Women Migrants From East To West

Based on the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirty additional interviews with ‘native’ women in the ‘receiving’ countries, this volume documents the contemporary phenomenon of the feminisation of migration through an exploration of the lives of women, who have moved from Bulgaria and Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. It assumes migrants to be active subjects, creating possibilities and taking decisions in their own lives, as well as being subject to legal and political regulation, and the book analyses the new forms of subjectivity that come about through mobility. Part I is a largely conceptual exploration of subjectivity, mobility and gender in Europe. The chapters in Part II focus on love, work, home, communication, and food, themes which emerged from the migrant women’s accounts. In Part III, based on the interviews with ‘native’ women – employers, friends, or in associations relevant to migrant women – the chapters analyse their representations of migrants, and the book goes on to explore forms of intersubjectivity between European women of different cultural origins. A major contribution of this book is to consider how the movement of people across Europe is changing the cultural and social landscape with implications for how we think about what Europe means. Cover image: Painting by Carla Accardi. Reproduced with the kind permission of Luca Barsi of the Galleria Accademia, Via Accademia Albertina 3/e, 10123 Torino.

Scientific Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Sociology - Politics, Majorities, Minorities, grade: 2, University of Vienna (Institut für den Donauraum und Mitteleuropa), course: Modul Soziologie, language: English, abstract: Eighteen years ago, mobility in eastern and central Europe beyond national frontiers was rare. After the fall of the Berlin wall the migration from East to West was a significant trend in international patterns and mobility. The relation between Eastern and Western Europe has been determined by the intensification of a variety of political, economic, and cultural exchanges between East and West. It is this human mobility, the transnational migration, its physical, cultural, political, subjective and conceptual form of movement, which play a central role in these exchanges. We are living now in a world which is organised along multiple axes of mobility, circulation, flows of people and commodities. The number of the migrants and especially that of women migrants has marked an increase in the recent years. The movement of people across Europe is changing the landscape of the continent. The migrants are becoming active subjects to their own social life as well as to legal and political regulation amongst others. Although the majority of the migrants are born in East Europe they are part of the European identity and they are taking responsibility for this transnational space of mediation and exchange called Europe. Apart from countries and cultures there are also spaces of social interaction that determine the establishment of relationships. The transition from state socialism to capitalism has had a huge impact on the lives and the position of the women in Eastern European societies. This political change has been accompanied by the intensification of multi-level communication between the European East and the West.

This collection focuses on a variety of fictional and non-fictional East European women's migration narratives, multimodal narratives by migrant artists, and cyber narratives (blogs and personal stories posted on forums). The book negotiates the concept of narrative between conventional literary forms, digital discourses, and the social sciences. It brings together new perspectives on strategies of representation, trauma, dislocation, and gender roles. It also claims a place for Eastern Europe on the map of transnational feminism. (Series: Contributions to Transnational Feminism - Vol. 4) [Subject: Sociology, European Studies, Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Migration Studies]

One Way Ticket (1983) examines the ‘hidden armies’ of migrant women workers who have since the 1950s fulfilled a demand for low-skilled, low paid and insecure work in both the formal and informal economies of Western Europe. It presents a new focus for the examination of labour migration and of the specific character of female employment. It looks at the relationship between motherhood, waged work and ethnicity; the position of a second generation of black women workers; and the oppression and exploitation of migrant women by their male counterparts through the creation of ‘ethnic’ economies.

The Partition of India resulted in a massive exodus of men, women and children from both East and West Pakistan to India in 1947.Even after the emergence of East Pakistan as Bangladesh, an independent democratic nation in 1971, the flow of migrants to the eastern states of India, namely West Bengal, Orissa, Assam and Tripura was not stemmed. The women among them, not only came along with their families, but also singly. Very often forced to accept the burden of a new refugee life, they began their struggle for survival and existence, fraught more often than not, with difficulty and adverse circumstances .The challenge sometimes became so acute, that there was a metamorphic change in their behaviour, thinking and attitude. The status of the women migrants under such circumstances is uncertain and precarious. This book, the outcome of the doctoral thesis at Jadavpur University, Kolkata is an attempt to present a picture of the status of women migrants from Bangladesh who have settled in the two states of West Bengal and Orissa after 1971, specifically, between 1971-2001.The position these women in the wider fabric of India society and their status at home and workplace have been studied, based on a primary survey in selected areas of West Bengal and Orissa, namely Nadia and Murshidabad in West Bengal and Kendrapara in Orissa where there are large settlements of migrants from Bangladesh. It is sincerely hoped that this book will be useful to scholars and researchers in the fields of economics, demography and women studies.

Women Migrants from East to West documents the contemporaryphenomenon of the feminisation of migration through anexploration of the lives of women who have moved from Bulgariaand Hungary to Italy and the Netherlands. The research is basedon the oral histories of eighty migrant women and thirtyadditional interviews with `native' women in ......

Most of the women studied in this volume hoped to retain their original culture and lifestyle at least to some extent but found that the exigencies of being migrants and refugees forced them to examine their preconceptions and to adopt roles, both social and economic, which they would have rejected at home. This remaking of self was often a traumatic experience with serious repercussions on their relationships with their menfolk.