Migration and Mothers

Women's Migration Patterns

Women and mothers are involved in all of these movements, but over the course of history, their participation has changed. For example, international migration for work was generally associated with men's migration to provide financially for their family, but we now know that mothers also participate in labor migration. Particularly in patriarchal and/or patrilineal societies, women generally migrated within national boundaries to marry in order to live at their husband's place of residence. Considering that in many countries motherhood outside of marriage was and continues to be shunned, women effectively migrated in order to become mothers.

Migration of mothers raises critical issues such as the reorganization of families, whether nuclear or extended in nature, into transnational families as well as the formation of global care chains.

Feminization of Migration

One of the most enduring ideas in migration is that men predominated in transnational migrations. However, Katharine Donato shows that women outnumbered men in some migration streams. In migration to the United States, women accounted for 55 percent of all immigrants between 1930 and 1979, and outnumbered men by over a million.

Official figures indicate that globally, women's share of the total number of international migrants increased from 46.6 percent in the 1960s to 48.8 percent in 2000. Most of the change is accounted by women migrating to more developed regions, such as Europe and the United States, where their share of the total number of international migrants increased from 47.9 percent to 50.9 percent over the same period. Women's share of total migrants in developing countries remained more or less constant at 45.7 percent.

The term feminization of migration highlights the fact that more women are leading migratory processes as primary migrants, rather than solely for the purpose of family reunification. While there are obvious problems with quantifying this process, both historically as well as in terms of current migration flows, it is nevertheless clear that economic and political changes since 1980s have led to an increasing number of women seeking work across national borders.

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