When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (review)

When Women Come First offers a "test case for the durability of patriarchy." It focuses on a small cohort of Christian nurses who immigrated to the United States from Kerala, India, leaving their husbands and children behind until after they established themselves. This book is organized around the three spheres of work, home and community. The author, the daughter of Syrian Christians from Kerala, employs her status as an ethnic insider to access a "convenience sample" of 29 South Asian couples who migrated from Kerala. Twenty-one of the couples interviewed included women who had migrated before their husbands and sponsored them while eight were "traditional householders" in which the women and men migrated either independently, together or the men first. All of the families interviewed were raised in traditional households where the women did the cooking, childcare and household work and men were the breadwinners. Drawing on the theoretical arsenal of Robert W. Connell, George analyzes the gender structures of labor in post-immigration Keralite families. She classifies the households into four types along a continuum of male domination ranging from: (1. male-headed households (traditional households), (2. forced participation households (men are forced to take an active role in childcare), (3. partnership households (egalitarian division of household labor) and (4. female-led households (all labor falls on the women).

George's presents three central findings. First, the ability of the women to secure professional jobs as nurses and migrate before their husbands is a reversal of the gender order and challenges definitions of femininity and masculinity in post-migration Indian families. Nursing is a stigmatized occupation in India because it is perceived as a low-status trade rather than an education. In the words of her interviewees, "Because nursing involved cleaning sick and diseased bodies, it was seen as dirty work.... At home you had servants to do things like that, and in nursing school you are doing the same thing your servants do for you."(47) This stigma and cultural construction of nurses as lower class in India follows them to the United States and is reproduced via multiple channels including potent transnational marriage networks. George argues that non-working wives remain a reference point for respectability, and thus class stigma that Indians attach to nursing mediates the financial assets that it provides for families.

Second, one of George's most significant research findings are the compromises and adjustments made by men in the household division of labor after migration. George's comparative analysis of the differences between partnership households and traditional households is illuminating. George argues that in partnership households there existed "presumed democracy" around financial decisions and the men made the most changes in terms of their active involvement in childcare, cooking and other activities deemed to belong to domain of women and wives. In sharp contrast, in the traditional households, families employed their resources (in India and the United States) to reproduce a rigid division of gendered household labor in the United States. The crucial role of family members and their servants (in India) in sustaining the patriarchal bargain in the United States after immigration is quite clear. Half of these upper-class families sent their infant children back to India for periods of time to be cared for by relatives or servants. For example, "while the men… focused upon their wives' responsibilities and limitations, most of the women talked about missing the support of family members and the servants they had in India."(85) Third, in her role as a Sunday school teacher, George observed how the men created "new male roles" for themselves in the church. She argues that among families supported by employed nurses "there was a reactive reconfiguration of gender relations in the domestic sphere in response to the demands of the work sphere, resulting in a refashioning of conventional patriarchy."(30) In order to cope with their loss in status they turned...