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Sheba Marian George, When Women Come First: Gender and Class in Transnational Migration (Berkeley: University of California Press 2005)
BASED ON ethnographic research for Sheba George's PhD dissertation, this book explores a key question in migration literature: What happens when women as labourers migrate first and the men follow later as dependents? The book examines the pattern of female nurses' emigration from Kerala, India, to Central City, a pseudonym for a metropolitan city in the United States, and the consequent implications for gender relations in three different spheres - home, work, and the community. Inspired by feminist literature, George delves into how transnational connections reproduce and transform sender- and class-based power relations among these immigrants. Although drawing from R.W. Connell's work Gender and Power: Society, The Person, and Sexual Politics (Stanford, CA 1987), George, unlike Connell, looks at the larger context where gender relations are transferred across spheres.
This book is the outcome of ethnographic research over three years (1994-1997), focusing on members of the Orthodox Church both in Kerala and in Central City. George interviewed 29 heterosexual couples in Central City, women and men separately. Further, she interviewed priests, bishops, and church leaders whenever she could. In addition to conducting focus-group interviews with nurses, nursing administrators, and teachers in Kerala, George used an innovative method - she interviewed people who were family members of Central City's interviewees, but lived in Kerala. Thus, the ethnography transgressed geographical boundaries.
George clearly followed rigorous research ethics guidelines in laying out her research framework. Being an insider gained her several advantages, including having relatively easy entry into the "Keralite" church-based community in the US as well as in Kerala. At the same time, George's age, marital...