When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration / Edition 1

by Sheba George

Overview

With a subtle yet penetrating understanding of the intricate interplay of gender, race, and class, Sheba George examines an unusual immigration pattern to analyze what happens when women who migrate before men become the breadwinners in the family. Focusing on a group of female nurses who moved from India to the United States before their husbands, she shows that this story of economic mobility and professional achievement conceals underlying conditions of upheaval not only in the families and immigrant community but also in the sending community in India. This richly textured and impeccably researched study deftly illustrates the complex reconfigurations of gender and class relations concealed behind a quintessential American success story.

When Women Come First explains how men who lost social status in the immigration process attempted to reclaim ground by creating new roles for themselves in their church. Ironically, they were stigmatized by other upper class immigrants as men who needed to "play in the church" because the "nurses were the bosses" in their homes. At the same time, the nurses were stigmatized as lower class, sexually loose women with too much independence. George's absorbing story of how these women and men negotiate this complicated network provides a groundbreaking perspective on the shifting interactions of two nations and two cultures.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520243194
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	07/18/2005
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	979,450
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Sheba Mariam George is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Assistant Professor at the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science. She is coauthor of Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (California, 2000).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations and Tables
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction
1. Contradictions of Gender When Women Immigrate First
2. Work: Nursing, Women’s Networks, and Men "Tied to a Stake"
3. Home: Redoing Gender in Immigrant Households
4. Community: Creating Little Kerala and the Paradox of "Men Who Play" in the Church
5. Transnational Connections: The Janus-Faced Reproduction of an Immigrant Community
6. Conclusions
Appendix 1: Interview Participants by Household Type
Appendix 2: Types of Nursing Jobs
Appendix 3: Transnational Organizational Structure of the Indian Orthodox Church
Notes
References
Index