Immigrant women

SIGNIFICANCE: Immigrant women often contend with exploitative work situations and the risk of physical abuse, including domestic violence.

Since the seventeenth century, women have journeyed alone or as members of families to North America. Coming first from England, Africa, Ireland, and northern and western Europe, in the nineteenth century, they later immigrated from southern and eastern Europe, China, and Japan. The major source of immigration shifted in the twentieth century from Europe to Latin America and Asia.

History

In early colonial America, women arrived from England as wives or were imported as purchased wives. Many came as indentured servants who were bought and sold like enslaved people; they endured physical and sexual abuse. Some were transported as individuals convicted of crimes, and other enslaved females were brought from Africa. Throughout the eighteenth century, although female immigrants experienced extreme job discrimination, they worked in a variety of trades.

Between 1820 and 1880, many women settled in the rural Midwest, where life on the prairies was lonely and harsh. In urban areas, the most commonly available work for young single women was domestic service, although as the century progressed, they began to find employment in factories. Married women often preferred to undertake piecework at home or to take in boarders. Compared to men, there was a high proportion of destitute immigrant women. In towns and cities, women joined the developing labor union movement and began to speak out against intolerable working conditions. Their first strike was organized in 1825, when the United Tailoresses of New York demanded higher wages. Women labored as domestic servants, teachers, and factory workers, half of whom were employed in textile mills. Leonora Barry, an Irish immigrant, commented on the largest problem for female workers: “Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them.”

From 1880 to 1920, arrivals from Europe substantially increased. For women, positions as domestic servants continued to be most easily secured. In 1900, when white-collar jobs became available to women, Irish women worked in Canada and the United States as office workers, shop clerks, or teachers. Chinese and Japanese women immigrated to Hawaii, the continental United States, and Canada. As the number of Asian immigrants on the Pacific Coast increased, an exclusionary movement developed. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act abruptly curtailed Chinese immigration; it would not be repealed until 1943. The 1907 Gentlemen’s Agreement strictly limited Japanese immigration. It did not exclude family members of residents, however, and therefore, many Japanese women immigrated to the United States as “picture brides.” In 1917, the ban on Chinese immigrants was extended to all Asian countries.

The Early Twentieth Century

In the twentieth century, many female immigrants continued to live under grim circumstances. Entering the labor force at an unprecedented rate, they faced discrimination and grueling conditions. Urban domestic service was managed by a network of unregulated and exploitative city agencies. Rents were frequently inflated. The Chicago Immigrant Protective League was founded in 1907 to help foreign-born arrivals find work, housing, and education. In New York City, new immigrants found work in sweatshops, in which conditions ranged from unhealthy to dangerous, and in the garment industry. In the winter of 1909, some women organized and voted to strike. As a result, membership increased in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Demands were won in more than three hundred shops, and some women succeeded in becoming union officials. Yet, improved factory conditions were not sufficient to prevent a number of fires, including one in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company that killed 146 people, mostly women. That same year, social scientist Francis Kellor described immigrants as “the poorest protected of all humanity in this country . . . even worse than children.”

Immigration during the first decade of the twentieth century exceeded by 35 million the total of any previous decade. Nativistic sentiment prompted Congress to enact new restrictions on immigration, including a literacy test (1917), a quota system (1921, 1924, and 1927), and the extension of deportation criteria. The Great Depression provoked further exclusion, so that total immigration for the decade of the 1930s was lower than at any previous point since the 1820s.

Post–World War II

During World War II (1939–1945), Issei (first-generation Japanese immigrants) were interned with their families in camps by the US government. Following the war, the War Brides Act (1945) allowed Chinese, Japanese, and European women to enter the United States as wives of military servicemen. Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, such marriages were common throughout southeast Asia. In 1962, the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act was passed to help Cubans resettle in the United States. By 1965, the major source of immigration shifted from Europe to Latin America and Asia. The Immigration Law of 1965, which amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, abandoned national origins quotas and introduced preference categories. After 1976, no country could send more than 20,000 people in any year to the United States, which resulted in a higher proportion of blue-collar immigration. The 1980 Refugee Act was introduced to deal with the refugees from Indochina who were admitted following the end of hostilities in Vietnam in 1975. In the 1970s, a “mail-order bride” industry developed that enabled women from the Philippines, Thailand, and Eastern Europe to immigrate to the United States.

In 1991, procedural guidelines for immigration screening were developed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Canada developed gender-sensitive rules to make it easier for women to pass through the screening process. In 1992, in order to manage the immigration of refugees more strictly, Canada introduced new restrictive laws.

During the 1990s, women were as likely as men to immigrate to the United States. Developing nations, such as Mexico and the Philippines, became the primary source of immigration. In 1993, Mexico provided the largest number of immigrants, including numerous undocumented women. As more American women sought employment outside of the home, Central American women, migrating in order to gain economic and social security, filled the need for domestic help in cities. In 1993, The Chicago Review addressed the exploitation of immigrant women: “To earn their living they perform the most varied jobs, many of them menial and sub-human.” In 2010, 55 percent of all people obtaining a green card were women. Women comprised 47 percent of all refugee arrivals and 53 percent of all people who became naturalized.

Concern surfaced regarding immigrant beneficiaries of two government assistance programs in the US: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC; 1935 to 1997) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI; began 1974). In 1993, 6 percent of the immigrant population received public assistance, compared with 3.4 percent of all citizens. Twenty-nine percent of all legal immigrants were living below the poverty line. Since 70 percent of all Americans living below the poverty line were female, it is probable that a high percentage of them were immigrant women.

When women depart from their own cultures, they may lose their customary support systems. They have often left patriarchal and hierarchical traditions. In the United States, they enter a more egalitarian world with a more open sexuality. Gender and family roles can be thrown into disequilibrium. Domestic violence against women immigrants has increased, and there has been a higher incidence of depression and substance abuse among these women. Often eager to take advantage of opportunities, immigrant women are more willing than men to accept any job that is offered, even working in garment sweatshops. Women from different immigrant groups face many of the same issues, but how they cope with these issues varies from one culture to another.

In the mid-2020s, over 23 million immigrant women living in America accounted for 16 percent of the American labor force, working in healthcare, social assistance, professional services, hospitality, restaurants, food services, and home health services. Compared to all men and US-born women, foreign-born women are more likely to experience discriminatory wages, lack access to legal assistance, and experience gender-based violence.

Bibliography

Carratala, Sofia, et al. "A Profile of Immigrant Women in the Workforce." American Progress, 10 Mar. 2021, www.americanprogress.org/article/profile-immigrant-women-workforce. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Daniel, Roger. Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life. Harper, 1990.

O'Leary, Anna Ochoa. Undocumented Immigrants in the United States: An Encyclopedia of Their Experience. Greenwood, 2014.

Pearce, Susan C., Elizabeth J. Clifford, and Reena Tandon. Immigration and Women: Understanding the American Experience. New York UP, 2011.

"A Snapshot of Immigrant Women in the United States." American Immigration Council, 2 June 2023, www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/snapshot-immigrant-women-united-states. Accessed 20 Jan. 2025.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Harper, 1980.