The changing role of women in the migration process
Ursula Apitzsch, University of Frankurt, Germany
U
ntil the 1970s, mainstream sociology failed to recognise that the main constituting and transforming element of migration flows — both inward and outward — is not the success or failure to assimilate individuals to the norms of western industrial societies, but rather a process I call the ‘dialectics of family-centredness’. Through the focal position that women hold in the family project, a position they have acquired historically in virtually all societies, women play a dominant as opposed to a peripheral role within the migration process.
In the following I should like, firstly, to briefly recapitulate the ‘sociological perspective’ on women’s migration. Secondly, I shall present some empirical studies that identify women as subjects and protagonists of migration processes, and, thirdly, I shall address the debate on equality and differences in migration processes and draw some conclusions regarding the role of women migrants in the European labour market.
The sociological perspective on women’s migration
The central issues in German and Swiss migration research since the early 1970s have been acculturation, assimilation and deculturation — that is, research has been based in key respects on the assumption that migrants should be understood as members of certain cultures of origin. The concept of assimilation draws on the notion of ‘culture change’ inspired by cultural anthropology and commonly entertained in the USA since the 1930s. Acculturation, in the classic definition formulated by Redfield and Herskovits in 1936, encompasses certain phenomena that are generated through direct and persistent contact between groups from different cultures, with such contact giving rise to changes in the cultural models of one or both groups (Redfield and Herskovits 1936, 149). This very definition is itself an illustration of the basic problems inherent in applying the notion of culture to the migration debate. There is an underlying assumption that cultures should be understood as monolithic and separate. Internal gender differentiation, for example, is generalised from the outset, if referred to at all; women, through their special ties to family and tradition, are seen as bearers of the culture of origin in its purer form. This conception leads to the idea of migration causing ‘culture shock’, ‘culture change stress’ and ‘cultural lag’. Attention is focused on the ‘deficits’ that arise through migration, while migration theories are conceived of as the basis on which to compensate for or surmount cultural deficits. Family-centredness is thus viewed as a special obstacle to modernisation.
The first West German studies that explicitly addressed the situation of women migrants — especially in the context of social work and migration research on children — were based on this cultural paradigm. This led to typifications in terms of differentials in modernity, discontinuities in modernity and the more or less successful assimilation to Western values (Schmidt-Koddenberg 1989). Women appear doubly disadvantaged on account of their culture and gender. Orientation to employment and the family are viewed as two diametrically opposite poles on the modernisation scale (Taravella 1984).
If we look beyond the situation in Germany, we can discern a decisive change since the mid-1970s in the approach taken by researchers to the social situation of women migrants. 1984 saw the publication in Paris of a first comprehensive international biblio-graphy on Les femmes migrantes 1965-1983, in which the author, Louis Taravella, saw the immigration controls imposed since the economic crisis of 1974 as a crucial factor behind a new awareness of immigration problems.
This crisis of the global economy was accompanied by attempts to stop the very migration flows from countries on the European periphery to the major cities that had previously been encouraged by government immigration agencies. These efforts to stem immigration have an unintended social effect similar to those that had been observed previously in Great Britain after immigration from Common-wealth countries was subjected to strict controls. Restrictive legislation in Great Britain since 1962 ‘compelled migrants to take decisions in favour of permanent settlement that they would probably not have taken otherwise’ (Watson 1980, 43f). Tem-porary migration become final emigration, because a return from the country of origin to the host country was now beset with problems. As a result, other members of the family come to join those who have already emigrated, while second- and third-generation youths attend schools in the host country and try to gain access to the indigenous labour market.
The dialectics of family-centredness; women as protagonists of the migration project
What, empirically speaking, is the relationship between work and family among women of the first and second generation? In Taravella’s description of the ‘feminisation’ of European migration since the mid-1970s, one is struck by the fact that the presence of migrant women in the labour market was not really acknowledged until these women were perceived as having a Muslim culture. In fact, women in post-war Europe were often protagonists of internal migration and migration flows within the EC that were not subject to immigration controls. In French sociology, this was remarked upon here and there en passant as early as the 1960s, as in Bourdieu’s 1962 study on predominantly female migration from rural areas of France (Bordieu 1962). In the 1980s, Piselli (1980) and Arlacchi (1989) studied the kinship structures and cultural roots of the Calabrian Mafia in Italy, showing that migration is often chosen (especially by women) as an alternative to falling victim to regressive developments in the regions of origin. Mirjana Morokvasic’s study in former Yugoslavia found that ‘in a milieu where unwritten laws have drawn the boundaries of acceptable behaviour for women, where only certain categories of women are socially accepted..., survival is very difficult for those women who have violated these rules or who do not fall into one of the socially accepted categories. If this situation is coupled with the impossibility of an independent livelihood, many women see emigration as one or even the only way to escape from this predicament (Morokvasic 1989, 77f).
A biographical study I carried out with 40 Italian women in the Rhine-Main area of Germany showed, however, that it is quite typical for women in extreme situations, also with several small children of infant and school age, to provide the crucial impetus for the whole family to migrate, even for the second and third time after the return home proved fruitless, or that they migrate with several small children before the husband and take on work (Apitzsch 1990a).
There is also very clear and statistically documented evidence of the widespread resistance offered by women to any return to their regions of origin. Most first-generation women migrants will verbally profess that they intend to return home at some stage, at the latest when they retire. The statistics suggest otherwise, however. According to a UN study carried out in 1979 entitled Labour Supply and Migration in Europe[1], for about every 100 men of a particular nationality who return home, there were 82 women in the case of Greeks, and only 44 Italian women. It is obvious that this trend has not weakened to this day, as shown by the current statistics on male and female migrants leaving the host country on reaching retirement age. Women seem to prefer living with their children and grandchildren in migration, even in cramped living quarters, to a life in their own house in their home village[2].
What factors account for this peculiarly ambivalent orientation of women to the family project, on the one hand, and to the host society, on the other? From the results of the biographical study I conducted, I would no longer speak of a ‘field-specific orientation’ (to family and occupation) among second-generation women migrants, but rather a ‘dialectic of family orientation’. Whereas male youths are exempted from all duties within the family and orient themselves very early on to their peer group — mostly within the particular ethnic colony — girls, especially the oldest ones in each family, bear the main burden of domestic labour when both parents work. Katharina Ley has shown that the employment rate of women migrants during the family phase was always much higher than that of Swiss women. A declining employment rate is due, as Czarina Wilpert and Maria Eleonora Karsten have shown, not to a lack of employment orientation, but to factors that push such women into insecure employment (Karsten 1987, 9-18).
A peculiar development now occurs among girls with this experience: the more intensive their responsibility for the family, the more likely they are to evaluate the emigration project on their own terms, to perform a summary evaluation of their situation and to take corrective action. In other words, those young people who realise through their involvement in the family that each year of emigration diminishes further their chances of successfully returning home are under more pressure to seek a successful outcome to the migration project in the host society. Girls are quite clear in their own minds that they cannot expect any assistance from the ethnic colony.
By contrast, those young people who are traditionally exempted from family duties and responsibilities — and we have every reason to assume that this applies for the majority of males — can only utilise their scope for action under the conditions of migration by casting themselves in the role of outsider, by playing with deviance careers, etc. In any case, they can be quite certain that the institutions of the ethnic colony will at least provide them with a basic livelihood in casual, temporary jobs. Many of these young men attempt at an early age to form ties through traditional marriage, and in this way escape from the nascent anomie in their situation. Biographical studies have also showed, however, that second-generation women migrants are reluctant to accept such traditional ties, and that they try to engineer a ‘contract’ in which they have a very strong position.
These observations offer a plausible hypothesis for interpreting the astonishing differences in school performance between migrant boys and girls. Whereas second-generation migrant girls attain virtually the same standards as German girls by the time they leave school, according to all existing statistics, migrant boys display enormous deficits[3].
This finding is substantiated by the biographical study I carried out, which showed that women migrants tend to pin all their hopes on education. Mothers try, through their daughters, to achieve their own frustrated hopes of escaping the eternal cycle of subordination. Very often, the father’s refusal to allow his daughter an appropriate education leads to full-blown rebellion within the family. It is not unusual in such cases for women to leave their husbands and take the children with them. Women migrants from EU countries, for example, are not reliant on their husband having a residence permit. (Immigrant women from non-EU countries are dependent on their husbands having such a permit, which means they lack the autonomy to determine their place of residence).
These observed cases of ‘family revolts’, particularly in connection with a daughter’s education, are by no means confined to non-Muslim families. Violaine des Villers’s film about young Algerian women in Brussels, La tête a l’envers, which was produced in 1993 for ‘Arte’, the German-French TV channel, provides some beautiful examples. One of the young women portrayed in the film was born in Belgium; her parents are from the Maghreb, and illiterate. The mother decides to leave her Muslim husband when he refuses to buy his daughter the things she needs for school. The daughter is now a sports teacher in the St. Gil district of Brussels, where the film shows her training young people from the district — predominantly of North African origin — on the flying trapeze. ‘Teaching little Moroccan boys ... was difficult’, she says, ‘the children can’t look you in the eyes at first ... they have not been brought up to look up to women ... but their view changes ...’. Their view has to change, because the boys must trust their teacher if they do not want to fall from the trapeze. One of the assistants in the gymnasium had left her Kabyle village with her family only four years previously (that is, before the interview took place) and had come to Brussels via Turin. ‘There are things where I wouldn’t give in’, she says, ‘for example, if my husband tried to push me into giving up my career and my independence’. She also indicates, quite clearly, that such rebellious thinking had developed prior to emigrating. Back in her home village, she tries to relate to tribal traditions in a very reflective manner. This woman migrant is proud of her Berbertraditions and shows some very beautiful photographs ofher grandmother in traditional dress. She is equally proud of a picture showing a piece of Berber graffiti on a police station wall: ‘If my thoughts were a man, they would have to imprison me’.
Another common feature in these narratives is the hope that education will increase women’s chances on the labour market. All these girls share a diffuse anxiety that they have no real chances of being integrated into the labour market according to universal criteria, but they are unsure about how best to respond. Despite having a good education, they suddenly disappear from the occupational statistics, where they play a marginal role, also in relation to male youths with the same ethnic background. The gender-specific segmentation of the labour market, as also applies for German women, operates more intensively in their case. Indeed, German women need the domestic services of immigrant women as a prerequisite for getting the good jobs.
At this point I should like to address the differences between women, in this case German and immigrant women, and consider the question of ‘divided’ sisterhood.
Consequences for the role of women in the European labour market and adult education
Although there are approximately six million women migrants in Europe, migration studies and women’s studies, particularly in Germany, have directed little or no attention to the relationship between migration and ethnic subordination.
The ‘housewife’ thesis, which viewed all women without distinction as victims of patriarchal relations, thereby neglecting economic dependencies and the specific mechanisms of racial subordination, operated for a long time as a barrier to any wider perspective. In Veronica Bennholdt-Thomsen’s 1987 study on employment among immigrant Turkish women, for example, we read that ‘within this framework, the financial independence acquired by women with their own source of income has very little value. Their powerlessness to determine their own lives is paralleled by an inability to dispose of their own labour power’ (Bennholdt-Thomsen 1987, 28). Empirical examples for the oppression of Islamic women (which includes physical violence) serve only to substantiate such a thesis; there is no attempt to analyse the way in which biographies differ. The discrimination experienced by immigrant women in the modern host society in the form of ‘ethnifying’ distinctions in the entire occupational structure is interpreted as a further level of oppression, additional to the sexist oppression experienced by all women.
The ‘race, culture and difference’ debate in Great Britain and the USA in recent years (Brah 1993) has shown, very convincingly, that gender-based social inequalities are not just reinforced by social inequalities based on origin, but that these inequalities are produced anew and in a very specific way by society. The social definition of gender and the ascription of ‘cultural identity’ by the host society are interwoven in a complex way — the issue, however, is always the specific ways in which social power is used to oppress others. When marginalised groups adopt the same definitions of themselves, they are effectively supporting such subordination mechanisms. Giovanna Campani (1992), in her study on Philippine women in Italy, has put forward the thesis that Italian women owe their higher qualifications to more than 100,000 Philippine and other immigrant women from the ‘Third World’ who care for their families as domestic servants. In Germany, the situation is probably no different. According to estimates by the Collaborative Research Centre 333 in Munich (‘Changes in the individual division of labour’), there are perhaps 2.4 million women in West Germany working in private households in insecure jobs that do not appear in the official statistics. Immigrant women probably account for a high proportion of that total. Maria Rerricht (1992) has put forward the thesis (very similar to Campani’s for Italy) that West German women have only been able to establish a presence for themselves on the primary labour market at the expense of increasing employment of illegal women migrants (and she refers to similar trends in the USA, as exposed in the famous ‘Nannygate’ affair).