'I've Never Dreamed It Was Necessary to Marry!': Women and Work in New England French Canadian Communities, 1870–1930

FLORENCEMAE WALDRON

OVER THE PAST DECADE, several scholars of migrants to northeastern United States cities have cautioned against reading women's migration as a clear-cut process of "liberation." Instead, they maintain that positioning U.S. cities as lands of opportunity for women, in contrast to a repressive homeland environment, can be misleading and inaccurate. In an article on the experiences of Puerto Rican women who relocated to the U.S. mainland in the latter decades of the twentieth century, sociologist Marixsa Alicea criticizes studies of migrant women that posit "home" as unilaterally more restrictive than life in the United States and the migrants' host communities as unequivocally "freeing" or "liberating" for women. In an examination of Italian and Jewish immigrants to New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anthropologist Nancy Foner echoes these concerns. "For many Jewish and Italian women," Foner writes, "the journey to New York imposed new constraints, and they were forced to lead more sheltered lives than they had in the Old World"; at the same time, "[t]he role of housewife and mother" was by no means wholly oppressive to these immigrant women, for it "carried with it respectability and the approval of family and neighbors."