ABSTRACT
Recently, there has been a surge of scholarly interest about immigrant women (Diner 1983; Ewen 1983; Glenn 1986; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992; Lamphere 1987; Simon and Brettell 1986; Weinberg 1988). Although women have always participated in population movements (Tyree and Donato 1986), suddenly newspaper reports are calling women the “new immigrants.” Initial attempts at making immigrant women visible owe much to the efforts of feminist researchers of the 1960s and 1970s (Morokvasic 1983). The first wave of research on immigrant women helped to fill in the gaps by calling attention to the presence of women in migratory movements and by providing the much needed descriptive detail on the employment status and family situations of particular groups, but, according to Morokvasic (1983), this early research did not break with the traditional individualist approach so pervasive in immigration research. It continued to analyze women as if their decisions to migrate were determined by their individual motives and desires; consequently, important questions were left unanswered: How do we account for women's migration, and should the migration of women be treated in the same conceptual framework as male migrants or do they require separate analysis? Recently, a new wave of research has begun to correct some of the problems unresolved by the earlier research. Scholars have begun to move beyond the additive approach to articulate how gender affects and shapes the migration process (Hondagneu-Sotelo 1992; Kibria 1990). This new research shows that immigrant women's relationship to market and nonmarket conditions is unique. The place of immigrant women in the labor market is shaped by class and their statuses as immigrants and racial/ethnic minorities; this intersection creates a particular and distinct experience (Glenn 1986).
