Feminism and migration
The postwar
Kay Ferres
Feminism emerged in revolutionary and eman-
cipation movements in Europe and the United
States in the 18th and 19th centuries. First-
wave feminists sought to secure women’s place
in the family and in public life, so that they
could act in their own interests, influence
opinion, and participate in democratic deci-
sion making. Recognition of their independent
legal status, their rights to property, and to
custody of children preceded the achievement
of political rights. Though women were active
in politics and social reform, suffrage was not
easily won. It was achieved first in new immi-
grant societies. Women in New Zealand were
accorded the right to vote in 1893. The colony
of South Australia, established in 1836 and
settled by a labor force of young adult poor
from Britain and Lutherans from Germany,
extended the right to vote and to stand for
election to women in 1894.
In the 20th century, feminist claims for the
recognition of women’s equality focused on
and described oppression in the family, dis-
crimination in education and the workplace,
legal impediments to substantive equality, and
disadvantage linked to embodiment. The law’s
treatment of rape, domestic violence, divorce,
and abortion changed radically. Workplace
reforms targeted equality of opportunity, mater-
nity leave, and sexual harassment. Where 19th-
century campaigns left the boundaries between
private and public spheres intact, later interven-
tions transformed the structure and expanded
the limits of the public sphere to accommodate
women’s gender and sexual differences.
Nineteenth century migration programs
encouraged “surplus” women to relocate to
settler societies to provide domestic labor
and to marry and have children. Their contri-
bution to the imperialist project was supported
and sponsored by female philanthropy as well
The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness.
© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm221
as by colonial administrations.
period saw new waves of migration: the reset-
tlement of displaced persons from Europe; and
subsidized migration schemes to support
nation-building enterprises in rapidly mod-
ernizing societies. Economic globalization further
increased mobility, especially of people from
ex-colonial countries and from Eastern Europe,
producing anxieties about integration. National
identity, based on fictions of bounded territory
and common culture, has been reasserted and
borders reinforced. While the white woman
symbolized “civilized” values during imperial-
ist expansion, the contemporary woman immi-
grant embodied disruptive and threatening
difference.
Feminist studies of migration have high-
lighted aspects of migrant women’s inclusion
in or exclusion from citizenship. They have
addressed such issues as legal status, recogni-
tion of rights, political membership and collec-
tive identity, and belonging. Although migrants
are often assumed to be male heads of house-
holds, lone women have continued to be
strongly represented in migrant populations.
Women’s economic migration work includes
many who leave families behind while they
work in service industries to support those
families. Their uncertain status both at home
and in their host countries means that theirs is
a precarious existence, and that they are vul-
nerable to economic exploitation and psycho-
logical insecurity.
Migrant women’s status comes into ques-
tion when they seek admission or entry as indi-
viduals rather than as dependents of fathers
and husbands; when they seek visas, and when
they form relationships and affiliations beyond
the family. Many studies have emphasized
discrimination, exploitation, and disadvantage,
addressing the insecurities of refugees and
asylum seekers, guest workers, and undocu-
mented workers. To take account of the complex
web of power within which women migrants are
located, feminist work has necessarily been
2 feminism and migration
cross-disciplinary, and has ranged in scale from
the documentation of personal experience to a
consideration of national and international
policy settings that have produced and are pro-
duced by mass migration from east to west and
south to north.
For many people, work is the principal
means of expressing their connection and
contribution to a wider community. In social
democracies, workers’ claims for wage justice
and safe working conditions have been central
to the achievement of equality. Women have
sought equal pay for equal work, equal employ-
ment opportunities, and recognition of the
contribution their unpaid work in the home
makes to the economy. Institutions such as
arbitration courts and tribunals and labor
unions have underpinned workers’ citizenship.
Globalization has transformed this landscape.
New international flows of labor and capital,
economic and industry restructuring that have
been driven by technological innovation and
deregulation have eroded worker citizenship.
Many forms of routine work have been out-
sourced from the developed to the developing
world. Globalization has also generated eco-
nomic migration programs that differentiate
highly skilled, educated professionals from dis-
posable workers in the growing but low paid
service economy. Typically, these service jobs
are highly feminized – in hospitality, in health,
and child care – and mainly but not exclusively
undertaken by women. Consequently, labor
migration is rapidly being feminized.
The conditions under which these migrants
gain entry, and the conditions of their work, do
not promote economic security and equality.
Workers are mobile and their jobs temporary.
They come to North America and Europe from
Central America, Eastern Europe, and East
Asia. Because they are not permanent resi-
dents, they accrue few benefits and do not have
access to working-class networks in the host
country. These patterns of employment and
their impact on social and family life both in
the host country and at home challenge the
feminist analysis of the separation of home and
work, and of the role of paid work in securing
women’s economic independence and freedom
(Pessar 1995). Studies of migrant experience of
work have attempted to grapple, not always
successfully, with the complexities of inequal-
ity (McDowell 2008). The assumption that
migration provides greater economic opportu-
nity and that paid work enables women to
negotiate egalitarian gender arrangements does
not hold where workers have little security of
employment or are undocumented.
Often workers, both men and women, have
left their families behind. Some migration pro-
grams, such as Canada’s live-in nanny program,
require workers to do so. In some cases, it is
possible to accrue eligibility for permanent
residence and to sponsor family members,
but state-sponsored family reunification pro-
grams are in decline. A growing body of work
has begun to describe the impacts of these
separations on families and workers in a range
of geographical locations. Common questions
and themes emerge from work that explores
the ways that women adapt to taking respon-
sibility for maintaining family relationships,
managing household income, and caring for
themselves and their children. In some cases,
their already precarious existence becomes
even more insecure. El Salvadoran women
have to deal with the surveillance and suspi-
cions of their husband’s family, the uncertain
arrival of remittances, and the practical diffi-
culties of communication in a country suffering
the effects of civil unrest and poverty (Mahler
2001). For women in Mozambique, inde-
pendence and autonomy in decision making
does not increase wellbeing for women left at
home, if it is accompanied by financial strain
and a changing balance of power in the marital
relationship (Yabiku et al. 2010). In an economy
where women are becoming more employable
than men and where their social and family
networks are attenuated, the net gains of eco-
nomic migration are small (Pessar 1995).
Where families migrate together, adaptation
to new environments is an evolving and uneven
process. Migration from “traditional” to more
liberal societies may not modify gender inequal-
ities, but rather reinforce them. Mexican women
migrants in the United States do not experience
greater economic and gender equality than do

women who remain at home. Their wellbeing
and power within relationships is undermined
by their “structural position in the receiving
society, including their precarious legal status,
unfavorable work conditions, and lack of social
support” (Parrado & Flippen 2005: 628). Mean-
while, in Mexico, women enjoy greater equality
than before.
Feminist understandings of women’s citi-
zenship have become more inclusive and more
internationally focused. As the franchise was
progressively extended to women in the 20th
century, citizenship was also expanded beyond
political membership to embrace economic
participation and social welfare, as well as legal
rights. This expanded citizenship was sup-
ported by the growth of the welfare state and
by the growing role of the United Nations. The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in
1948 formalized signatory states’ obligations to
recognize the basic rights of individuals,
including the right to nationality. This codifi-
cation of rights gave rise to civil rights move-
ments in the 1960s and brought new players
into the public political sphere, including femi-
nist groups. Campaigns to end discrimination
and promote equality created new political
constituencies, based on class, race, ethnicity,
gender, and sexuality.
Feminism is now a global social movement.
This development was underscored by the
United Nations’ proclamation of the “Decade
of Women” in 1976–1985. Key initiatives
emerged from this, including the UN Con-
vention to Eliminate Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW), the recognition of refugee
women as a special category of migrant (1985),
and guidelines for the Protection of Refugee
Women (1991). The international public sphere
that is underwritten by the UN provided a new
arena for feminist activism. The opportunities
for women to work together across borders
and cultural differences fed feminist aspira-
tions to create a new democratic commons
that is plural, egalitarian, and communicative
(Bickford 1996).
At each stage of its development, feminism
has encountered objections to its claims to rep-
resent women’s interests, as these are fractured
feminism and migration 3
and dispersed through other affiliations and alle-
giances, including class, race, ethnicity, and
sexuality. Feminist analyses of, and responses
to, changing flows of migration over this period
reflect shifting discourses of citizenship and
identity. Increasing sensitivity to the multiple
dimensions of difference, combined with more
nuanced understandings of the gendered geog-
raphies of power (Mahler & Pessar 2001), have
informed feminist understanding of the inequal-
ities experienced by women migrants.
Recent feminist work has probed the fears
and anxieties of otherness that migration pro-
vokes in receiving societies in the New Europe
and the post-9/11 world. New measures to
enforce border security in response to the “War
on Terror” have arguably come at the cost of
human security and the aspiration for a better
life. A policy emphasis on social cohesion masks
concerns that some groups cannot assimilate.
A continuing feminist interest in the way dif-
ference is recognized in the public sphere, and
with the ways different voices can join demo-
cratic deliberation, has re-emerged in discus-
sions of migrant integration. As feminists
negotiated the tensions of individual and group
rights, of identity and difference, and equality
and difference in both political practice and
theoretical debate, they also developed new
conceptions of the public sphere and demo-
cratic arrangements.
The persistence of certain gender differences,
as perceived in deportment or dress, is often
taken as a sign of a failure of migrant groups to
integrate. Such concerns have concentrated on
the presence of Muslims in Europe. Though for-
eigners are a small minority of the total popula-
tion, the Muslim presence has disturbed old
certainties about assimilation as a means of man-
aging diversity. Women have become a catalyst
of anxiety, which has centered on their appear-
ance in public in various forms of the “veil.”
Debate about what their appearance means has
captured wide attention, especially in France,
where a ban on children wearing conspicuous
religious symbols in public schools was put in
place in 2004. Though this ban included symbols
of all religions, it specifically targeted girls wearing
headscarves.
4 feminism and migration
The “affaires des foulards” has divided
opinion among women, and feminists in par-
ticular. It was initiated in 1989 when three
Muslim girls wore their hijabs to school in defi-
ance of an agreement reached with the princi-
pal and their parents. Subsequent attempts to
ban religious symbols in schools were over-
turned in the courts. Finally the French gov-
ernment appointed a commission to consider
appropriate legislation. While many promi-
nent French women declared the scarf a sign
of patriarchal oppression, religious fundamen-
talism, and outmoded tradition, others argued
that the ban was discriminatory and denied
freedom of religious belief and expression. In
France, where women got the vote in 1947 and
where women are underrepresented in many
spheres of work and politics, the project of
gender equality is incomplete. Feminist reac-
tion to the headscarf as a symbol of oppression
and inequality and an affront to republican
values could be seen as a disavowal of that reality.
This dispute has focused attention on poli-
cies designed to integrate migrants in receiving
countries. Where assimilation assumes that
citizens accommodate themselves to the culture
of the host society, the presence of significant
minorities who wish to maintain their cultural
and religious affiliations and who also have
longstanding attachments to the host country
(whether as former colonial subjects, or as per-
manent residents) raises the question of how
the will to live together into the future can be
fostered and supported. The suppression of
difference maintains existing institutions and
defers public debate about reforms that would
positively recognize diversity.
Feminist arguments in support of the right
of women to wear headscarves, and to defy
the ban, have taken different approaches. But
they commonly attend to women’s problem-
atic presence in the public sphere, invoking
democratic principles, the meaning of nation
and national identity, and the relation of culture
to citizenship. The range of arguments is also
indicative of the continuing feminist commit-
ment to inclusion, to be achieved through the
recognition of difference, the positive embrace
of diversity, and a focus on civil society (Young
2000; Fraser 2003).
Democratic theory requires that citizens’
obligations to respect the laws and customs of
the receiving society are balanced by the state’s
obligations to enable their participation. This
includes the distribution of public goods, such
as access to education and to processes of
democratic deliberation, to all members of the
national community. In the case of schoolgirls,
the state’s obligation to provide educational
opportunity should take precedence over its
concern to promote secularism (Gutmann
2003). Theorists of the public sphere argue that
the French commitment to secularism con-
strains the range of identities that can be visible
and active in the civic realm. The logic of iden-
tity is deployed in a way that turns difference
into absolute otherness (Young 2000). Secular-
ism conceals a profound antipathy to differ-
ence and the insistence on a unique “French”
identity closes off the possibilities of politics
(Scott 2007; Volpp 2007). The structures, rules,
and manners denoted by laïcité limit access to
the public sphere. While cultural and religious
difference is sequestered in the private sphere
and characterized as traditional and backward
looking, the actually existing inequalities of
the dominant culture are obscured. Instead
of a retreat from multiculturalism, the state needs
to find new ways to be inclusive (Scott 2007).
This debate highlights continuing feminist
interest in reconfiguring the public sphere as a
space that can be inclusive of different political
practices. Encounters in civil society hold a
privileged place in feminism, as a legacy of
women’s continuing underrepresentation in
parliaments and other elected assemblies. The
ban on the headscarf fails to recognize the way
its meanings are being remade in new times
and places, and the way young Frenchwomen
are using it to stake a claim as citizens (Ben-
habib 2004).
Migrants are a growing presence in the
developed world, and the unfair terms of their
entry are undeniable. Border security is an
inescapable fact of life both for global travelers
and those who seek entry and the prospect of

a better life. Feminist theorists have addressed
the particular threat that statelessness repre-
sents for women and children (Bhabha 2004;
Kerber 2007) and have examined the extent
of our obligations to strangers (Benhabib
2004; Young 2006). Border crossing has been a
powerful trope in feminist writing about iden-
tity and difference, and a new attention to
transnational space has figured in discussions
of displacement and belonging.
Citizenship conceived of as political mem-
bership, however, remains inextricably bound
up with the nation-state even as many people
find themselves living and working in more
than one country. The claim to be a “global
citizen” has gained traction, and the experience
of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers dem-
onstrate that claims for fairness and justice
need to be addressed extra-nationally. Feminist
attention to the complexities of intersecting
identities and solidarities has informed both
theoretical discussion of pluralization and
practical politics consequent upon mass migra-
tion and global mobility. It has much to offer
in meeting the challenge of giving effect to
multiple identities and to resolving conflicts
among them (Bosniak 2000).
SEE ALSO: Citizenship; Citizenship, nationality,
and legal status; Culture and migration, a critical
assessment; Gender and Migration; Nationality
policies and migration
References and further reading
Benhabib, S. (2004) The Rights of Others: Aliens,
Residents, Citizens. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Bhabha, J. (2004) Demography and rights: women,
children and access to asylum. International
Journal of Refugee Law 16(1), 227–243.
Bickford, S. (1996) The Dissonance of Democracy:
Listening, Conflict and Citizenship. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Bosniak, L. (2000) Citizenship denationalised.
Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 7, 447–509.
feminism and migration 5
Fraser, N. (2003) Social justice in the age of
identity politics: redistribution, recognition and
participation. In N. Fraser & A. Honneth (eds.)
Redistribution or Recognition? A Political –
Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso,
pp 7–87.
Gutmann, A. (2003) Identity in Democracy.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kerber, L. K. (2007) The stateless as the citizen’s
other: a view from the United States. The
American Historical Review 112(1), 1–34.
Lister, R. (1997) Citizenship: towards a feminist
synthesis. Feminist Review 57, 28–48.
Mahler, S. J. (2001) Transnational relationships:
the struggle to communicate across borders.
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
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Mahler, S. J. & Pessar, P. R. (2001) Gendered
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Phillips, A. (2007) Multiculturalism without
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Scott, J. W. (2007) The Politics of the Veil.
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Yabiku, S. T., Agadjanian, V., & Sevoyan, A. (2010)
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