When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration

by Sheba Mariam George

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.

Genres: Ethnography

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Jyothis James · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for any Syrian Christian in the diaspora

[akhivae · Rating 4 out of 5]

wow indian people will just jump at any excuse to feel superior to each other

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the best books that examines shifting tropes of masculinity and femininity in the Keralite immigrant community. A must-read for those who are skeptical of totalizing theories of patriarchy and labor migration that fail to investigate the changing relations of women and men as a result of migration, and the ways in which immigrant male and female identities are structured by class and other social hierarchies.