Women and Migration

Abstract

Women have been discussed in all the preceding chapters of this book. We have looked at sex ratios among migrants, at the effects of migration on the relatives of migrants, often female, left behind in the sending areas, and at the sexual divisions in the labour market for migrants in the destination areas and the lives of female migrants. This chapter will focus on women, returning to some of the gender-specific aspects of migration already touched on in earlier chapters and taking up others such as female autonomy, fertility, motherhood and prostitution. Marriage migration, that is a move undertaken in order to join a spouse in another area, is the subject of a separate chapter, but this chapter will look at other aspects of the relationship between marriage and migration, such as the way in which the timing and the duration of women’s migration appears to be affected first by the need to find a partner and subsequently by being married.

It’s lonely sometimes in the factory. I miss my family. But I like having money. I send some home to my parents so they are happy. And I can buy clothes and have my hair fixed. I decide about those things for myself. That’s good.

(Young woman worker at Chengdu railway station on her way back to a factory job in Guangdong Province, 1994)