A Woman's Tale: Emigration and Immigration

Lamentations that the history of immigration has largely been written as a history of men today sound quite banal. It seems a bit after-the-fact to implore historians of ethnicity to rethink their androcentric biases of the past and to recognize that women as members of families and communities helped shape the processes of migration and adaptation to America. In dissertations, articles, books, essay collections, and conferences ethnic historians who previously universalized from the experiences of men and who deemed male activities to determine history have changed decisively.

The lion’s share of the credit for this change in the writing of immigration and ethnic history belongs to a new group of scholars whose training dovetailed with the rise and legitimization of women’s history. Donna Gabaccia happens to have been one of the key players in this intellectual transformation. In her book, From Sicily to Elizabeth Street (1984), in several significant essays and conference papers, she indirectly and often bluntly chided immigration and ethnic historians to rethink their categories, forcing them to recognize that communities consisted of men and women and that to focus on only the former not only left out the latter but actually detracted from the intellectual enterprise of analyzing the whole.

Placed as centrally as she has been in the debate among immigration historians about the need to rethink gender categories, Donna Gabaccia may have been the most appropriate scholar to take on the ambitious task of writing a synthetic work that tackles the entirety of the immigration experience from the point of view of women and gender. From the Other Side brings together the fruits of this new era in immigration history. It can be read as a tribute to the new scholars and their scholarship. The author implies throughout the book that this cadre of historians, mostly although not exclusively women, self-consciously and successfully leveled the old edifice of immigration history and rebuilt it, brick by brick (or more appropriately, group by group) and replaced it with something richer, more variegated, and ultimately closer to the truth. The dense text abounds with the very human details about women as immigrants and as new Americans culled from the work of Gabaccia’s sister scholars. Her extensive notes demonstrate clearly the newness of this accomplishment. With the exception of three “classic” works of the early twentieth century, her bibliography contains nothing written before 1976. The historians whose work she draws upon constitute her peers, her own community of scholars, who, like her, recognized the futility of studying such a profound human phenomenon as immigration and not paying close attention to issues of gender.

Gabaccia has undertaken a bold task. She has attempted to demonstrate that the migratory experiences of women can provide the clearest analytic window from which to come to terms with the entire complicated process by which people leave one home and reshape their lives in another. Gabaccia turns the immigration paradigm on its head. Rather than hold up the experiences of men and the meanings that they derived from them as the norm, with an occasional nod to women and their activities, Gabaccia puts the behaviors and sensibilities of women at the front and considers them to explain the phenomenon as a whole. She rightly asserts that immigration has always involved family strategies and that women have traditionally provided the emotional core for those families. Therefore to reconstruct the experiences of immigration, historians must actually begin with women and then work outward. By and large this effort succeeds. She presents formidable evidence to support her argument that the experiences of women as immigrants and adjusters encapsulated the whole epic process itself. Women should be seen, claims Gabaccia, as the markers of the process of cultural change both before and after immigration. Through them we can understand the evolution of ethnic identities.

From the Other Side falls into three thematic sections each...