Changing Gendered Divisions of Work

Abstract

This chapter discusses how migration changed gendered divisions of work. A sedentary bias can also be detected when the gendered effects of emigration from Switzerland are studied. Moreover, when studying emigration, its colonial contexts and, in particular, their relation to gender inequality have to be addressed. In colonial constellations, certain privileges intersected with specific forms of discriminations to produce an ambiguous potential for new social and political reconfigurations. A somewhat similar situation was also created by the migration of nurses from Kerala to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Both a sedentary bias and an orientalising way of looking at this kind of migration once again become visible. But such stories could also be told differently, as we will see.

Nurses from Kerala

Even though the vast body of secondary literature in migration studies provides a good starting point for reflecting on the reconfiguration of gender relations through migration, this type of scholarship has often focused mainly on the ‘migrants’ themselves and on the society they leave. Those who stay behind, as well as the subjects themselves who move, might perform tasks that do not conform to traditional gender roles (even if this is, of course, not necessarily the case). For example, in a study done on the situation of Italian women in Switzerland, the authors identify important changes in gender relations for Italian couples living in Switzerland: ‘In other words, emigration stimulates processes of emancipation. […] The women reach a certain independence thanks to work and thanks to the confrontation with other models concerning the division of roles’.¹ According to the authors, it was not only ‘migrant’ women who experienced a process of change. Their male partners now did housework relatively frequently, either because their wives were working or because, having lived on their own in a foreign country, they had learned to get by on their own.²

However, the possibility that this kind of migration could also change gender relations in the receiving society, i.e., Switzerland at large, is something that has not yet been systematically studied. It is precisely this question that I will look into by analysing the expansion of the nursery infrastructure and its consequences in Chapter 4. For now, let us turn to some interesting special cases concerning the migration of women to Switzerland and its impacts on gender dynamics.

A publication from 1977 on Turkish couples in West Germany suggests that ‘in such cases where wives have migrated prior to their husbands, the wife becomes the principal breadwinner and the husband the primary child-carer’.³ However, no empirical data are given to support this claim. Conducting research on ‘migrant’ couples⁴ in which the woman migrated earlier than the man and, as a consequence, had already begun working outside the home before he arrived, therefore seems likely to prove fruitful. In this context, Urmila Goel studied how, in the 1960s and 1970s, Catholic institutions in Germany used their global networks to recruit young Christian nurses from Kerala. Research in Switzerland and the USA⁵ has confirmed these findings.⁶ After several years of work, most of these women had married highly qualified men from Kerala. However, their husbands could join their wives in West Germany only in the framework of regulations concerning family reunification. Consequently, they were not immediately eligible for work permits and instead stayed home and brought up the children. As a result, the women remained the main breadwinners in these families, while their husbands initially looked after the household and children. Later, these men were often forced to accept occupations below the level of their own qualifications and even those of their wives. The division of work within these families thus differed from the norms in both India and Europe.⁷ Here, we see how specific privileges like the right to immigrate intersect with specific forms of discriminations and thereby produce a new configuration.

Urmila Goel showed, moreover, that the existing research on these families focused most often on the resulting problems, for example, cases of alcoholism. It was also assumed that due to India’s ‘patriarchal structure’, such a role reversal was particularly hard for Indian men to adapt to. However, according to Goel, these stories could also be told in a different way: strong women forged their own path—and their husbands joined in. These Indian nurses could then be regarded as protagonists who were part of the West German emancipation of women.⁸ The fact that such a perspective was not, in fact, adopted and that the focus was on the problematic, rather than the productive dimensions of this migration, is the result of both a sedentary bias and an orientalising way of looking at this kind of migration. Here again, conceptualising ‘the immigrant woman’ into an analysis of the women’s movement remains a research desideratum.

Against this background, it would also be of interest to systematically investigate what happened to those couples in which the woman was native to the country and the man came from abroad. For instance, in the family of a friend of mine, the mother was Swiss while the father came from Spain. In this case, the father stayed at home and the mother went to work as long as they lived in Switzerland.⁹ In Switzerland in the 1970s and 1980s, such a distribution of roles was still very rare. It would therefore be interesting to study more binational cases in which the father relocated.

A Sedentary Bias in the History of Emigration

At this point, we turn to emigration from Switzerland and its associated gender effects. The region that is now Switzerland experienced intense and sustained emigration for centuries, and it is only since the last decades of the twentieth century that immigration has become more common than emigration. The main focus of this contribution is on migration to Switzerland and its impact on changing gender relations. In future work, it would be worthwhile to address the same question with regard to Swiss emigration.¹⁰ As is the case with most discussions of immigration, a sedentary bias can, in fact, also be detected when the effects of emigration from Switzerland are studied.

A good example can be found in the interpretation of emigration from what is now called the Canton of Ticino during the early modern period. At that time, the seasonal emigration of men led to local women taking over all the work to be done in their home region. Contemporaries who visited these areas described this in very negative terms and often claimed that, in the absence of men, the whole community developed pathological traits. According to a widespread narrative, a correlation between migration and social stagnation was postulated. In addition, the alleged effects of mothers’ working on children’s health were described in very drastic terms. According to Paolo Ghiringhelli, for instance, in no other region of Switzerland did one see so many deaf and dumb people as in Ticino.¹¹ He attributed this to the hard work done by the women, who would often carry the heaviest burdens on their backs uphill and downhill even on the day of their parturition, to the clumsiness of the midwives, and to bad childcare in general. In spring and autumn, the mothers’ and the other female members of the family would stay away from the house all day long, leaving the small children to the care of other children who, according to Ghiringhelli, were hardly able to keep themselves upright. Under such circumstances, the children would be in danger of being crushed, burning, falling—or of being eaten in the cradle by pigs, or at least seriously injured by them. In summer, the small children would be taken to the fields. There, they would stay with their heads uncovered, leaving them exposed to the scorching rays of the sun. This would boil their brains and make them into deaf, dumb, and completely stupid people.

As other reports also testify, this kind of migration called into question the traditional division of labour, revealing it to be a social construct rather than a natural phenomenon—which would explain the angry reactions. However, in historical research, the negative opinion expressed in such sources was for a long time simply taken over as is. For instance, Ghiringhelli’s statements were not checked, but repeated verbatim, nor was there a discussion of which function such discourses should fulfil.¹² Instead of simply showing how this migration was perceived by contemporaries, historians adopted these opinions as their own and thus, by extension, the view that emigration had reinforced the bad position of women. That a historian who is uncritically attached to his sources, adopts the judgement of contemporary observers and even transfers it to the present day is, under such circumstances, not surprising. For example, the following was written in this context: ‘Emigration was not only a mean of stabilising the size of the population, it also stabilised the backwardness from which the Ticino has still not […] recovered today’.¹³

Only relatively recently have two female historians, Patrizia Audenino and Paola Corti, developed a different view on this process: ‘For these reasons, the women of the Alps could have verified precociously how the division of domestic and productive roles was a social construction, rather than a natural phenomenon’.¹⁴ Of course, it is not a question of proclaiming a naive narrative of ‘emancipation’, since the very difficult living conditions of these women must not be neglected. But only from a perspective like the one adopted by Audenino and Corti can the dimension of migration come into view, which can be an important trigger for socio-political change.

Colonial Constellations

In the colonies, women were also often perceived in ways that diverged from the European image of the ‘weaker sex’. The local women appeared to the European colonisers to be workhorses: carrying wood, stomping grain in heavy mortars, carrying heavy loads to the market, and doing ‘unwomanly’ work in the fields.

It is well known that colonialism legitimised itself as a civilising mission with the aim of improving the position of women in particular. In this context, female missionaries, female professionals, and missionary wives were able to create a field of activity of their own by ‘educating’ local girls and women and through medical work. Against this background, it appears evident that the colonial contexts of Swiss emigration, and in particular their relation to gender inequality, need to be addressed.¹⁵

In the case of Bertha Hardegger, for instance, gender discrimination was directly related to her decision to leave Switzerland. Hardegger had studied medicine.¹⁶ When her father died, she took over his practice, but only in order to preserve it for her younger brother, who was just taking his final examinations.¹⁷ In 1936, she left Switzerland for South Africa, and in 1937 she moved to colonial Lesotho, where she became the first female doctor in that region. She was also one of the first female Swiss Catholic missionary doctors. According to Ruramisai Charumbira, ‘Hardegger was following the footsteps of many educated European women who found an outlet in the colonies, where they could and did become their own mistresses and practiced their professions fully’.¹⁸ Against this backdrop, it comes as no surprise that Hardegger saw the independence of Lesotho in 1966 critically and returned to Switzerland in 1970, where she ran a medical practice in Thalwil.

In colonial constellations, women were considered by the dominant European ideology to be inferior within a race that was considered superior.¹⁹ Therefore, certain privileges intersected with specific forms of discriminations and produced an ambiguous potential for new social and political reconfigurations. Female colonists exercised power over colonised men and were, for instance, able to delegate menial work to them. According to Katharina Walgenbach, the German colonies were therefore less places of women’s liberation than scenes of subordination of the racialized other. In her opinion, it can be assumed that racist privilege in the colonies in fact stabilised traditional gender relationships between European men and women, because white women were compensated for their gender discrimination on another level.²⁰

A somewhat different picture is drawn in the research on Swiss missions.²¹ The relationship between mission and gender innovation is here as well highly ambivalent. Undisputed is that this mission was defined as a male enterprise and that the movement behind it embraced conservative views of women’s participation in public life.²² Even when women were designated as missionaries, they were often given subordinate status without the rights held by men.²³ Missions thus often confined women’s activities to a limited sphere. On the other hand, in order to create Christian communities, women were indispensable as wives and teachers.²⁴ Girls were, for instance, taught domestic skills by older women, among other subjects, as they were trained to become Christian wives and mothers.²⁵ Cleanliness and hygiene campaigns in these years aimed at instructing both Europe’s underclass and colonial subjects, while, at the same time, striving to establish bourgeois gender concepts.²⁶ The aim was to instruct these women so that they would be able to raise their children ‘properly’. Colonial policies thus specifically aimed to change relationships between women, men, and children.²⁷ In addition, the circumstances created by the colonial constellation often placed pressure on received understandings about differences between men and women and their proper roles among colonised and colonisers alike. The paid employment of women to promote evangelical domestic ideals abroad implicitly violated and thus critiqued those very same ideals. And sending young children home to be reared and educated deprived missionary wives of many of the roles of motherhood. The imperial mission was therefore from its beginning gendered. It left its marks on the division of labour and relations between women and men in the broader societies in which the missions originated, as well as those in which the missions pursued their goal.²⁸