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| 1 1 “We Can’t Go Back” Immigrant Women, Intersections, and Agency Women are migrating and will continue to do so. Their needs are urgent and deserve priority attention. Only then will the benefits of international migration be maximized and the risks minimized. —United Nations Population Fund, 20061 In 1836, a young Polish woman named Ernestine Susmond Potowski Rose made her way across the Atlantic to her chosen destination, the United States. Her exit from Poland was prompted by her adamant refusal to agree to an arranged marriage. Ernestine had filed a lawsuit against her father, a Jewish rabbi, over control of her inheritance; she arrived, consequently, after sojourning in other European countries, marrying an Englishman, and espousing an avowed rejection of religious beliefs regarding women’s inferiority . An active and controversial leader and eloquent public speaker for the movements to abolish slavery and forward women’s rights, Ernestine Rose went on to earn the nickname of adulation “Queen of the Platform.”2 In 1986, a full 150 years later, the young attorney Sheela Murthy left her native India to enter law school at Harvard University, where she earned her LLM (master of law) degree the following year. Sheela’s migration—across a different ocean from that traversed by Ernestine—was motivated in large part by an activist desire to improve the lives of women through the law. By doing so, Sheela was echoing Ernestine’s ambition and underscoring the fact that the revolution that the Queen of the Platform and her cohort undertook had remained unfinished. Sheela’s decision to migrate to the United States and study law meant that she broke out of the mold of a traditional adult path for women in her society, as had Ernestine. Today, Sheela runs the successful Murthy Law, an immigration law firm in Baltimore, Maryland , that she founded, which provides legal assistance to both women and 2 | “We Can’t Go Back” men nationally. Twenty years after Sheela set foot in the United States, her firm was acknowledged as one of the world’s leading U.S. immigration law firms by international law-firm rating agency Chambers Global. Across 2007, 2008, and 2009, Super Lawyers International named Sheela Murthy a “Maryland Super Lawyer.” The Queen of the Platform and the Maryland Super Lawyer represent two eras in U.S. immigration history and two different world regions. And they illustrate a phenomenon that is not consciously recognized in the American immigration stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves or in the shared social memory of our founding myths: the presence of foreign-born women as leaders and contributors to the cultures and structures of the United States. This relative silence on the active roles of immigrant women carries over into the scholarly arena. Denise Segura and Patricia Zavella recently characterized this absence in the following way: “[Foreign-born] women’s economic contributions, creative adaption strategies, cultural expressions, and everyday contestations remain largely unrecognized in scholarship.”3 The United Nations Population Fund has also charged that “policymakers continue to disregard both [migrating women’s] contributions and their vulnerability.”4 We concur with these diagnoses and offer this book in an attempt to help correct the imbalance in scholarship and policymaking. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the image of the typical immigrant in the American popular cultural imagination is a monolithic one: it is that of a working-class Mexican or Central American man. This stereotype continues despite statistical evidence that approximately 50 percent of all global migrants are women5 and that today women and girls constitute the majority of legal immigrants to the United States.6 The stereotypical public image also misses the wide diversity in national origins that constitutes the current American immigration landscape: foreign-born women, men, girls, and boys represent more than 140 countries.7 Globally, women are migrating more than ever in history: they comprise 49.6 percent of all migrants worldwide .8 Until recently, however, women have been ignored or marginalized in immigration and refugee policy. Due to this prolific presence yet perceptual absence, the United Nations Population Fund has begun to label the phenomenon of globally migrating women as “a mighty but silent river.”9 This book is an overview of the social, cultural, and employment terrains inhabited by adult foreign-born women in the United States in the early twenty-first century, with attention to the stories that these women narrate about their lives. The book’s authors came to this project...

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