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CONTINUE WITH INTRODUCTORY SLIDE

My talk today is titled “Beyond the Feminization of

Migration. It is based on a book that I --an historian-- am

currently co-authoring with a sociologist, Katharine Donato. Our

book focuses on a pattern that social scientists studying

international migration often call—somewhat problematically, we

think--the feminization of migration. On the slide behind me the

phenomenon of feminization is represented by a map that shows the

percentage female among persons who have lived for at least a

year outside their country of birth in the year 2013. As you

will easily see, most foreign-origin populations in the world

today are between 45 and 55 percent female. Social scientists

generally see these percentages as exceptionally high. In the

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past, they assert, migrations were male dominated. They present

the feminization of migration as recent, unprecedented and a

product of recent global integration. I hope to convince you this

afternoon that none of these assumptions is completely correct.

By focusing on the composition of populations of long-

distance migrants over four centuries of human history, our book

demonstrates that balanced and even predominantly female

migrations are nothing new. It is the discovery and naming of

feminization that is new. Thus, while most of our book offers an

historical analysis of how and why the composition of migrant

populations have changed over time—often quite dramatically—it

also ask readers to ponder why these changes remained invisible

for so long. With this dual focus, I think our project answers

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the agenda of Gravensteen lectures for exploration of global

interconnections among the world’s many regions by crossing

disciplinary borders. I will begin my talk by identifying the

moment in time when social scientists first noticed and labeled

the feminization of migration. I will then introduce the kinds

of questions that historians and gender studies scholars rightly

raise about the data and methods of the social scientists who

named feminization and made it a symbol of the current moment.

My talk also offers a quick summary of our history of migrant

composition; this history points toward factors that have—past

and present—produced at times the feminization and at other times

the masculinization of migrations. Finally, I ask you to consider

why the feminization of migration became worthy of discussion

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only at the end of the twentieth century and why it was social

scientists rather than scholars of women and gender who led that

discussion. Throughout my talk I will discuss statistical data

but as a humanist I will also treat statistics as a particular

kind of language that creates a particular kind of knowledge.

Allow me first to quickly trace the sequence of

discoveries--all of which I want to emphasize were made by social

scientists working with empirical data and quantitative methods—

that first generated discussion of the feminization of migration.

Slide DISCOVERING THE FEMINIZATION OF MIGRATION, 1984-2006 w/fly

ins

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The recognition of a female migrant majority—of 52 percent

of American immigrants--was first made by statisticians employed

by the United States Department of Labor in 1984. They published

their findings in the first special issue devoted to research on

immigrant women in the flagship journal of migration studies,

International Migration Review. The labor statisticians did not

themselves use the term feminization to describe the female

majority they described but their report appeared alongside

another article by sociologist Saskia Sassen that instead

discussed the feminization of wage-earning in off-shore

industrial workplaces in the third world. DOWN KEY A year later,

the labor statisticians’ report found a much broader audience

under a New York Times headline that proclaimed that men were QUOTE

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“Only a Third of U.S. Immigrants.” According to the Times

editors, the labor statisticians’ data upset the QUOTE

“Conventional Wisdom” that international migrants were usually

male. The editors suggested that immigration as a result would

QUOTE have “Less Effect on Labor Markets”.

During these exact same years the U.N. Population division

had resolved to compile and was beginning to analyze new data on

the composition of immigrant populations around the world. DOWN

KEY In 1993, already aware of the U.N.’s preliminary findings,

British sociologist Stephen Castles and American political

scientist Mark Miller invented the phrase feminization of

migration and simultaneously declared it to be one of the

defining characteristics of what they called a new global age of

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unprecedented international population movements. Then, in in

2006 DOWN KEY the United Nations Report on the State of World

Population revealed to a broad, public audience evidence for

feminization worldwide and called for public action to solve the

problems facing women migrants around the world.

This data inspired us to write our book. But as an historian

I was underwhelmed by the evidence presented for feminization. In

1984, the statisticians’ report—but not the more sensational NY

Times article--had clearly documented that the percentage female

among American immigrants had surpassed 50 percent many, many

times after 1930. Look closely at the 2006 U.N. data.

SLIDE: DATA: CONFLICTING PERSPECTIVES

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Examining the global data on the left point my skepticism only

grew. Already in 1960, 47 percent of migrants living outside

their countries of birth were female. The share of female

migrants did increase slightly after 1960 but those increases (at

less than 3 percent) struck me as trivial. As an historian I

instead why changes occurred before 1960, why scholars in gender

and women’s studies had never addressed the issue, and why social

scientists had been excited enough to invent a new concept based

on such a small post-1960 change.

As a sociologist, my colleague Katharine Donato viewed the

data differently. For one thing, she called my attention to the

fact that the U.N. had analyzed a different type of data than the

American labor statisticians. The labor statisticians had

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analyzed flow data—annual counts of migrants as they acquired

visas and entered the U.S.—while the 2006 U.N. Population report

analyzed stock or census counts of people living outside the

country of their birth, taken at ten year intervals.

(Ultimately, we would discover how this difference mattered—a

point I will return to later.) Katharine argued that stock or

census data routinely documents both age and sex and that

demographers believe that quite small changes in either produces

significant demographic consequences in large populations.

From the beginning, we were committed as co-authors both to

seeking and analyzing statistical data on the numbers of male and

female migrants but also to interpreting the numbers from long-

term historical perspective and to incorporating insights from

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the field of gender studies. I will not tell the story of some of

the practical difficulties this disciplinary-crossing has caused

but would welcome questions about that topic. For now let me

address the questions and definitions that guided our research.

NEXT SLIDE: QUESTIONS ACROSS DISCIPLINES WITH FLY-INS

First of all, as social scientists, DOWN BUTTON we of course

wanted to determine how the feminization of migration had been

defined and measured. Scholars, journalists and students have

used the term feminization in very different ways; some use it to

mean rising numbers of women migrants, generally, or rising

numbers only of independent or wage-earning women workers.

Demographers, measured feminization through what they called a

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sex ratio, which focused on the relative total numbers of male

and female migrants. We wanted to write a book about gender and

migration, not a book about female migrants so we defined

feminization as a change over time in the percentage female in

migrant populations. Doing so, we acknowledged that

masculinization of migrant populations could be as analytically

interesting as feminization. We were lucky to find four series of

data that allowed us to measure the relative numbers of males and

females among long-distant migrants but in doing so we also

discovered that most historical data was flow data while after

1970, series of flow data almost completely disappeared, so we—

like the U.N. worked instead with census data.

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As historians, our questions were mainly about time and

temporality. DOWN BUTTON. We knew that women were a very

sizeable portion of international migrants already in 1960 so we

wanted to know why feminization had occurred before that date.

We wondered whether the female majorities of the recent past were

indeed as unprecedented as social scientists suggested. If not,

then we wanted to explain why shifts in migrant composition

occurred, and occurred when they did. Finally, as we discovered

how much data documented feminization since at least the 1920s,

we wanted to explain why the pattern was named and discussed only

in the 1980s.

Questions from gender studies focused our attention on the

meaning of key analytical terms associated with the feminization

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of migration. DOWN BUTTON Statistical data counted male and

female migrants as dichotomous sexes and demographers measured

feminization through attention to what they call sex ratios. Yet

no scholar had ever argued that biological sex drove the

composition of migrant populations. Scholars in gender studies

have devoted enormous energy to showing the analytic consequences

of conflating biological sex with socially constructed gender. We

decided to make migrant gender composition (not sex composition)

the unifying thread for our book. By changing the analytical

terminology we hoped to call attention to the gender ideologies

and gendered relationships of power that shaped migration

patterns. Finally, because gender studies shared with other

humanities disciplines a deep interest in how scholarship created

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knowledge about sex and gender, we hoped a focus on gendered

practices within scholarship could help us to understand why it

had been social scientists who discussed the feminization of

migration.

To do the kind of long-term historical analysis we proposed,

we of course had to identify appropriate data and to make

decisions about how to order that data with a kind of migrant

typology.

SLIDE Data and Typology

Eventually we chose four long-term series of data that together

covered four somewhat overlapping centuries. PAGE DOWN Each

series was created for a slightly different purpose. None was

truly global in its coverage--but neither is today’s U.N. data.

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We also worked exclusively with data series that distinguished

male and female migrants—not all migration data does that, even

today. Using four different data series covering 400 years meant

also that we had to define a migrant very broadly as a person who

either crossed an international border or (and especially in the

early period, before 1820), traveled from one continent to

another. In order to compare variations in gender composition we

also PAGE DOWN chose to adopt but also to adapt a typology of

migrants that would be familiar to modern readers but still

useful for analysis of earlier times. Broadly we distinguished

between migrations motivated by the recruitment of individual

productive labor (a group that included Atlantic slaves and

indentured servants before 1800, and various kinds of contract

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workers and freer labor migrants after 1800) and migrations

through which both migrants and receiving societies expected

cultural and biological reproduction to occur in a new setting.

This too was a broad grouping that included old world slaves,

refugees, settler-colonizers and what today are sometimes called

marriage and/or family migrants. Of course our broad distinction

between productive and reproductive migrations became muddy as we

explored specific times and places but it nevertheless showed how

reproductive as well as productive labor figured in shaping

migrant gender composition.

Now let me offer a whirlwind and very much simplified tour

of four centuries of gendered migration patterns. The tour begins

in 1600 and ends in 2010. The data is statistical and our methods

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quantitative but our interpretation of the data draws heavily on

a broad array of cases studies from every continent. So…are you

ready for some graphs?

SLIDE Slaves, Servants, Refugees, Settlers

In the early modern world of European empire-building,

indigenous demographic collapse and the re-population of the

Americas by Europeans and Africans, most migrations were coerced

or forced. The map that you see on the left provides a reminder

that slave trades existed in both the old and new worlds but that

the transatlantic slave trade—from which we drew our longest data

series for this period—was by far the largest. Scholars have long

known that slaves trafficked across the Sahara, Red Sea and

Indian ocean were 2/3 to 3/4 were female while the transatlantic

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slaves were predominantly male—roughly two male slaves for every

female slave. This reflected the structural and functional

differences of the two slave systems. Slavery in Afro-Eurasia was

largely domestic and household-based; it augmented not only the

wealth and labor resources but also quite literally the size of

the families, kin groups and lineages of wealthy men. It was

through reproduction that such men expanded their political

influence. Although slave women’s reproductive work and fertility

were central to this system slavery was not an inherited status.

It became that in the emerging plantation system of Atlantic

slavery. There, Europeans consistently sought to purchase male

slaves to work them in gangs. But as the graph on the right

documents, POINT European slave purchasers in the Atlantic were

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concerned with the reproduction of their work force—note that

proportions of female slaves were higher at the beginning of the

Atlantic slave trade than they were after 1700. By 1700, slave

owners in the Caribbean and Brazil sugar producing areas had

realized they could dependably purchase new male slaves to

replace those who died. Comparisons of slaves to other migrant

groups in the early Atlantic confirm that reproduction mattered

in shaping migrant gender composition. Among the much smaller

numbers of European indentured servants recruited individually

(albeit more voluntarily) as laborers, the proportion female was

even lower than it was among slaves and often well under 20

percent. Slavery and indentured servitude made the Atlantic what

Carole Shammas QUOTE “a quasi marriage-free zone.”

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It was only among the still smaller groups of European

settler colonizers who intended to reproduce and impose their

ways of life in the Americas that migrations approached gender

balance (at 40 percent female or higher). Data on gender

composition exists for the small populations of Spanish investors

and plantations owners in the 1500s and for refugee Pilgrim

religious dissidents in the 1600s. Both refugees and settler

colonizers traveled to the Americas in family groups. Already in

the early modern era, then, labor migrations and reproductive

migrations differed in their gender composition--the latter were

more female than the former.

In the 60 years between 1800 and 1860, we begin to see more

clearly how state policies could also influence migrant gender

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composition. As slavery was abolished, expanding national and

imperial states either identified culturally desirable settler

colonizers to re-populate and reproduce their political control

in far-away territories or they recruited culturally less

desirable coerced or free labor migrants to replace slave workers

on plantations but also in the mining industries, factories, and

cities where wealth was produced in an integrating world economy.

As wage labor replaced slave labor, employers’ concerns with the

reproduction of their work force also diminished.

SLIDE From Coerced Migration to Settlers and Gold Seekers

The role of states is visible in this slide, focused on the

era of abolition. Both the settler colonizers traveling to

Australia and to the United States had relatively balanced gender

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composition. In the 1830s, POINT women from Britain actually

outnumbered men among migrants to Australia. Why? After

transporting to Botany Bay heavily male populations of prisoners

since the 1780s, Britain’s imperial planners began to subsidize

female migration. They saw women as tamers of men, and expected

that newly married and reproducing men would be easier to govern

and thus more likely to create a permanent “New Europe” in the

Antipodes. In the U.S., state and federal policies granting land

to Europeans also replaced indigenous populations with

reproducing, laboring and loyal groups of immigrant family

farmers. In both cases, gender ideology made female migration key

to civilization and governability.

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However, labor migrations again soon inundated the gender

balanced settler migrations. Not for nothing have migrations

between 1850 and 1940 been called the proletarian mass

migrations. Demand for labor drove migrations and that demand was

always gendered. In Australia, POINT it was the early discovery

of gold that initiated masculinization. By the end of the 19th

century a highly gendered recruitment of male laborers for

industry, plantations, and mines had produced global migrations

that we estimate to have been no more than 25 percent female.

Needless to say, it was at this time that the geographer Georg

Ravenstein proclaimed his seventh law of migration—the

conventional wisdom to which the New York Times would later

refer. But we must also recall that the masculinization of

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migrations occurred in a world where few nations imposed any

significant controls on the movements of people, so eager were

they to recruit male workers. Nevertheless, nation states

generated the data we used. Since they distinguished rather

sharply between emigrants leaving and immigrants arriving—

bifurcating living persons into two separate bits of data—they

allowed us to analyze variations in gender composition for a

broader range of migration streams. We were surprised by what we

found.

SLIDE: “Immigrant” and “Emigrant” Labor Migrants

The graph on the left POINT for example shows us that in

Northern and western Europe female immigrants almost equaled male

immigrants in numbers. So much for the conditional wisdom. In

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industrializing Europe, a growing urban middle-class demanded

women as servants—reproductive work again—and women migrated to

takes such work. Already in the 19th century, then, Europe’s

immigrants were close to gender balance. Nor was Europe the only

place where gendered demand for female reproductive labor

produced gender balance and female majorities. Historians have

long commented on the female predominant Irish migrants; Irish

women too found work as domestic servants around the Atlantic.

But these gender-balanced migrations were the exception in

the nineteenth century. In Latin America, point, demand for

seasonal agricultural workers and in construction and meatpacking

industries produced labor migrations that were far more heavily

male. In the United States a rather sharp masculinization also

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occurred as settler colonization diminished with the closing of

the frontier and as recruitment of industrial labor, especially

from southern and eastern Europe, increased.

POINT The graph tracing emigrant gender composition confirms

the gender balanced nature of Europe’s migrations but tells more

about the heavily male labor migrations. For example, southern

and eastern European emigrants more resembled the emigrant labor

migrants of Asia in their gender composition than they did their

neighbors to the north. Scholars have determined that contract

laborers—the so-called coolies of India--were also heavily male—

at 15 to 25 percent female their migrations were more imbalanced

than the Atlantic slaves to whom they have often been compared.

But the emigrants from China were even more heavily male.

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Scholarly studies comparing Italian and Chinese labor migrants of

this era show that in both cases, temporary and heavily male

migrations provided regular inflows of cash (today we would call

them remittances) and that these remittances allowed peasants in

both societies to prop up faltering systems of household

subsistence production and to guarantee that several generations

of children could be educated and married within their home

countries.

The gender composition of both immigrant and emigrant labor

migrants also provides some evidence of feminization occurring

almost everywhere in the years between 1910 and 1920. Point Many

of these early twentieth century moments of feminization were

followed by equally sharp years of masculinization. POINT Only

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when we turn to the next data series–as we will in a moment-- do

we see feminization becoming increasingly continuous and global.

We argue in our book that the feminization of migration

began not with the global integration of the late twentieth

century but with the unraveling of the global economy of the

nineteenth century. It accompanied the imposition worldwide of

restrictions on free movement and the subsequent drop in global

migration volumes that were further exacerbated by global

depression and international war in the 1930s and 1940s.

SLIDE 1918-1985 Restriction (Refugees, Family Migrants, Labor

Migrants)

For example, the graph on the left, POINT, suggests that at

least in the years between 1918 and 1948, the percentage female

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among international migrants predictably increased whenever the

overall volume of international migrants fell. Of course, none

of the new state-imposed restrictions on migration specifically

prohibited male migration. Instead restrictions made it more

difficult for men to respond freely and flexibly to global

markets for their labor. In Europe, for example, the denial of

residency permits underwrote the development of what would later

be called guest work programs. In other cases, countries such as

the United States explicitly prohibited all migration (e.g. from

Asia) or imposed numerical caps on particular migrations—notably

those from southern and eastern Europe that had been heavily

male. At the same time, the U.S. allowed the spouses and

children of naturalized immigrants and of native-born Asian

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citizens to enter outside the so-called quotas or numerical

limits. Since earlier migrations had been heavily male, the

resulting family unification migrations—like all earlier

migrations of persons intending to settle and reproduce—were

female predominant or gender balanced. The very sharp

feminization that we see POINT at the end of World War II was als

driven by the large numbers of male soldiers who found female

brides abroad, while the postwar re-location of large numbers of

refugees, many of whom had fled war zones in family groups and

who intended to settle and reproduce in a new homeland, also

pushed percentages higher.

The increasing size of migrations premised on a desire to

reproduce relative to the numbers of increasingly restricted

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labor migrations also explains why the feminization that began as

total migrations fell before 1945 also persisted as migration

totals again rose worldwide after 1950. Focus now on the graph

on the right, POINT which summarizes migrant gender composition

in the postwar era. Here POINT we see the impact of massive

recruitment of mainly male guest workers in Europe and the United

States the 1950s and 1960s. But evn these male labor programs

never produced migrations that were as heavily male worldwide as

in the nineteenth century. Almost everywhere, provisions to

accept marriage and family migrants, including the families of

guest workers, coupled with refugee admissions kept percentages

female higher than in the previous half century.

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When we turn to the years after 1970—years when

international migration totals increased even more rapidly--we

found much the same broad contrast between heavily male and

state-supported labor migrations and gender balanced refugees,

settlers, and marriage or family migrants. Clandestine and

irregular labor migrations for example, are often still heavily

male. So are migrations of workers under temporary contract to

the oil-industries of the Middle East. Worldwide, our analysis

of recent migration gender composition continues to point to the

significance of refugees and of family unification and marriage

migrations as drivers of the gender-balanced migrations of the

past half century. Of course, we also found evidence of what

dozens of feminist scholars have analyzed recently. The global

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reorganization of production and reproduction in our own times

has again created very active and massive recruitment of female

labor, for example as textile and assembly line workers,

especially in Asia, and as domestic and service workers—nannies,

cleaners, elder care givers, nurses—in the wealthier countries of

the global north. When such societies today demand reproductive

workers their demand translates into female predominant

migrations—just that as it did in the Afro-Eurasian slave system

of the n early modern era.

Overall, then, our book argues that migrations have always

varied in their gender composition, that such variations are both

modestly predictable and the consequence of gender ideologies and

practices that shape both human reproduction and markets for

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productive and reproductive labor. Faced with restrictive

immigration regimes in the twentieth century, women have become

as likely as men to undertake long-distance migrations both as

refugees, marriage partners and creators of re-settled families

and, increasingly, also as temporary labor migrants. The so-

called feminization of migration across the twentieth century was

neither unique nor completely unprecedented. It was not the

consequence of the global integration of the late twentieth

century. Rather than continue to discuss the feminization of

migration, we suggest that scholars seek to understand

consequences of migrant gender balance; one of those consequences

is that migrant and native populations resemble each other

demographically to a much greater extent than they did 100 years

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ago. Although female migrants who work on temporary contracts are

in fact a recent development, overall, migrants worldwide today

are far more likely to live together with their families than was

the case in the nineteenth century.

To conclude my presentation, I would now like to return

briefly to questions that fascinated me more as an historian and

a humanist than as a social scientist. Why was the feminization

of migration identified only in the 1980s? And why was it social

scientists who first named and discussed it? I have learned that

some colleagues regard this question as uninteresting because

they believe that no one, and certainly not migration scholars,

studied either women or gender before the 1980s. As an historian

I know this is inaccurate;; if it true there there would have

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been no conventional wisdom for the New York Times to cite in 1984.

So let me conclude with 3 concrete examples that help us to

understand the timing and disciplinary context that invented the

feminization of migration in the final decades of the twentieth

century.

In the simplest sense we can blame the data. For reasons

that are too complex to explore here, scholars of international

migration largely ignored flow data for the twentieth century.

That flow data as you saw described the 1950s and 1960s not as an

era of feminization but instead of a slight masculinization. Yet

U.N. stock data for the years after 1960 showed clear female

majorities among immigrants in Europe and Oceania and (briefly)

also in North America. I use this figure, which compares two

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measures of migrant gender composition in the United States, to

explain why different data paints very different portraits of

migrant gender composition.

SLIDE 1850-2006: Correcting Age Distortions in Stock (Census)

Data

Unlike flow data, which describes the numbers of males and

females at the moment of migration, stock data is a snapshot of

all foreigners who remain alive at the time of the census,

whether these migrants entered a country yesterday or as young

people 80 years ago. As a population ages, its percentage female

inevitably rises. That is because men on average die earlier than

women. Thus, in countries with long histories of migration,

sizeable populations of elderly migrants inevitably push the

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percentage female higher in stock data. Demographers have

developed a statistical method to control for this kind of aging;

it is called age standardization. This graph shows how age

standardized changes migrant gender composition as described over

time in U.S.census data. When Katharine Donato age-standardized

international stock data the percentage female among migrants

worldwide rose by only 1 percent point after 1960. In fact, a

pair of historians who recently age standardized the data

analyzed by Georg Ravenstein in the 1880s also found that it

almost completely eliminated his evidence for describing men as

the majority of long-distance migrants. Thus, we argue in our

book that sociologists discovered the feminization of migration

in the 1980s and 1990s largely because they began at that time to

39

use new stock data being compiled by the United Nations and

because they then assumed—wrongly--that changes in that the

gender composition described in that reflected recently changing

migration patterns. It did not.

It’s important too to emphasize that sociologists of the

1980s were not the first scholars to study gender and migration

or to do research on immigrant women. In the humanities

historical studies of women and gender were firmly established in

the 1960s and 1970s while in sociology specialists firmly

rejected early studies of gender as reductionist and trivial. Not

surprisingly, furthermore, none of the social scientists

discussing feminization in the 1980s remembered or evoked the

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work of earlier social scientists whom historian Dirk Hoerder has

labeled the women’s Chicago School of Sociology.

SLIDE: The Women’s Chicago School, 1890s-1920s

The Women’s Chicago School originated in Jane Addams’ Hull House

point and in the New York research foundation point founded by

Mrs. Russell Sage. Scholars in both places pioneered the

development of survey research methods with immigrants; they

collected and analyzed systematic data on migration and on

immigrant urban, household, and wage-earning patterns. Excluded

from the Chicago (and other) sociology departments for their

social activism and their engagement with the immigrant

communities they studied, the Chicago women soon created the

School of Social Administration at the University of Chicago. The

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school’s first dean was the economist Edith Abbott point, who

wrote extensively about immigration issues. Most of these early

immigration researchers have been forgotten, along with the

knowledge they created; they were regarded as something other

than social scientists. Two of them--Louise Bolard More and

Caroline Manning--authors of works on immigrant women wage-

earners and on immigrant family budgets—remain faceless even on

the World Wide Web. It is tempting to wonder whether one of these

women scholars might have trained sociologists able to identify

the feminization of migration long before the mid1980s.

Unfortunately, none of them had that opportunity; they instead

trained social workers, historians, and government bureaucrats.

. SLIDE: Gender and the Transatlantic “Statists”

42

Gender Studies too, we realized, was a discipline shaped by

forgetting and by the exclusion of earlier knowledge about gender

and migration, much of it also produced by earlier female

demographers and statisticians. As we presented the preliminary

results of our research, our colleagues in Gender Studies

repeatedly quoted to us the words of the feminist poet Audre Lord

who warned in the 1970s that QUOTE “the tools of the master could

not be used to tear down the master’s house.” In Lorde’s

metaphorical language, the master is patriarchy and the master’s

house is the dualism of biological sex difference; our critics

were telling us that the master’s tools included the quantitative

methods we had chosen. Statistics and quantitative methods, we

realized, had come in the 1970s and 1980s to be gendered as male

43

scholarly practices and thus largely excluded from gender

studies. Ironically, the statistical analysis of demographic

data, including data on women and migration, had instead formed

an important niche of female academic achievement in the years

between 1920 and 1960.

SLIDE: MISSING FROM GENDER STUDIES

For example, the Population Association of America elected two

female demographers as their president in the 1950s--a good three

decades before female historians and humanists managed to achieve

the same levels of leadership.. One of these female

statistiticans, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, POINT had compared Swedish

and American internal migrations; she became the first female

44

president of the American Sociological Association, also in the

1950s. A photo of the second demographer presidents, Irene

Taueber, a specialist on U.S. and Asian migrations can today not

be found on the web. Another invisible woman—POINT Hope Tisdale

Eldridge--was the editor of the U.N. publication in which our

twentieth century flow data appeared while it was the Mexican

demographer Hania Zlotnik who became the first female director of

the U.N. population division that produced the stock data that

facilitated the identification of the feminization of migration.

The fact was however that by the 1980s and 1990s there were

almost no scholars in gender studies willing to see or to use the

data these feminist statisticians created.

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As these final examples suggest, our efforts to explain why

the feminization of migration remained invisible for so many

years required us to appreciate and understand not only data but

the particular form of knowledge data created. By showing how

changing gender ideologies and gender practices of scholarship

worked to create disciplinary boundaries and to marginalize or

exclude methods, evidence and forms of knowledge, we believe our

book is better able to recognize the worst of divisions that

still separate the social sciences from the humanities and offer

at least one small example of how to bridge them while tackling

the interactions that migration creates at the global level. In

this sense I hope my talk to today has fulfilled the mission of

the Gravensteen lectures and can provoke discussion among

46

scholars and students with no familiarity with statistics or

international migration or little sympathy for gender studies. I

welcome that discussion. Thank you.