ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss the choices that single women migrants have now that they are in the urban labour market. Unlike married women, withdrawal from wage work is not an option for them as it is the raison d’etre for their migration into the city in the first place. Instead, they can choose to marry or not to marry, and who to marry, if they decide on the course of marriage. This is a choice that their village mothers did not have as village women gained adult status through marriage and child-birth. This will be elaborated later in this chapter. However, with wage work in the city, single women migrants are self-supporting and marriage is no longer a necessity but a choice. In looking at this issue, I draw upon the work of historians documenting the changes in the lives of single women urban migrants in nineteenth century Europe. Comparison between nineteenth century Europe and late twentieth century Sarawak is relevant because women in both instances were/are facing massive transformative forces although the structural forces effecting changes in Europe at that time was wrought by the industrial revolution. In both instances, waves of young women from peasant households migrate to the city for employment. However, it would appear that the long drawn out changes in the last century in Europe have somehow been compressed and accelerated in the context of late twentieth century Sarawak.2 Comparisons will be made with other south-east Asian countries wherever possible, although most studies of working daughters in the region have tended to focus on their employment experiences and natal families rather than on marriage.
