On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building

Abstract

On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building, by Cinzia Solari, is an excellent, beautifully written, and consistently conceptualized book that looks at the contemporary migration of middle-aged women from post-Soviet Ukraine. It takes readers on a masterfully structured trip steering between transnational ties linking migrants to their countries of origin and destination, the meaning of gender in different social and political contexts, and the role of female migrants in the nation-building process. The volume is based on Solari’s ethnographic research conducted among Ukrainian female migrants and their families in Italy, California (U.S.), and Ukraine in the years 2004 to 2006, enriched by the author’s observations on the recent developments in Ukraine, including the Euromaidan revolution. The book studies Ukrainian migration in an innovative way: by investigating the root causes, pull factors, and actual life in emigration through the lenses of gender (motherhood) discourse and the role of migrant women in constructing a modern Ukrainian identity. The author suggests that contemporary female migration from Ukraine may be explained by the concepts of ‘‘exile’’ and ‘‘exodus.’’ ‘‘Exile’’—forced by socio-economic circumstances and often irregular—portrays a Ukrainian migration to Italy, while ‘‘exodus’’ refers to longawaited legal departures to California. These two concepts are reevaluated and deconstructed, offering a nuanced interpretation of both their structural and discursive meanings. Undoubtedly one of the main advantages of the manuscript is its very coherent, logical, and transparent internal composition. In the introduction, Solari studies the social, political, and economic background of a category of middle-aged women rendered ‘‘superfluous’’ as a result of economic and identity transformation after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She also elucidates her conceptual approach. The first part of the book examines in detail the root causes of the mass departure of early-retiring well-educated women from Ukraine. First, Solari argues that it was the gendered economics of a Ukraine in transition that pushed this social category out of the labor market through the abandonment of state support for the social services sector where the women used to work. Second, retired, yet still full of energy, women at the same time felt unneeded at home, as their families ceased to call for their support in caring for the grandchildren. This situation coincided with the call of the newly built Ukrainian state to return to the ‘‘traditional’’ family with young women as mothers and housewives and young men as breadwinners (in practice, however, they could not support their newly created families without the financial assistance of their mothers). The next two parts of the book investigate, in a comparative manner, the immigration of, as Solari labels them, ‘‘babushka’’ (grandmother) migrants to Italy and to California. She presents the legal and social context of reception in both destinations and the narratives of chosen women-informants whose stories portray the main patterns and models of migrants’ behavior and their role in nationhood construction. In these descriptions, Solari singles out structural and subjective dimensions of the transnational social fields migrants exist in. The structural dimension in the case of Italy ‘‘produces’’ temporary labor migrants working in a domestic sector with little prospect for long-term residence or family reunification. The subjective dimension of Ukrainian migration to Italy is very deeply immersed in painful, yet lively, connections to the sending country and its future as a European state. 466 Reviews