Suzanne M. Sinke

Gender and migration : Historical perspectives

Gender has become a category of concern for many historians of migration in scholarship of the 2000s. This article notes a variety of factors which made it possible and likely for historians to turn to questions of gender. The article surveys historiography on migration and gender as it developed in the late twentieth century and explores some current directions in this scholarship, on a variety of geographic scales: global, national, and local. It emphasizes the need for longitudinal analysis in any study of gender and migration, and notes some approaches to the concept of time used by historians.

A century of European migrations, 1830-1930

This volume is the outcome of a symposium held in Wayzata Minnesota November 6-9 1986. It contains 16 papers on various aspects of migration from Europe to North America during the period 1830-1930. The papers are divided into five parts which are concerned with macroperspectives; microanalysis including chain migration with studies concerning migration from Finland the Netherlands Norway and Hungary and to Pittsburgh; two case studies concerning Quebec and northwestern Italy; return migration; and ideologies and migrants. (ANNOTATION)

Marriage through the Mail: North American Correspondence Marriage from Early Print to the Web

So begins one of several hundred web sites devoted to matchmaking across borders in 2004. It offers online pictures, addresses, and descriptions of women, international (telephone) calling cards, and a video people can order. At first glance the technology would appear to be driving a new form of marriage arrangement. Is this a new transnational world?2 A better question is to what extent infrastructure, in the form of communications systems and education, creates opportunities or sets limits on making key personal connections across space and borders. To answer that, I suggest looking at the history of epistolary courtship across borders in North American history.

Relating European emigration and marriage patterns.

This article discusses a number of the ways in which marriage and migration interacted in European sending areas for migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also speculates as to some of the ramifications of those changes in marriage and migration patterns. In particular, it uses sources from the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to illustrate a few patterns, some quantitative ones already well known to scholars of demography and some qualitative ones which have received less attention, and poses some hypotheses which other researchers can pursue for other emigration regions and periods. Unlike international migrants from many sending regions, where single men dominated the migration of this period, those from the Netherlands at the turn of the century tended more often to move in family units. In discussing these issues, this article demonstrates the degree to which marriage in the sending country was affected by migration, offering a variety of insights into the way in which these changes were of a gendered nature.

Adjusting and fulfilling masculine roles: the epistolary persona in Dutch transatlantic letters

Abstract People involved in migration across borders in the past wrote letters. To write back to family and friends served to reaffirm relationships, but also to readjust those relationships. Mobile letter writers of the past nurtured an epistolary persona – sharing certain information that they expected would sustain or foster the relationship they sought, while withholding other information. Various social roles fell within this persona, in part depending on the recipients. This article explores how visions of gender shape the writing in two letter collections in Dutch from just after the turn of the twentieth century. One comes from a man who left his family to migrate to the United States and where only one (his) side of the story remains. A second collection of family letters illuminates a cross-Atlantic relationship from multiple perspectives. Both collections show how related individuals presented their roles to an epistolary audience and how they negotiated their relationships when it became impossible to fulfill what they and their families saw as appropriate behavior. Both illuminate visions of masculinity and how these tied to other familial roles.