Gendered ideologies and strategies

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the challenges faced by professional immigrant women and their families in terms of balancing the demands of work and home. I use the case of Indian Christian nurses from the state of Kerala who, starting in the late sixties, immigrated to the U.S. with their families. Because the nurses come first and are upwardly mobile while their spouses lose status in the immigration process, there is a drastic change in gender relations in these households. This shift in the immigrant households provides a fertile research opportunity to understand how these couples negotiate, challenge, and transform conventional gendered practices and discourses. The struggles around the household division of labor and child care of these American families will add to our understanding of the classic "double-shift" dilemmas of two job couples in the U.S.
I relied on ethnographic and in-depth interviewing methods in conducting this research project. In order to understand the dynamics of gender relations in communal life, I spent eighteen months doing extensive participant observation in an Indian Orthodox Christian immigrant congregation in an urban area of the U.S. Using my ties in the congregation, I conducted fifty-eight interviews, which included twenty-nine couples.
I divided the twenty-nine couples into archetypal households based on the domestic division of labor along the lines of housework, child care and financial decision making. They include the following four types: traditional households, where the women do the housework and child care and the men are in charge of the financial decision making, forced-help households, where the men are forced to share the child care, egalitarian households, where all aspects of domestic labor are shared and female-led households, where the women shoulder almost all the labor in the household, including the financial decision making. I analyze how the division of labor varies with participation in the labor market on the one hand and connections back home to Kerala on the other.