Migrant Women: Crossing Boundaries and Changing Identities

Description

Population movements on a large scale have been a prominent feature of modern society, but there have been as yet few attempts to look beneath the surface of mass movements of people. There is a particularly urgent need to disentangle the specific experience of women who are critically involved in the process of adaptation to new worlds and ways of life. Most of the women studied in this volume hoped to retain their original culture and lifestyle at least to some extent but found that the exigencies of being migrants and refugees forced them to examine their preconceptions and to adopt roles, both social and economic, which they would have rejected at home. This remaking of self was often a traumatic experience with serious repercussions on their relationships with their menfolk. On the other hand, for some women, emigration also provided a spur to ambition and progress, a means of achieving a social and economic mobility that they would have been denied at home.

Gina Buijs Professor of Anthropology at the University of Venda,South Africa, formerly Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Rhodes University, and visiting Research Fellow, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, University of Oxford

'...is a useful and readable publication for anyone interested in the consequences of migration on women.' Partnership - issues of coordination and participation '...delves into the manifold active roles of women in migration' Studi Emigrazione 'This is a fascinating study covering the subject of gender in migration from many perspectives - social, cultural, anthropological and political.' International Review of Administrative Sciences 'Whether they are active migrants, crossing physical and sociocultural boundaries themselves, or associational migrants whose lives are substantially affected by the larger context of migration, the different chapters in this volume provide rich documentation of the effects of migration on women. This volume is a welcome addition to the growing collection fo work on women and migration.' Asian and Pacific Migration Journal