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2. “Your Story Drops on You”: Who Are These Women?
- NYU Press
- Chapter
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| 19 2 “Your Story Drops on You” Who Are These Women? It is 1774, in Great Britain. A woman named Ann Lee has finally convinced her brothers and husband to migrate with her to the American colonies. Although illiterate, Ann is nonetheless familiar with the legal philosophy of English judge William Blackstone, who insisted that “[t]he very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.”1 Ann has adamantly expressed her impatience with Blackstone’s philosophy; additionally, in the midst of disappointments in her personal life and with her surrounding culture, she has become attracted to the emotionally expressive new Christian Protestant sect Shaking Quakers. Her rise as a charismatic orator of this group has earned her the anger of English authorities and street mobs who have subjected her to physical punishments. Ann escapes across the Atlantic and devotes her life to leading the American (renamed) Shaker movement, which eventually attracts some six thousand members. Although the practice of celibacy took its toll on the Shaker movement, which has all but vanished today, this group’s unique, simple approach to architecture, furniture style, and music continues to exert its influence in American culture.2 It is more than one century later: the year 1872, in rural China. A teenage girl has been sold by her financially desperate parents and forcefully smuggled to the frontier settlements of the northwest United States. Arriving with no knowledge of the English language or the culture of her new home, this individual, who later becomes known as Polly Bemis, unwittingly becomes caught up in a chain of women sold to Chinese men who had immigrated earlier, for marriage or as servants. Living in a generation when Chinese women’s feet are routinely bound to assure their submissiveness, Polly is expected to spend her days in servile devotion to her master’s needs. As Polly acculturates to the harsh living environment of the mountains of Idaho, she eventually breaks out of her situation, marries an American man, and goes 20 | “Your Story Drops on You” on to become one of the leading pioneer women in the Northwest, living to an old age. A legend is built around Polly: among other activities, she ran a boarding house, was renowned for her hard work managing the ranch with her husband, and earned a respectful reputation in the region for her strong character and wit.3 These two historical vignettes, each exhibiting its own particularity, offer the beginning sketch of an outline of a more general demographic portrait of women immigrating to the United States. Even relatively early in U.S. history , as is evident in these stories, there was diversity—in national origins, in regional settlement patterns (east and west coasts), and in the contexts of exit (one voluntary and the other forced). Both of these women were able to prevail against strong odds—particularly in eras when their rights as women were few—and to have a lasting impact on their new homeland. Despite their legacies, however, Ann Lee and Polly Bemis are far from common household names in the twenty-first century. This chapter positions the story of migrating women within the dynamic historical narratives that define their migration constraints and opportunities . Included in those narratives is the evolving nature of U.S. immigration policy as it has been shaped by issues of gender. Following an outline of these historical contexts of migration, we review recent statistics on the demographic characteristics of the foreign-born women living in the United States today. Migration, Gender, and History An interpretation of the meanings of immigrant experiences must be a historicized one. The historical context of any era has a major impact on the meanings and parameters of women’s and men’s immigrant experiences. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut emphasize the impact of particular “contexts of exit” and “contexts of reception” on the adaptation process for immigrants. Early on in immigrants’ migration experience, Portes and Rumbaut explain, the conditions under which people left their home countries strongly influence their settlement in their new host country; but as time passes, it is the context of reception that plays a more lasting role on the experience. The authors suggest that there are three aspects to these contexts: government policies to promote or restrict immigration, features of labor markets, and the presence and characteristics of the ethnic community into which the new immigrant enters...