women readers, routinely devoted pages of copy to stories that sought to incite hopefuls on the path to success out west. Louella Parsons, a journalist who pioneered celebrity reporting as mainstream news, rose to the top of this field by serving up the industry’s women personalities as embodying new parables of feminine success in a frontier that valued women taking risks in previously unimaginable ways. And, indeed, the increasingly female audience for the movies elevated a disproportionate number of women to stardom. Early Hollywood’s women workers offered some of the most arresting models of professional advancement available to other women in the early twentieth century. In a trajectory that followed those of other women professionals, their record of influence as actresses, directors, writers, producers, and publicists through the early 1920s would not be equaled until more than half a century later. These women enacted, directed, and produced movies, shaping the infant industry and the new images of femininity and masculinity that it sold. They churned out the publicity that filled newspapers and fan magazines that explained who mattered to the industry and what the business meant.
By the early twenties, however, Hollywood’s efforts to attract young women had perhaps succeeded too well. The female migrants who relocated to Los Angeles came under fire in mainstream news accounts. Reports increasingly embodied all of Los Angeles working women in the figure of the “’extra girl’” who became the quintessential representative associated with Hollywood’s new bohemian habitat and social mores. These reports portrayed such women as either in danger, or as providing models that endangered other women. As the movie industry became conflated with the controversy surrounding such women, the industry became a pervasive symbol of the cultural changes associated with women’s growing freedom of movement.

• Dorothea Schneider, University of Illinois, Department of History (USA), Female Immigrants from Europe to the United States in the First Half of the Twentieth Century [Les migrations féminines de l’Europe vers les Etats-Unis durant la première moitié du XXe siècle].

Borders and border crossings have had a deeply gendered character over the past centuries. Scholars of transnational migration have recognized this feature of modern migrations and migration policies and studies of the gendered character of migration are therefore numerous. For the most part they emphasize the nearly unilateral power of the state or other public institutions over immigrants and the disenfranchised status of women immigrants in particular. My paper will make the argument that women migrants were well aware that they were in a potentially vulnerable and inferior position as migrants out of Europe and into North America. But while patriarchal laws limited the mobility and freedom of female migrants, they could also provide ways for women to gain access to mobility and, ultimately, economic and social opportunity. I will show that women immigrants knew that for them successful border crossings were predicated on understanding and interpreting the gendered rules for emigration, immigration and naturalization to their advantage. Women migrants had agency, I will argue, to renegotiate the gendered conditions of their journeys in ways that would be advantageous for themselves. As a result, women, while generally poorer, more physically frail and more likely to be considered morally suspect than men (especially if they travelled alone) were a minority among the rejected immigrants to North America and they also made a up a minority of deportees from the continent between the late nineteenth century and the 1940s. On the other hand women became a majority of legal immigrants to the United States, beginning in 1930 and a majority among those taking out U.S. citizenship beginning in the early 1940s.
My paper will begin with a description of emigration controls which authorities (both European and North American) tried to impose on women emigrants in the countries and ports of departure and on the ships that brought women overseas. Police surveillance, inspections of women by local authorities were used to discourage some from leaving. Americans authorities added their own layer of scrutiny by stationing officials and representatives of shipping lines in the ports of embarkation. Women defended themselves against these hurdles and prohibitions. They carried with them the letters, testimonies, and workbooks required of servants and other unattached workers in the nineteenth century. In addition, during the trip they put themselves under the protection of a male relative, preferably their husband or father, or another adult male with close kinship or geographic ties. As women dependent on a man, they were accorded more legitimacy which made their journey and eventual entry to the United States easier.
For women who managed to depart as single working class migrants, finding a male escort to travel could be advantageous, giving them quasi protected status upon entry to the United States or Canada. But this was also a risky strategy as immigration inspectors in the United States saw such arrangements as morally dubious unless they themselves understood and approved of the ties of kinship and patriarchal hierarchy that bound the women to their companions. Some travelers tried to remove the stigma of being a working class single woman by traveling second (not third) class, where they were less likely to be scrutinized by officials. Economic status was also interpreted in other ways by women to their advantage. Most unskilled women who came as future wage earners declared themselves to be domestics. Working class women immigrants were assumed to have the necessary domestic skills to work in this occupation. But even women whose life circumstances did not point to a life of domestic activity previously, (because they had been accused of prostitution at home or in the United States or because they had lived with men but outside marriage), used this designation, often successfully.
Nevertheless, domesticity turned out to be the sharpest double edged sword for immigrant women. It represented both the strongest claim for immigrant women to a place in the United States, and a high threshold for them to cross when they sought admission. Women were challenged on their claim to domesticity by officials in many ways. Female factory workers accused of prostitution, because it seemed doubtful that single women workers could support themselves in a morally unimpeachable way. Abandoned wives needed to show that they were able to maintain their domesticity in the face of immoral male behaviour. My research will show that women enlisted help from lawyers, middle class women, kinship networks and social service agencies in their quest to show themselves as moral and deserving immigrants and that officials were reluctant to challenge the women once such help had been obtained.
The final part of my paper will examine women’s’ strategies in gaining U.S. citizenship through naturalization by working through the gendered ideals that prevailed in naturalization law. Married women were covered under the naturalization of their husbands, unmarried women up to the age of 18 were covered under their fathers until 1922. This meant that few women became citizens on their own before the 1920s. Most of them qualified on the strength of their relationships to adult men, not because of their individual qualities, desires or knowledge. It was only after 1922 that American officials set out to teach women how to define and present themselves as future citizens. This turned out to be difficult task, since American citizenship had always been closely tied to masculine virtues of involvement public life, and economic self-sufficiency. But by the 1930s women immigrants had carved out their own definitions of citizenship by presenting themselves as consumers, workers, community activists and well informed mothers to officials and in many public settings. Women immigrants were able to see and use the advantages of naturalization fore directly than male immigrants and by the 1960s and 1970s they were becoming the most important cohort in the network of sponsored family migration which is dominant in U.S. (legal) immigration today.

• Angelika Sauer, Texas Lutheran University (USA), Gendered Transnationalism in the Atlantic World: The Immigration Work of Elise von Koerber, 1872-1884 [Un transnationalisme féminin. L’œuvre d’Elise Von Koerber, 1872-1884].

My paper uses the concepts of transcultural and transnational lives to analyze the work of Elise von Koerber in the field of managing female migration in the Atlantic world in the last third of the 20ths century. In an era of nationalism and nation-building, Koerber’s female migration work spanned Canada, the United States, Britain, Germany and Switzerland in an interesting display of transcultural competency and transnational identity.
Transnationalism, a concept most often used in the context of the social sciences’ globalization debate, reminds us of the existence of social processes and social fields that transgress geographic, political and cultural borders. By combining a cultural history approach and its questions of individual agency with the structural context which is typically the provenance of political historians, I am attempting to shed light on how individuals like Elise von Koerber managed to insert themselves into one or more national projects. In my paper I am also emphasizing the limitations, both political and historiographical, that have typically circumscribed the transnational life.
Elise von Koerber was a German-born, middle class, widowed mother of four who worked as an immigration recruitment agent for the Canadian government from 1872 to 1878. Beyond recruiting settler groups in German-speaking areas of Europe (Switzerland, Austria and Germany), she also started to build a transnational network of philanthropic associations designed to assist in the protection and management of migrant women and children. She continued this work after she lost her civil service position in 1878, hoping to create for herself a position at the head of a large transnational organization modeled on the Red Cross or at least a Canadian position as supervisor of female immigration. With her work she intended to create a new transnational gendered space, where women helped women migrate from one place to another. Koerber’s ideas allow an insight into what might be called a philosophy of maternal transnationalism.
I argue that Koerber attempts to create a borderless, gendered space not only changed the way the Canadian government dealt with female migrants but also gave Koerber herself, who did not seem to have a national identity, an alternative sense of belonging and a life’s purpose. I further suggest that her ideas reflect transcultural competency in several ways, drawing their inspirations from German liberalism, Swiss internationalism and Victorian feminism. Koerber was fluent in English, French and German and moved with considerable ease in circles of the educated middle class in several countries. Long before the age of fast travel and easy communication, she was at home in Ottawa, New York, London, Lausanne, Geneva and Berlin.
Yet, throughout her public career, Koerber encountered obstacles, created by gendered national discourses of bureaucracy, citizenship and belonging. She complained about “the general distrust as to a woman’s capacity and judgment in public matters.” Her transnational lifestyle of crossing the Atlantic regularly and living in different countries also ran into the very practical problem of citizenship: The widow of an Austrian, naturalized in the colony of Canada before Confederation and born in the German state of Baden before the German Empire was formed found out that it seemed impossible to ascertain whether she was a British, Austrian or German subject.
Political difficulties on both sides of the Atlantic further limited what she was able to do. From the beginning, she encountered hostile nationalist attitudes in Germany. Koerber was personally attacked for her efforts and criticized for being unpatriotic. Similarly, her emphasis on better rather than more immigration failed to excite many of her Canadian compatriots in the 1870s. Her increasingly defensive reporting suggests that she was accused of not serving Canadian interests when she worked for her transnational female migration system. Under John A. Macdonald’s Conservative nationalist government, any dreams of Canada as part of a North Atlantic migration system that included Continental Europe and the United States were no longer welcome. The dominant discourse in Canada of the 1880s became British and imperial to the exclusion of any North American or North Atlantic dimension. In the final analysis, this is what put an end to Koerber’s life’s work.
Similarly, my paper suggests reasons why an individual like Koerber has not found her historiographical niche. I suggest that Koerber’s biggest historiographical handicap lies in the fact that her vision and ideas were outside any dominant historical narrative. She crossed borders, not only literally in her travels but figuratively in her thinking, and imagined spaces and communities that were not confined to any one national or historiographical territory. Like the inhabitants of the borderlands between two countries, she straddled European and North American culture, drawing inspiration from each but belonging to neither. She was an outsider wherever she went. She remained a historiographical outsider, refusing to fit into national contribution history based on the assimilation paradigm.
Koerber, and people like her, will stay invisible until historians tackle the difficult task of reconstructing the past dimension of transnational social fields. An Atlantic world approach goes a long way towards rectifying this imbalance. Koerber’s life an work further suggest, that such an approach has to be gendered and classed to fully understand the experience of migration.

 

10 h 45 – 12 h 45 : Travail/Work

Discutante : Liane Mozère, Université de Metz, Centre de Recherches Universitaire lorrain d'Histoire (France)

• Yakari Takai, Aichi Kenritsu University, Department of British-American Studies (Japon), More than a Defense of Traditional Family: Unpaid Work of French-Canadian Women in an Early Twentieth-Century Textile City [Les Canadiens français au Massachussetts durant la première moitié du XXe siècle. Transformation des rapports de genre dans la migration].

In the early twentieth century, a large proportion of French-Canadian families in Lowell, Massachusetts, could not live solely on the wages earned by the male head of the household. A 1909 report of the Immigration Commission shows that the total yearly income of French-Canadian households in Lowell averaged $800, an amount 1.6 times greater than the average annual wage of a single male worker. Whenever possible, wives and children brought home additional wages that eased their families’ precarious financial situations. As the amount of family income provided by children declined, the contributions of women became increasingly more important.
Unlike wage work, the responsibility for which was shared, to varying degrees, by both women and men within Lowell’s French-Canadian families, a vast array of work, unpaid and having to do with social production and reproduction, fell invariably, and often entirely, upon women’s shoulders. The amount and nature of such women’s tasks led to a definition of unpaid domestic work as women’s work, which reflected, and at times perpetuated, a gendered hierarchy within an immigrant family and Lowell’s broader economy.
Notwithstanding the saliency of the division that defined unpaid work as women’s work, existing studies on immigrant families of French-Canadian origin have rarely addressed such issues. Such oversight is partly a byproduct of the paradigm shift that occurred within the field of migration history since the 1960s. The emphasis placed on the continuity, rather than disruption, of migrants’ lives as they moved from their land of departure to that of settlement has given rise to a tendency toward underlining the immigrant family as the most important source of ethnic resilience and adaptation in the face of the potentially destructive and dehumanizing effects of industrialization and urbanization. Accordingly, the immigrant family emerged as a monolithic unit bound by the common interests of all its members.
For example, the very title of Tamara Hareven’s seminal work, Family Time and Industrial Time, is indicative of this propensity to consider the family as an active historical subject, rather than as an arena in which women and men struggled through co-operation and conflict. Moreover, while Hareven has skillfully underlined the resilience of extended families in facilitating migration of French Canadians to the New England textile mills, she fails to look at gender dynamics within extended family networks and immediate families. As a result, as Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson have critically noted, immigrant families are depicted as invariably providing the “structural context within which an individual decides to migrate.”
My proposed paper builds on insights advanced by practitioners of women’s studies, gender history, and migration studies in addressing one of the hitherto understudied aspects of the daily lives of French-Canadian immigrant families: unpaid work – household work and care work, in particular – performed by immigrant women and men. To what extent did migration transform, or render fixed, women’s role in assuming unpaid domestic work in Lowell’s French-Canadian families? In what ways did female-centred networks helped wage-earning French-Canadian wives, mothers and daughters to assume such roles, or burden them? How did women and men view the amount and nature of work they performed and the power relationships that informed their family lives in the urban, industrial milieu of Lowell?
Evidence derived from collection of oral histories and U.S. federal census manuscripts emerges at odds with a prediction on the part of early feminist scholars on American-born female wage earners that growing participation in the paid labour market would increase the scope for women’s emancipation. Unpaid domestic work performed by Lowell’s French Canadian women I studied shows that women’s wage-earning power did not provided them with not so much a source of emancipation. Rather, the amount and nature of their work point to the tenacity of gendered division. While a growing minority of single women migrated, worked, and lived outside the immediate family context, the majority of wives, mothers, and daughters of French Canadian background likely considered that families provided the best conceivable way of bringing a better life to themselves as well as to their families. As Donna Gabaccia has argued elsewhere, the importance of family for Lowell’s French Canadian women – with its internal conflicts and tensions, on the one hand, and newly expanded functionality, on the other – grew within the framework of transnational migration strategies.
French Canadians formed by far the largest group among the foreign-born population in early twentieth-century Lowell. They constituted about one quarter of the city’s population. This single important fact about French Canadian immigrants has been largely overlooked both by U.S. and Canadian historians including immigration historians. Cursory attention given to the subject becomes even more glaring, when one considers the number, the duration, and particular – yet changing – patterns of movements of this group south of the border. According to demographer Yolande Lavoie, the migration movement of French Canadians numbered about 1,000,000, representing one in ten Canadiens, and continued over the span of one hundred years from about 1830 to 1930. The majority, who headed for Lowell in the early twentieth century, were following the well-known paths explored by their predecessors in the last century.

Notes

1) U.S. Senate, Immigration Commission, The Immigrants in Industries, Reports of the Immigration Commission, 61st Cong., 2d Sess., Doc. 633 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1911), vol. 10, 264.
2) Frances Early, “French-Canadian Beginnings in an American Community: Lowell, Massachusetts, 1868-1886” (Ph.D. diss., Concordia University, 1979; Bruno Ramirez, On the Move: French-Canadian and Italian Migrants in the North Atlantic Economy, 1860-1914 (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991); Ramirez, Crossing the 49th Parallel: Migration from Canada to the United States, 1900-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Yves Roby, Les Franco-Americans de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (1776-1930) (Sillery, Québec: Septentrion, 1990); Yves Frenette, Les Francophones de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, 1524-2000 (Sainte-Foy, Québec: INRS-Culture et société, 2000); Jean Lamarre, Les Canadiens français du Michigan: Leur contribution dans le développement de la vallée de la Saginaw et de la péninsule de Keweenaw 1840-1914 (Sillery, Québec: Les editions du Septentrion, 2000)
3) Tamara K. Hareven, Family Time and Industrial Time: The Relationship between the Family and Work in a New England Industrial Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
4) Thomas Dublin, Transforming Women’s Work: New England Lives in the Industrial Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 11-12.
5) Elaine Bauer and Paul Thompson, “’She’s Always the Person with a Very Global Vision’: The Gender Dynamics of Migration, Narrative Interpretation and the Case of Jamaican Transnational Families,” Gender & History vol. 16, no. 2 (August 2004), 334-375.
6) Heidi Hartmann, “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1981, vol.6, no. 3 366-394; Franca Iacovetta, Such Hardworking People, chap.6; Donna Gabaccia, Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992); Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends, ed. Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Patricia R. Pessar, “Engendering Migration Studies: The Case of New Immigrants in the United States,” in ed. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gender and U.S. Immigration, 20-42; Patricia Fernandez-Kelly and Anna Garcia, “Power Surrendered, Power Restored: The Politics of Home and Work among Hispanic Women in Southern California and Southern Florida,” in Women, Politics, and Change, eds. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Guerin (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1990): 130-149; Sheba Mariam George, When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
7) Donna R. Gabaccia, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street: Housing and Social Change Among Italian Immigrants, 1890-1930 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1984); Simone Cinotto, “Leonard Covello, the Covello Papers, and the History of Eating Habits among Italian Immigrants in New York,” Journal of American History (September 2004), 497-521.
8) In line with this argument, I have chosen to use the terms “migrants” and “migration,” in place of “immigration” and “emigration,” unless they became repetitious. This is because I consider that, as Donna Gabaccia has stated, these terms better describe the reality of multidirectional and multiple movements of migration within and across the border. Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000).
9) Yolande Lavoie, L’émigration des Québécois aux États-Unis de 1840 à 1930 (Québec, 1979), 45, Tableau 7.

• Vera Hajto, Doctorante, Université catholique de Louvain, Département d’histoire moderne (Belgique), Hungarian Migrant Women Recruited as Domestic Servants to Belgium between 1929 and 1949 [Domestiques hongroises en Belgique, 1929-1949].

„Most of us were single and obtained a peculiar nickname ’spinsters’. We didn’t have hard feelings against them, they were about right. We didn’t have time to marry. On our evening-off we quickly washed the rest of the dishes and go straightaway to the ’Hungarian House’. Oh! to the cinema, maybe two times a year when we managed to visit one…”

These are memory fragments of a Hungarian woman about the social aspects of her migrant life. She was 20 in 1949 when she arrived to the Flemish city of Ghent by airplane. At the airport her boss was already waiting for transporting her to his townhouse where her new life as a domestic servant would begin. She was among the last ones who left their country before the fall of the iron curtain.
During the first half of the 20th century several migration flows characterized by different features arrived from Hungary to Belgium. One of them considered only of young, unmarried women. This presentation deals with the migrants’ experience, more precisely it focuses on the establishment, organization and working process of the social networks of those young Hungarian women who were recruited in Hungary to come to Belgium and become a domestic servant in a Belgian middle-class/upper middle-class household. Their life stories and oral testimonies are the principle base of this presentation.
The theme discussed in this paper fits well into the wider perspective of the recent international debate about gender and migration. It gives a very good example of a woman’s migration that is running unhindered along its own lines. As Silvia Pedraza argued the experience of the immigration had a profound impact on the public and private lives of these women – their participation in the labor market, their marital patterns and satisfaction, their social contacts and their autonomy and self-esteem. Furthermore the case of immigrant women working in domestic service seems to be a special arena for examining the genderdized dynamics of the migrant experiences. Domesticity implies a closed female environment that largely excludes men. The public and private spheres of life merge into each other and may provide the migrant domestic servant with beneficial outcomes. Although domestic service might be seen as the most traditionally female because it restricted women as wage-earners to the domestic realm, it also held emancipatory potentials. It allowed for both financial autonomy and daily contact with people of different social class, and thus mediated in the immigrant women’s introduction to the host/new society, such as it was in the case of Irish immigrant women in the United States during the 19th century or Italian migrants women in Belgium.
The historical research on immigrants in Belgium is currently engaged in the study of the relationship of gender and migration as well as of domesticity and migration. In it female migration is mostly described as chain migration, especially in the case of Italian women, with young unmarried females gaining greater prominence as the subjects of the migrant studies. This paper intends to elaborate further the issue of female migrants who migrated due to their individual decision and established a new life with the help of their social networks. The story of the Hungarian maids in Belgium is about young, unmarried women who traveled alone, did not follow their fathers or fiancées, and only occasionally their sisters. They were extremely dependent on a properly working social network, an immigration network which existed through family and friendship, community practices such as festivals, membership in associations, social organization or religious community.
How did they established and used their social contacts? In their case the social networks fundamentally defined the migratory paths, where the migration could have become temporary, permanent or recurrent. The networking gave an impetus to start with their journey, assisted them during their stay and helped them to return to Hungary or to migrate further to a third country. How and in which settings did these social ties operate? Was it a fellow-woman who played the role of the agent or men also got the chance? Social organization and the character of their occupation rendered young women migrants protected and at the same time rather isolated from the outside world and men. Did these girls develop a specific social life? How did their relationship with the other sex evolve?
In 1936 on the initiative and under the leadership of a nun involved in secular affairs, the Hungarian domestic servants established the Circle of Saint Margaret. Through this organization the case of the Hungarian girls was taken up by the Catholic Church with the aim to help the girls filling in their „empty” hours by engaging themselves with „useful” activities and to provide them with spiritual guidance. One of the aims of the paper is to investigate the impact of this organization on the life of the migrants by tracing its intervention and attempts to structure the life of female migrants. Research suggests that there were two main environments, the Belgian household as the occupational environment and the Circle of St. Margaret, that bore a defining influence on the lives and future prospects of these young women. We would like to critically ponder whether there were ways for the women migrants to build their lives outside of this restrictive milieu.
Working with the methods of oral history helps one to reveal the individual experiences of the Hungarian migrants. The research results can shed light on such important information as individual decision making processes or personal relationships especially if the case is a closed „women’s world”. Privacy in a household was always an important requirement and this can mean lack of information sources for the researcher. Owing to this fact next to a smaller portion of classical research method, this paper is mainly relies on oral history methods, life story evidences. The interviewed migrants who were looking back at an early period of their lives considered themselves lucky to participate in an adventure, which sometimes turned out to be a life-long hard work, and an existence between two countries and mixed identities.

• Karen C. Flynn, University of Illinois, African-American Studies and Research Program (USA), Caribbean Migrant Nurses in Britain and Canada: Migration, Work and Identity [Infirmières des Caraïbes en Grande Bretagne et au Canada, 1950-1980]. [texte]

Research into the formation of multi-layered diasporic subjectivities has been emanating primarily from the literary and representational disciplines. Thus, Renaldo Walcott, while trying not to posit literature and its critics as the vanguard of cultural knowing, he maintains that, in writing about black Canada it is imaginative works [that] often render much more complex and interesting constructions of our multiple historical experiences than other cultural forms.’ Influenced largely by cultural studies, Walcott’s assertion is hardly surprising given that very little attempts have been made within the social sciences to place the debates raised in theorizing diasporic experiences in empirical investigation. Using an interdisciplinary framework, coupled with oral narratives the purpose of the presentation is to focus on the experiences of two groups of Caribbean nurses: those who migrated as young women from the Caribbean to Britain, then trained as nurses and subsequently migrated to Canada; and those who migrated directly from the Caribbean to Canada already trained as nurses. I focus on the multiple factors that contribute to the constitution and redefinition of identity among Caribbean migrant nurses. Some of themes I pursue in this presentation are: identity formation among Caribbean girls; young Caribbean women and migration; the forging of a professional identity and the ongoing formation of a transnational identity as it relates to conceptualization of community and the multiple meanings of “home,” “belonging”.

• Karine Meslin, Université de Nantes, Centre nantais de sociologie (France), Transformations de l'ordre sexué et tiraillements identitaires : l'exemple des migrantes cambodgiennes en France. [Identities and Sexual roles. Cambodian Women in France after 1975].

Si l’immigration est le plus souvent pensée par le prisme des hommes, c’est parce qu’ils en sont généralement les pionniers. D’une part, l’espace migratoire, avec ses accords et ses règles, a été conçu pour des hommes seuls et a longtemps écarté les femmes. D’autre part, les migrants venus en France pour travailler temporairement, n’ont admis que tard leur installation prolongée en terre étrangère (A. Sayad, 1999) et, par conséquent, le regroupement de leur famille. Dans cette configuration, les femmes qui finissent par migrer maîtrisent moins bien que leurs époux respectifs les codes et les mœurs de leur pays d’adoption. Elles demeurent en retrait et l’ordre sexué quitté peine à s’estomper. Il arrive même que ce dernier se rigidifie, lorsque les hommes cherchent à renforcer leur domination dans l’enceinte familiale, pour compenser une dévalorisation professionnelle et sociale (C. Quiminal, 1990) et pour restaurer leur image aux yeux de leurs compatriotes. Ce n’est que sous les effets d’une socialisation primaire en France, des enfants de ces migrants, que la division sexuée des rôles et des représentations se réajuste progressivement ou, pour le moins, visiblement.
L’immigration que nous nous proposons d’analyser et que nous avons étudiée dans le cadre de notre thèse de sociologie (1), se distingue du modèle décrit. Il s’agit de l’immigration des Cambodgiens arrivés en France entre 1975 et 1990, au titre de réfugiés politiques. Dans leur cas, hommes et femmes fuient un pays dévasté par la guerre civile et le régime des Khmers rouges. Ils sont indistinctement candidats au départ vers la France. L’immigration cambodgienne ne s’institue donc pas par son versant masculin.
Les conséquences sont importantes. On remarque que l’arrivée simultanée des hommes et des femmes ne renforce pas la domination masculine, bien qu’elle soit traditionnellement établie. Ajouté à cela, le modèle familial traditionnel est affaibli avant même que les migrants ne s’exilent. Les Khmers rouges ont non seulement éclaté les unités familiales afin d’en reconstituer de nouvelles de façon aléatoire, mais ils ont surtout provoqué la mort de millions de Khmers, de sorte qu’au sortir de leur règne, de nombreuses familles sont amputées. Jeter les bases d’un nouveau compromis familial semble donc plus envisageable qu’ailleurs. En outre, l’arrivée de certaines femmes veuves ou chargées de subvenir aux besoins de leurs parents provoque une mise au travail des femmes cambodgiennes plus rapide et plus massive que dans les autres groupes de migrants. Ces raisons contribuent à comprendre que les transformations de l’ordre sexué quitté soient accélérées dans le cadre de cette immigration atypique. L’immigration cambodgienne se présente donc comme un miroir grossissant des réaménagements des rapports de genre en migration et des tiraillements identitaires qu’ils génèrent.
L’objet de notre communication consistera à revenir sur les mutations des représentations et des rôles sexués, dans le cadre de cette immigration précipitée d’hommes et de femmes. Nous tenterons tout d’abord de retracer brièvement les conditions de la venue des migrant(e)s cambodgien(ne)s en France, afin d’en saisir les spécificités. Puis nous verrons que les réaménagements des rapports de genre, qui rapprochent les Cambodgiens du "modèle français" et les préservent des critiques d’archaïsme que subissent d’autres groupes dits "communautaires", ne sont pas sans poser question. Pour cela, nous nous pencherons sur différentes trajectoires de femmes marquées par un affaiblissement des frontières qui, avant leur départ du Cambodge, séparaient le masculin du féminin. Il ne s’agira pas de montrer des trajectoires linéaires qui donneraient de la migration l’image d’un acte libérateur délivrant les femmes d’une tradition sexuée, évidemment jugée néfaste, et leur garantissant une émancipation via l’adhésion au modèle français. Les réalités que ces femmes traversent sont beaucoup plus complexes. Elles permettent de comprendre que les aménagements de l’ordre sexué sont à géométries variables – cet ordre peut être aménagé dans le contexte familial et ne pas l’être à l’échelle du groupe communautaire, modifié dans les faits et non dans les esprits, accepté subjectivement et remis en cause socialement… – et génèrent donc de forts tiraillement identitaires.

(1) Meslin, K. (2004), Les réfugiés cambodgiens des Pays de la Loire, Etude ethnographique d’une immigration de "bonne réputation", thèse de doctorat de sociologie, Nantes.