Diana Kay

The politics of immigration to Britain: East-West migrations in the twentieth century.

This analysis places recent interest in East/West migration in a historical perspective. It argues that East/West migration to Britain is not a new phenomenon: Russian Jews arrived at the turn of the twentieth century and members of the Polish Armed Forces and Displaced Persons in the mid‐to late 1940s. Official responses to these refugee movements varied as did the ideological representations of the incomers. In particular, prevailing political and economic considerations as well as ‘race‐thinking’ informed official responses. Current British policy towards refugees from former Yugoslavia reinforces the argument that refugee status is socially determined, rather than inherent in a particular set of circumstances.

The TUC, foreign labour and the labour government 1945–1951

In the early period of the Labour Government of 1945–1951, the British economy underwent a serious crisis, one dimension of which was a severe labour shortage in sectors identified as essential to national economic recovery. In an attempt to resolve this problem, the Labour Government recruited foreign labour from a number of different European sources, but was also required to gain the consent and co‐operation of the trade union movement for this initiative. This paper documents and explains the evolution of the policy of the Trades Union Congress towards this initiative, and the opposition that this stimulated within the trade union movement.

History and Biography

This study sets out to explore the meanings of a set of historical events for a group of Chilean men and women in exile in the West of Scotland since the Chilean coup of September 1973. Broader historical changes at the level of structures transform the context and meaning of work, political participation, marriage and family life. It is this interplay between history and biography that forms the focus of this work.

Rupture of the Public and Private Domains

This chapter takes up the story at a critical point in the lives of both the politicised and privatised actors, for it charts the breakdown of two socially constructed worlds. Given the different relationship which men and women had to public events, the timing of this breakdown differed. For the politicised men, who were intensively involved in public affairs, the rupture in their biographies coincides with the rupture in Chilean history marked by the military coup d’etat. The collapse of the privatised women’s world came later, when departure from Chile severed kinship ties and opened up a schism in their private lives. This chapter then bridges a major shift in Chilean history as well as a geographical shift from one society to another through exile. The first part of this chapter focuses on the. coup and the emotionally charged process of leaving the country. The second part examines the initial experiences of men and women in exile and their differing feelings of deprivation and loss.

Accounts and Accounting

This chapter examines some of the methodological issues arising when asking actors to give accounts of their life experiences.1 The research strategy pursued here parts from the premise that accounts are social products and as such need to be located and interpreted within the social context in which they occur. In this case the specific context and features of exile as a research setting, and the way in which this impinged upon the gathering of information and the quality of information obtained, need to be borne in mind. More narrowly, the accounts were generated within the distinctive setting of an interview where the presence of the researcher also has a bearing on the data received. Not only is the researcher assigned a number of identities by participants themselves as they attempt to make sense of the project and the person but, more generally, the researcher’s gender, age and ethnic identity all play a part in shaping the account produced.2 The chapter ends with a discussion of the way in which the participants in this study were selected and with a broad profile of the men and women who make up the interview group.

Private Troubles and Public Issues

This chapter and the following set out to document the experiences of women in exile. Here the experience of those women who worked outside the home in Chile (the public-private women) is examined, whilst the next chapter takes up the story from the point of view of women in the home. It is important to clarify that this difference in social location corresponds to a class difference. All women who had worked outside the home in Chile had been employed in non-manual or professional work, whilst all women in the home except one were married to manual workers. In each case the significance of being female diverged considerably. Whilst the public-private women had enjoyed a degree of economic independence, the private women had been wholly dependent upon a male breadwinner. Whilst some professional women had been directing teams of men at the workplace, some housewives had been expressly forbidden from working outside the home by their husbands. As Bujra points out, gender may be a universal category but its meaning and imperatives differ widely between groups of women.1 In particular the ability of middle-class women to employ a maid in Chile had sharply differentiated their life-experiences from those who could not. Should the private women have found work outside the home in Chile, the majority would still have had to take full responsibility for the home, as did most women in manual or casual employment.2

‘Family First, Politics Second’

The privatised women came into exile extremely ill-equipped to lead the kind of lives they were about to lead for in Chile many had lived almost exclusively within the micro-world of the extended family. Female kin in particular had played a vital part in sustaining these women’s identity and place in the world. They had consoled, advised and shared what had frequently gone unshared between husbands and wives, forming a daily source of support. In exile, by contrast, the privatised women were forced to go about their daily lives in strange surroundings, in a language they did not speak and with few people outside husbands and children to talk to. Just as political space shrank in exile, so the private sphere was also experienced as more restricted. Exile, by disequilibrating the private domain, transformed the texture and meaning of these women’s lives, leading them to question some taken-for-granted assumptions or to articulate some long-held or newly-felt grievances.

Revolution in the Revolution

It has been argued in the two preceding chapters that exile brought about a new tension between the public and private domains. Both the public-private women and the private women confronted a new and more disadvantageous set of circumstances in the home from what they had known in Chile. However, any insights which the women made regarding gender inequalities were not developed into a fully-blown gender challenge. Nevertheless, women’s struggles in the home were not without public repercussions. There was a general awareness in the exile community that all was not well in the home, that marital difficulties had gone beyond the level which passes by without comment to become the subject of public concern and alarm. To many it seemed that wherever one looked couples were on the verge of separating. There was what could be defined as a ‘private crisis’ which left few untouched. In this chapter I shall examine how this crisis was addressed and in particular whether it led to the adoption of new political ways of organising or to the accommodation and adjustment of previous patterns.

Reconstructing Public Life in Exile

After an initial period of confusion and loss, the politicised actors were anxious to cast off their dependency and to carve out a new political space in exile. They did not intend to remain victims of history for long, but to transform their defeat into a new offensive. This chapter focuses on the way in which the politicised actors set about reconstructing their world in exile. It looks at their attempts to regain a level of collective identity by regrouping politically. As the most prominent participants in this endeavour are men, it is their experiences which are largely examined here. Women’s experiences of the public domain often differed from men’s and will be considered apart in the next chapter. Where, however, there is a degree of overlap, or women contribute to the discussion at hand, their experiences have been included here.