Contenu du sommaire : Femmes et genre en migration

Research into mobility and migration in Roman Antiquity has been particularly dynamic over the last thirty years. However, unlike the case for other historical eras, few gendered approaches to these phenomena in the Roman period have been published, and these have mostly focused on women's practices and experiences in the context of mobility and/or migration. This paper starts with a brief account of the academic literature on this topic, before considering the various types of evidence available for the study of women's mobility in the ancient Roman world, and on their strengths and weaknesses from a methodological point of view. The article willl concentrate on epigraphical evidence, making a case study of the city of Rome itself (late Republic – High Empire). It will draw on the inscriptions (mostly epitaphs) mentioning women who had moved, and probably migrated, from the provinces of Roman Empire to the Vrbs.

This article explores the ways in which the great migrations of the early Middle Ages were represented and perceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were habitually interpreted as movements of coherent ethnic groups, led by male heroes. This model took its inspiration from a specific type of early medieval mythical saga, the Origines gentium which drew on different topoi from ancient sources to present the complex chessboard of displacements, wars and alliances between barbarians and the Empire as linear exoduses of coherent tribes towards a promised land. Archaeologists and osteologists applied this model literally: in their view, grave goods and types of skeleton made it possible to identify the members of different tribes and to follow their migration routes. They paid special attention to tombs containing weapons and to male skeletons, thus emphasizing male agency. However, closer scrutiny of the archaeological findings tells a completely different story: in fact, in cemeteries of the early medieval period, women are more present and visible than men.

Women and gender relations are pivotal for understanding the construction and inner workings of a colonial society. From its inception, New Netherland was shaped by two patterns of migration: those of single men and families. Single women therefore found themselves in a vulnerable position. Such vulnerability resulted in various forms of sexual transgression in this colonial society. However, transgression can be seen as a means of conforming to a colonial order based on marriage and family. Not only was marriage a form of security for women within the society, it also contributed to building transatlantic networks in which they played an essential part.

Focusing on the transatlantic route between France and Cuba, this article explores early twentieth-century debates on the “traffic in women” through the lens of migration history. A range of sources attest to the predominance of French prostitutes, pimps and procurers in the Cuban sex industry. Whether French women were entrepreneurial migrants or trafficking victims remained however an open question for contemporaries. This article examines migrant prostitution as a survival strategy for poor French women, while also considering their options for overseas travel and the kind of sex they sold in the brothels of Havana. It also reviews the role of male intermediaries in facilitating migration from France to the Americas, and concludes with a discussion of the intersection of anti-trafficking efforts and Cuban immigration law in the mid-1920s.

The research which has brought the history of emigration from the French Caribbean out of obscurity usually puts most emphasis on its presence within the large-scale postwar labour migration to France (1950s to 1970s), on the role of the French state in this massive movement of migrants, and on the experience of discrimination they faced. Relatively absent from the literature is a sense of the strategies of individuals: strategies shaped by motives for departure in the first place, and later by expectations and long-term plans. Based on archival sources, this article aims to contribute to research showing how norms and representations of gender relations may influence individual choice as well as the orientation of migration policies. By bringing together individual and institutional dynamics, the article also questions the constructed dichotomy between the autonomy and the passivity of the migrants.

This article analyzes a form of emigration by the native female population of Lampedusa (Italy) over the past few decades: it consists of short-term migration [to the Italian mainland] in order to receive hospital treatment during childbirth, not available on the island. In order to examine the development of this migration, which has led to the phenomenon of de-territorialized births, it will consider data from several generations of women, and review the socio-cultural, socio-economic and health consequences related to this female reproductive mobility. The final section explores the ways in which the childbirth-related emigration of native women interacts or conflicts with the medical assistance offered to pregnant migrant women in Lampedusa. This analysis will shed light on the nexus between national and international women's migration, childbirth experiences and reproductive rights.

Examining the life stories of three female refugees from Afghanistan and Syria now in Berlin, this article challenges narratives that portray women fleeing from these countries as victims of patriarchal cultures who are in need of liberation and rescuing. The article shows instead how these women were already struggling to liberate themselves in their countries of origin, and how the experience of fleeing itself could be empowering. It is, by contrast, the status of being a refugee in Germany that can be disempowering.

This article proposes a transdisciplinary reading of the works of the Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar (born 1946). By taking both a historical and a literary approach to her trilogy Sonne auf halbem Weg : die Istanbul-Berlin Trilogie (Sun at mid-way : the Istanbul-Berlin trilogy), we set out to analyse this first-person narrative of a woman's migratory journey that defies traditional literary categories, being on the borderline between autobiography, novel and historical testimony. Rather than defining new criteria of classification, our article aims to show how a literary text that tackles gender-related perspectives can help build an alternative historical discourse, one that dismantles the dominant historiography of the late twentieth century, the age of a massive arrival of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in the Federal Republic of Germany.

This article traces the historiography of migration studies over the last four decades (in the United States and France), arguing that there have identifiably been four different, albeit overlapping, periods, largely similar in both countries. In the first stage, the new social history of the 1960s-1970s led to a first “discovery”, that of immigrants, pointing out importantly that the national working class was not homogeneous in composition. However, rather quickly another “discovery” was made: that of the immigrant woman, giving rise to a second historiographic “age” from the 1970s-1980s on. Following historiographic trends in general, this history of women then gave way to questions about gender as a category of analysis in what we can call the third period of migration history. While there is still more work to be done on the gender of migration – analyzing the political and the economic in conjunction, drawing attention to the politics of immigration and emigration that target men and women differently, and the ways in which national and international labor markets affect the gender of migration flows – a fourth stage has now emerged, studying aspects related to sexuality. Studies investigate State reactions (fears of prostitution or homosexuality), or explore how migration offers sexual liberation for some. The article ends with reflections on the latest historiographic approach concerning intersectionality (long inherent in migration history's questions concerning class and origins). It emphasizes the importance of research that examines both how gender has an impact on migration and how migration has an impact on gendered roles.

This article presents and comments on a series of excerpts taken from Jane Edna Hunter's autobiography entitled A Nickel and A Prayer, published in 1940. It analyzes the testimony of this woman – who started her career as a nurse and became an important African American social worker in Cleveland – and focuses more particularly on her experience as a migrant in Cleveland in the early 1900s. The article examines the way Hunter experienced leaving the South – her native region – and settling in a Northern urban center during the Great Migration. It also sheds light on the way migration dramatically changed the life of this young woman, and pushed her, as early as in 1911, to dedicate her life and energy to helping young African American women migrants.

This article analyzes a report by the Immigrants' Protective League in Chicago (1931) on maintenance orders in separated families. Written in the context of a draft international convention on assistance to indigent aliens, the report presents the various tactics used by the organization's social workers to reunite families in order to avoid legal action. Analysis of the life stories of couples and families as they appear in the document shows the process of legitimization of International case work and reveals the practices of social workers who relied on emotions to restore a family social model weakened by migration. The document also allows us to trace migratory projects and journeys that faced numerous administrative and legislative constraints.

From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s, solo male guest-workers – often from Turkey, Morocco, and southern Europe – participated in the radicalizing gender and sexual cultures of northwest Europe. From the mid-1970s onward, however, with the arrival of wives and children from their countries of origin, these men's attitudes toward sexual liberty changed. This article explores this conservative turn during the guest-worker family reunification years in the Netherlands, using photographs from the Historical Image Archive of Migrants (International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands) to show how personal photo collections can contribute to histories of sexuality and immigration.

This article examines the reading practices of Herminie Brongniart, a young bourgeois Frenchwoman. New definitions of gendered roles and a new hierarchy of literary genres emerged in the post-revolutionary period in France. In this context, Brongniart's daily reading practices offer insights into the gendered logic underlying young women's access to learning and the world of books, through the subtle delimitation of what could be read or not. What literature was acceptable for a young girl in the 1820s? How was she able to use her knowledge? The journal of Herminie Brogniart reveals existing reading norms and their evolution; its analysis contributes to scholarship on the use of personal writings for a gendered history of reading.

Results from a survey and statistical review reveal that throughout the nineteenth century, contrary to received opinion, fewer women than men entered French mental asylums, yet the total number of women detained on a permanent basis was higher. The asylum itself was, therefore, responsible for a degree of overcrowding. What factors led to women being kept there longer than men? How are we to explain this phenomenon, when doctors and families were developing strategies to bring the women out, especially those who were considered as “having improved”? Studying the decision-making process applied to those who left, as well as to those who remained, shows that on each occasion, the woman's social isolation or, on the contrary, the resources of her family were crucial. This study reveals gender logics, not specific to asylums: it raises the question more generally of women's role in society at this time, of their autonomy and particularly their lack of autonomy, which an episode in an asylum reinforced, creating greater fragility.