ABSTRACT
A veritable explosion of academic work on gender in recent years has argued that the study of women should be a central part of the history of migration. The scarcity of research that deals with masculinity in the migration process, however, is testament to the fact that gender often gets conflated with the study of women in isolation rather than the migratory processes that produce and reflect social and power relations between and among men and women. Moreover, whilst attentiveness to the specificities of new independent female labour migration is surely welcome, a historical myopia tends to pervade sociological literature, as Ryan and Webster argue in the introduction to this volume, and threatens to overlook the economic activities of previous waves of female migrants, including those who migrated secondarily but did waged work nonetheless.
