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Title: Young, Unwed, Mobile, and Female. Women on their Way from the Habsburg Monarchy to the United States of America

Citation Type: Journal Article

Publication Year: 2005

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Abstract: Although women participate in every human migration, more actively in some than in others, they have been ignored by migration research for a long time. However, migrating women or women in migration processes, whether as stayers or movers, are no longer invisible. Analysing a sample of passenger list from Bremen to New York and the Census of the United States of America in the year 1910 will give new inside in female migration over long distances, from the Habsburg Monarchy to the United States of America, at the first decade of the 20th century. While women accounted for roughly 40 percent of the total immigration in the second half of the 19th century, since 1930, by contrast, women have dominated migration to the United States. Particularly in the first decade of the 20th century, Austria-Hungary became a major source of migrants to the United States of America. The proportion of women, who took part in this great overseas migration process, varied by ethnic background and type of migration. The unmarried, young, and independent migrant was female, since more single women than men from the provinces of the Habsburg Monarchy decided for a transatlantic move. Although migrant women wage earners in the United States, like in Europe, clustered in very few female-dominated occupations, their possibilities to earn ones living changed after they went overseas. While domestic service was the most important and most exclusively female occupation in Europe, the demand for factory 'girls' increased in the USA and more and more Polish, Czech, Jewish, and German women were occupied in so called 'sweat shops' and factories in garment and textile production. In addition, women migrants of every background were less likely to return to their homelands than were men.

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Authors: Steidl, Annemarie

Periodical (Full): Przeglad Polonijny (Review of Polish Diaspora)

Issue: 118

Volume: 4

Pages: 55-76

Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Migration and Immigration

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