Gender is an important dimension of migration. Female migration workers in the past have been dismissed and defined through the patriarchal structures of society as wife, mother, and dependent on the male breadwinner. Through different aspects of international migration, however, these structures and prescribed gender roles have been slowly challenged through traditional family models, and female agency has been explored in many different ways.
For the purpose of this article I am defining agency as “‘the ability to assess one’s options, reflect critically about them, and make choices that allow one to exert some control over one’s life” (Hirschmann 2003).
New aspects of female agency can happen in different ways. One way was the changing of the Turkish family dynamic when husbands immigrate abroad. When husbands were abroad, the hierarchical structure of the family changed. Before migration happened, in Turkey husbands or sons had the final word and were the predominant decision-makers for the family. However, when husbands traveled abroad women were now in positions of authority within the family.
This introduced women to new state institutions and structures as women became the primary handlers of the money that their husbands were sending home. As more women were pushed into the role of being the head of the household and started making more important decisions, many women in Turkey also started demanding for the ability of their daughters to receive an education.
A different way women interacted with decision making was through migrating themselves, but this only happened first through male-dominated social structures. This happened in Turkey through Germany’s labor system that allowed for female migrants, after a period of time, to claim for family reunion. Now through their wives, men could also be allowed to migrate to Europe. Women, therefore, became a key in the minds of men to future migration.
To employers in Europe, women were a key group of cheap labor. Female migrants were considered to be docile, passive, and uninterested in unionizing which made them ideal factory workers. In the 1970s in Western Germany, the family reunion system changed the traditional Turkish family roles in a very large way. In the situations that women were the first of the family to migrate, the husband that was joining her was considered to be entering the country under her protection. Through this, the wife was now perceived as the breadwinner in the family and the husband the childminder.
Women’s mobility is often shaped by a complex and fluid set of gendered power dynamics, as was seen in Armenia. Where most people assume that when women do not migrate it is due to a lack of agency, this isn’t technically true. Women often prefer to stay at home because of the expectations that wives and daughters will stay at home to assume domestic responsibilities. When this decision happens, as it was seen in households in Armenia, agency is used but it should be looked at through the lens of the gendered patriarchal system.
In comparison, Turkish women started using new levels of their agency in a variety of ways. One way was being able to decide what family member they wanted to bring to the country of settlement, despite their husband’s wishes. Some women took in people that weren’t apart of their immediate families to save on rent. Other ways were saving their money, creating the ability to provide a higher standard of living for themselves.
Women can use exert agency in different ways. While most people look at migration as the sole action of female agency inside patriarchal structures, agency takes many different forms. Not all agency might be what we would normally think of today, but that doesn’t mean that women don’t make decisions about their own lives.
Bibliography:
- Abadan-Unat, chapter 7, “Social Processes: Migrant Women,” 87-111
- DeHaas, Age of Migration
- Intersectional power dynamics and extended households: elderly and widowed women’s international migration from Armenia,” Gender, Place & Culture: a journal of feminist geography 2018, 23 pages
Interesting analysis. Thus, you seem to argue, migration can be somewhat transformative of women’s agency, whether a particular woman migrates herself, or with family, or remains at home while her spouse migrates. In all of these cases new circumstances provide women with what may be perceived as opportunities to exercise new roles. Of course, as we see in the Armenian women’s stories, those may be framed not as opportunity but as sacrifice.