Migration for Labor, Migration for Love: Marriage and Family Formation across Borders

Suzanne Sinke

Reprinted from the OAH Magazine of History
14 (Fall 1999). ISSN 0882-228X
Copyright (c) 2002, Organization of American Historians
 

"'Poor Masha' [grandmother] moaned, 'what is to become of her? Her chances [for marriage] had been small enough without a dowry. And now, burdened with an aged father and a blind helpless mother, the best she can expect is a middle-aged widower with half a dozen children!'...After dinner she said to mother, hesitating at every word as she spoke, 'You know, I decided last night, that when you go to America Masha should go with you'" (1).

When Rose Cohen wrote about the circumstances of her impoverished Jewish family in the Pale in the 1890s, she highlighted a basic theme in migration. Though economic opportunity was a driving force behind migration, on a personal level it was rarely sufficient. Rather, individual and family decisions often hinged on contacts and on perceptions of what migration would signify not just for the individual, but also for a family, either the one in place at the moment, or the one a migrant hoped to someday form (2). For Masha, this could have gone in different directions. Either her parents could have impressed upon her the duty to remain in Russia and care for them in their old age, or (as in the true story) they could have encouraged her to migrate with relatives to the United States and have better opportunities for both work and marriage.

For women, until quite recently, marriage was one of the few options for a reasonable economic existence as an adult. It was often economically advantageous for men as well. For both, it was a goal in life, the pursuit of which could trigger migration. Two basic characteristics of migrating populations emphasize the role family formation had in migration decisions: the majority of migrants were young adults, and sex ratios in migrating groups were often imbalanced (3). The former meant that a substantial proportion of migrants were newly married or of an age when marriage would be appropriate, while the latter meant that finding a spouse of the same background could be difficult after migration. This article explains some of the ways in which marriage and migration interacted, using migration to the United States as an example.

In the late nineteenth century commentators on migration began to write of an "international marriage market." Just as there was an international labor market, by which workers from one country made their way to job opportunities in another, so too was there an international marriage market, by which young women might receive a specific marriage proposal and thus migrate. Within a setting of international migration, marriage choices and opportunities changed dramatically. The key variables determining the relationship between marriage and migration were 1) demographics, 2) legal policies 3) cultural perceptions, and 4) information and technology.

The demographics of migration required the rearrangement of traditional marriage patterns. Until the 1930s women were a minority of immigrants overall, and in most ethnic groups such tendencies left skewed sex ratios on both sides of the migratory trajectory. The international marriage market affected the men who migrated from rural Sicily to the U.S. at the turn of the century as well as the women in the rural districts they left behind; both often sought the other across the Atlantic. From 1899 to 1910, 78 percent of immigrants from Italy were male, while less than 22 percent were female. This contributed to the high rates of return migration, 60 percent for southern Italy. And as with many other groups, this return was almost exclusively male (4).

In other cases, a man might marry prior to migration but leave his wife behind to attend to family matters while he made money, or he might return to marry and then migrate again with his spouse, or he might send for a bride. All three cases appeared in the story of Rosa Cavalleri, who traveled to America to join her husband, accompanied by several women who would marry upon arrival.

"Oh, I'm so scared!" Emilia kept saying and she kept looking at the little picture she carried in her blouse...

"Don't be scared, Emilia," I told her. "That young man looks nice in his picture."

"But I don't know him," she said. "I was only seven years old when he went away."

"Look at me," said the comical Francesca with her crooked teeth. "I'm going to marry a man I've never seen in my life" (5).

The numbers of single men and women migrating to the U.S. were rarely balanced. Even in cases where they were close, geographic distribution could be uneven, as with the Finnish population, where single women tended to congregate in cities for domestic service opportunities, while men often went to more remote locations, such as the Iron Range of northern Minnesota (6).

The 1930s experience of a Punjabi man in California demonstrates that demographics were not the only problem. He was not allowed by law to bring in a spouse and was forbidden by state anti-miscegenation laws from marrying a "white" (7). This case highlights a second theme in the relationship of marriage and migration, governmental policies. Legal restrictions could affect both ends of the migration flow. Sending areas sometimes placed restrictions on marriage and migration. In most German states during the nineteenth century there were laws requiring a substantial economic base before marrying. This sometimes led to postponed nuptials, or children born outside legal marriages. Such families were prime targets for migration to the U.S., with marriage as one of their first goals (8).

On the U.S. side, legal restrictions based on race affected both marriage and migration patterns and had a profound effect on the immigrant families and communities that did (or did not) develop in the U.S. The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1908 forbade the further immigration of Japanese laborers, but allowed those already in the U.S. to bring in their wives and families. This, combined with the legal ability to marry in absentia in Japan, led to the phenomenon of the picture bride. Women would marry and then join the spouses they might or might not have known prior to migration. One, anticipating the pitfalls of her new life, wrote:

On the way from Kobe to Yokohama, gazing upon the rising majestic Mount Fuji in a cloudless sky aboard the ship, I made a resolve. For a woman who was going to a strange society and relying upon an unknown husband whom she had married through photographs, my heart had to be as beautiful as Mount Fuji (9).

Outrage at the picture bride practice in the U.S. led to further restrictions in 1920, and the Immigration Act of 1924 more permanently banned all Asian migration. Only with the 1965 shift in immigration policy did Asians have the opportunity to immigrate on something close to equality with Europeans (10).

The predominance of woman immigrants in the latter part of the twentieth century was due largely to governmental policies that promoted family reunification. This was most obvious in the case of war bride legislation after World War II, when the rate of female immigrants reached its highest level, but has remained a major component of subsequent legislation (11). Sometimes women arrived with the plan of having a U.S. husband provide the family wage, but as in the past, many immigrant women came intending to work for wages regardless of marital status. And as service jobs burgeoned in this century, demand for women immigrants to fill them rose proportionally. Current concerns over marriage for a green card stem from this reality. Yet they have their counterparts in earlier times, when others used marriage as a means of migration. In these cases women (and recently a few men) who wanted to migrate agreed to marry someone in the U.S. Often their expectations were of a better life materially, and perhaps a more "enlightened" spouse, which leads to the next theme of marriage migration.

Cultural perceptions concerning who was a suitable spouse, how to arrange a marriage, and whether one needed to marry and at what age factored into the marriage and migration nexus. The necessity and arrangement of marriage varied greatly by culture and over time. While decisions about marriage were generally individual ones, different cultures placed varying degrees of pressure on people to marry, from the relative acceptance of being single for mid-nineteenth-century Irish women to the relative imperative of marriage for modern Chinese men. For other groups, such as Mexican immigrants, fear of sexual impropriety for young women (though not for young men) led to patterns of early marriage and chaperonage. Migration often helped break down these practices (12).

If a culture had a tradition of third-party matchmaking, such as among Japanese or Jewish immigrants, it might facilitate marriage to someone from the same background. For others, migration opened opportunities to choose their own spouses on their own terms. Whether a person would seek a spouse from the same background or from another varied, but the chances for marriage across national and ethnic lines increased for many after migration. The goal of finding a suitable spouse, however, remained the same.

Potential spouses who came from what some considered a more desirable background possessed "cultural capital," as one anthropologist termed it (13). In recent times this has included U.S. men seeking wives from outside the United States, where matchmaking companies since the 1970s have advertised women that fit the ideals of the 1950s, are more family-oriented, and "want to keep the house, cook the meals, etc." (14). In earlier times, a similar phenomenon existed of trying to get someone from the "Old World" who was not corrupted by American gender ideas. Aart Plasier, a Dutch immigrant in western Michigan in 1915, reported, "I think that I will go back to the Netherlands to look before I marry, maybe I can turn up a helpmate. It is sad here regarding the females" (15). He, like many other Dutch immigrant men, sought a spouse who wanted to speak Dutch, obey her husband, and not shy away from the physical labor of a family farming venture (16).

The desire to find a suitable spouse resulted in a variety of recruitment techniques. These help introduce the final theme of changes in information and technology. Matchmaking and personal ads, both of which existed in the U.S. colonial era for some groups, have taken on more importance as migration rates and mobility have risen. Today international matchmaking is big business. Computer connections make the globalization of the marriage market more feasible, but in earlier eras letters or newspapers served a similar purpose. A mid-nineteenth-century German immigrant wrote to his aunt, asking her to find him a wife: "My demands for a young woman are very limited, a developed figure with passable face is sufficient, everyone wants industriousness and a good disposition, social position and class make no difference. Wealth is good and none perhaps better" (17). Others turned to personal ads, paying for the opportunity to spell out their interest. Sometimes these ads went to the hometown paper in the place one left; in other cases, immigrants relied on American-based journals. In the 1970s two studies of New York-based newspapers, India Abroad, the English language weekly of the Indian migrant community, and Nowy Dziennik, a Polish language daily, indicated that both carried matrimonial ads in most issues (18).

In the era of steam travel, a visit to the homeland was possible for some, who then led whirlwind courtships or married someone they had sought out through other means. For some ethnic groups this became a common phenomenon. Early in the twentieth century Cape Verdean men, often situated on the northeastern seaboard and with contacts in the fishing industry, could make the trip back to find a spouse. As one explained:

I went to the islands after the [First World] War....At that time all the Cape Verdean men that were here had the custom of going back to the old country and marry a Cape Verdean woman and bring her back here....My sister-in-law was the one that arranged the marriage....I had never met her but I saw a picture of her (19).

For those who lived in the days of wind and animal power, this was less common, and the choices were more geographically limited. Air travel has made the possibilities of "shopping" for a spouse, as on tours by some matchmaking companies, much more prevalent (20). From sporadic postal service compounded by low literacy levels to the World Wide Web, shifts in the availability and reliability of information have combined with technological changes to make travel easier, thus allowing people to seek spouses from greater distances with greater ease. This in turn has sometimes shifted perceptions of who a suitable spouse might be.

Marriage and migration have always affected one another. In a global world system, it should come as no surprise that marriage choices and job choices have developed in similar ways. But the influence of an international marriage market has often been an important factor in migration decisions for women, who had fewer economic choices than men. Still, even for men and women who migrated primarily for labor, marriage (and sometimes love) was not often totally out of mind.

1. Rose Cohen, Out of the Shadow (1918), excerpted in Immigrant Voices: New Lives in America, 1773-1986, ed. Thomas Dublin (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 150.

2. See Charles Tilly, "Transplanted Networks," in Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, ed. Virginia Yans-McLaughlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

3. See, for example, the demographic information on transatlantic migration flows in Walter T. K. Nugent, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870-1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

4. Donna Gabaccia, From the Other Side: Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in the U.S., 1820-1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 28; [William P. Dillingham], Reports of the Immigration Commission: Abstracts of the Reports of the Immigration Commission, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1911), 97; and Mark Wyman, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 11. One of the main characteristics of permanent populations was their degree of kin connections in the United States. See Ewa Morawska, "Return Migrations: Theoretical and Research Agenda," and Walter D. Kamphoefner, "The Volume and Composition of German-American Return Migrations," both in A Century of European Migrations, 1830-1930, ed. Rudolph J. Vecoli and Suzanne M. Sinke (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

5. Marie Hall Ets, ed., Rosa: The Life of an Italian Immigrant, excerpted in Dublin, ed., Immigrant Voices, 112.

6. Carl Ross, "Servant Girls, Community Leaders: Finnish American Women in Transition," in Women Who Dared: The History of Finnish American Women, ed. Carl Ross and K. Marianne Wargelin Brown (St. Paul: Immigration History Research Center, 1986).

7. On the vicissitudes of "white," see Karen Isaksen Leonard, Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

8. These restrictions were not abolished on a national basis until 1919. John Knodel, "Law, Marriage, and Illegitimacy in Nineteenth Century Germany," Population Studies 20 (March 1967): 282. See also Monika Blaschke, "No Way but Out: German Women in Mecklenburg," in Peasant Maids--City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America, ed. Christiane Harzig (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 25-57.

9. Emma Gee, "Issei Women" (1971), excerpted in Immigrant Women, ed. Maxine Schwartz Seller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), 55.

10. See Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America Through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

11. In the decade 1940-1949, 61 percent of immigrants to the U.S. were female. Gabaccia, From the Other Side, 28.

12. Charlotte Ikels, "Parental Perspectives on the Significance of Marriage," Journal of Marriage and the Family 47 (1985): 253-54. On the relationship between marriage prospects and migration of German, Irish, Swedish, and Polish women, see Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids--City Women. On the reluctance of Irish women to marry, see Hasia Diner, Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 53-54; and Deirdre Maggean, "To Be Matched or to Move: Irish Women's Prospects in Munster," in Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids--City Women, 57-98. For Mexican attitudes, see Vicki L. Ruiz, "The Flapper and the Chaperone: Historical Memory among Mexican-American Women," in Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia (New York: Praeger, 1992); and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

13. Kathryn Robinson, "Of Mail-Order Brides and 'Boys' Own' Tales: Representations of Asian-Australian Marriages," Feminist Review 52 (1996): 53-68.

14. "Why a Russian Woman?" Russian American Alliance: <http://www.jbiinc.com/~jonathan/index.html>, accessed 25 January 1999.

15. Aart Plasier to cousin, Grant, Michigan, 6 January 1915, Heritage Hall Collection, Calvin College.

16. See Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, forthcoming).

17. Quoted in Wolfgang Helbich, ed., "'Amerika ist ein freies Land': Auswanderer schreiben nach Deutschland" (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1985), 137.

18. Musab U. Siddiqi and Earl Y. Reeves, "A Comparative Study of Mate Selection Criteria among Indians in India and the United States," International Journal of Comparative Sociology 27 (1986): 226; and Barbara Lobodzinska, "A Cross-Cultural Study of Mixed Marriage in Poland and the United States," International Journal of Sociology of the Family 15 (1985): 94.

19. Quoted in Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 84.

20. Cherry Blossoms, an American matchmaking company aimed at men seeking women from other countries, began operating in the 1970s and as of 1999 boasted 26,000 clients married due to their assistance. In the late 1990s it ran tours to eastern Europe and the Philippines on a regular basis. "Our Bragging Rights," Cherry Blossoms Home Page: <http://www.cherry-blossoms.com>, accessed 25 January 1999.

Suzanne Sinke is an assistant professor of history at Clemson University in South Carolina. She is co-editor with Rudolph Vecoli of A Century of European Migrations (1991) and author of Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920. She spent the 1999-2000 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar at the North American Studies Center at the University of Tampere, Finland.