Introduction: Who are the ‘new’ female migrants?

Feminist scholars have been critical of the lack of academic recognition for female migrants and their role in migration movements. While the feminisation of migration has been accelerated in recent decades (Castles and Miller 2003), women have always been in a migration stream. What is new is rather the recognition of women's participation in migration, both politically and academically (Morokvasic 1984), and the increasing autonomous migration of women in post-socialist Eastern Europe in particular. Gender and migration scholars have been deconstructing gender-neutral assumptions in migration studies that had been based on the male migrant experience. These assumptions were criticised for their generalising and androcentric nature (Lutz and Huth-Hildebrandt 1998; Lutz and Morokvasic-Müller 2002).

German feminist scholarship has been examining gender specific aspects in migration since the late 1970s. The main question has been whether, and if so, how the migration process has changed gendered power relations within families (Ley 1979; Krasberg 1979). Ursula Apitzsch (1990, 1999) considers the changes in gender relations in terms of modernisation and points out that modernisation had already begun in the societies of origin prior to migration. This led women to taking active roles in migration. The fact that immigrant women tend to organise their lives in order to accommodate their families does not necessarily mean that they return to the ‘traditional’ way of life during the settlement process.