Work makes a woman? Gender, ethnicity and work in Afro -Caribbean immigrant women's lives.
Bennett, Natalie Dione Antoinette
2002
Abstract
This dissertation is based on an ethnographic study of Afro-Caribbean immigrant women who do nursing work in New York City. The study examines women's personal experiences and subjective understandings of nursing work in the U.S. The dissertation also explores the meaning of immigration and work in everyday life for these immigrant women. Its focus is on the ways in which Afro-Caribbean immigrant women negotiate the social constraints they encounter during settlement, and how they construct social identities within these constraints. The central question that this dissertation seeks to answer concerns the meaning and consequences of gender in the experiences of Afro-Caribbean immigrant women in the U.S. The theoretical objective of the study is to explore how women's understandings of work are expressed through narrative identities, and the implications of these subjective identities for how scholars study social identity formation. The study is based on a multi-methodological approach---participant observation, intensive interviewing, analysis of modes of women's storytelling---to inquire into the social conditions in which women work, women's experience of that work, and the stories they tell about work. I conducted 45 in-depth interviews with Afro-Caribbean women who worked as nurses and nurse aides in New York City between 1998--1999. In addition to interviews, I used participant observation data in a healthcare facility and a church, and secondary sources such as novels, newspaper articles, original documents, and organizational publications. I argue that women develop narrative identities that reflect overlapping discourses about gender, race-ethnicity, social class, and immigration. The five narrative identities (self-made woman; reluctant sojourner; unfettered self; struggling woman; rebel) focused primarily on four themes: personal autonomy, dignity of person, freedom of physical mobility, and perceptions of success and social mobility. These narrative identities inform how women respond to the constraints they face in everyday life. Narrative identities also shift individually as well as collectively in response to the social constraints that women face. Overall, the study supports the notion that narrative identities are <italic> themselves strategies of negotiation</italic>, and involve creating an identity that is more or less congruent with the current social situation. Here, I draw distinctions between women's narrative choices and the social realities they talk about. Narrative identities are not the same as ways of life. The salience and persistence of these narrative identities suggest that they are social practices that Afro-Caribbean immigrant women regularly enact, and which are taken-for-granted features of women's lives.Subjects
Afro-caribbean Ethnicity Gender Immigrant Lives Makes Woman Women Immigrants Work
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