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COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
Introduction
Early debate on the impact of immigration on women focused on the costs and benefits of life in poor agrarian or early industrializing societies from which many immigrant women came as compared to the rich mature industrial or postindustrial societies that were their destinations. In this sense it has formed a special case of the assessment of modernization on gender roles. Research revealed a complex picture within some clear broad outlines. For nearly all immigrants, the loss of community is quite substantial (e.g., Appleyard and Amera, 1986; Foner, 1986; Prieto, 1986, Simon and Corona, 1986; Bhachu, 1986; Lamphere, 1986). Women's paid work is typically more separated from the home in the mature industrial societies; men's authority over women is typically less in the mature industrial societies; and conflict over the legitimate extent of that authority is more common (e.g., Brettell and Simon, 1986; Caspari and Giles, 1986; Davis and Heyl, 1986; Lamphere, 1986). The logistics of childrearing, especially with respect to babies and toddlers, are typically much more burdensome in the mature industrial societies (e.g., Appleyard and Amera, 1986; Foner, 1986; Mirdal, 1984). It is also noteworthy that the affluence that immigrants experience in mature industrial societies comes with (and generates) a wide range - indeed sometimes a bewilderingly wide range - of options (e.g., Boyd, 1986; Evans, 1984; Muenscher, 1984; Pessar, 1986).
The strategies that families employ with regard to these options continue to form the focus of research on gender and immigration up to the present day. In contrast to earlier research that tended to assume that the interests of men and women were opposed, we are now still following through the more nuanced framework that began to emerge in the mid-1980s, exploring both commonalities and opposition of interests of men and women, family strategies, and individual strategies (e.g., Brettell and Simon 1986; Evans, 1984; Manderson and Inglis, 1984).
The focus on family strategies is also, in part, a response to the (then) surprising result that global gender ideologies associated with the country of origin bear little relation to patterns of workforce participation in the new country (for example, some groups of women from extremely patriarchal countries have high labor force participation rates). This turned some researchers altogether against cultural explanations of immigrants' gender roles, but that rejection goes far beyond the evidence. Instead, it may be that we need to treat as problematic the degree to which immigrants endorse the "maxi-culture" of global gender role ideologies in their home countries. And, equally important, we need to begin to explore the "mini-culture" zone of cultural practices at the familial level.(1)
We would like to suggest that cultural practices at the familial level form important resources and constraints in their own right. Several that appear immediately crucial are the availability of grandmothers as major childcare providers with sanctioning authority. Grandmothering roles vary tremendously among cultures, especially in the authority dimension. We with show that immigrants from several societies that are very conservative on gender roles in the "maxi-culture" sense but that also enjoy traditions of committed grandmothering with full sanctioning authority have high rates of labor force participation. Another family level issue we will explore is whether the maternal role strongly emphasizes a "good provider" component - note that this is not a rarity, but occurs in some peasant societies, as well as many hunting and gathering societies. Finally, we explore the importance of intergenerational wealth flows and their timing, in particular assessing the possibility that women's labor force participation will be elevated during the period when there are dependent children in the home among immigrants from cultures that enjoin the accumulation of wealth in order to establish children in neo-local residences upon marriage (with the version in the destination country involving the parents making a substantial payment towards the purchase of a house, furnishing that house, acquiring appliances, etc.). The existing evidence suggests that the division of labor by gender in the home tends to show a lot of continuity between the old country and the new; when women go out to jobs they typically retain nearly all their household chores, and it is important to remember that going out to work for them involves a major "second shift" at home.
This paper takes up this issue by examining labor force participation patterns of immigrant women from the former Yugoslavia in Australia.(2) These women hail from a country at the intersection of two major culture areas - the Slavic world and the Mediterranean, and we systematically compare them to women from other countries in each of these culture areas. These women were all subject to the same regime of immigration policies, so although those are important for many issues (e.g., Caspari and Giles, 1986; Davis and Heyl, 1986; de Wenden and DeLey, 1986), they are effectively held constant in our analysis. The emergence of ethnic politics is a sufficiently distinct issue (Kelley, 1996) that we will not attempt to deal with it here.
Is there any point assessing the common experiences of immigrants from a country that has now fractured into separate pieces? We think so, at least for the purposes of an analysis of labor force participation - it might be different if we were studying ethnic identity or politics. For the purposes of analyzing labor market experiences, several society-wide institutions are crucial: Social capital formation took place under the Yugoslav self-management system and human capital formation took place under the Yugoslavia-wide educational system.
An important question in comparative work on immigrants is how to group the sending countries so that the comparisons are manageable and theoretically interesting. Good answers to this question, in turn, will enable us to begin going beyond the nominal approach to country difference (which, correctly and necessarily, dominates exploratory research) by developing hypotheses about which social forces affect the adaptation process and reception in the host country. The eventual goal would be to assess what underlying dimensions give rise to the groupings, but the first task is to begin developing the groupings.
Our purpose here is to assess this grouping problem for immigrants from the former Yugoslavia in Australia: The former Yugoslavia was ruled by a Communist government for most of the postwar period and so many political scientists tend to treat it as an East European country (together with Poland, Hungary, etc.), a placement which gains an extra rationale from the fact that its people are mostly Slavs. But many of the immigrants who came to Australia from the former Yugoslavia were more like Mediterranean immigrants (mostly Italians, Greeks, Maltese, and Lebanese) in their rural origins, limited human capital endowments, and unskilled occupational experiences than like Eastern European immigrants (Kelley and McAllister, 1984).
We assess systematically the impact of educational and life cycle stage on workforce patterns of women to assess whether immigrants from the former Yugoslavia should be grouped with the Eastern Europeans or the Mediterraneans. This builds on prior research using aggregate data that used factor analysis to demonstrate Yugoslavs' greater proximity to the Mediterranean group (McAllister and Kelley, 1983). Their proximities to and distances from these other groups may help illuminate the family strategies being pursued, as well as the resources and constraints that impinge on these groups.
The History of Yugoslav Immigration
Australia is an advanced industrial society structurally similar to Western Europe and the United States, but with 21 percent of the population foreign born (at the time of this study) it is much more dramatically an immigrant society. Note that this is far in excess of the 10 to 15 percent foreign born that the U.S. experienced during its heyday of immigration earlier in this century (Zubrzycki, 1964). Levels of education are intermediate - lower than the U.S., but higher than Britain.
At the end of 1995, Australia's population included more than 183,000 people born in the former Yugoslav republics. They form one of the largest immigrant groups in Australia, accounting for 1 percent of the total population and 4.3 percent of the overseas-born population. The only countries contributing more immigrants are the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Italy. The Yugoslav influence on the composition of Australia's population is even greater if we include the "second generation" - the Australian-born children of immigrants - then 1.4 percent are of recent Yugoslav extraction (Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, 1995). An ancestry-based measure of origins yields similar estimates (Jones, 1991); in the 1986 Australian Census, 230,204 people reported their ancestries as Croatian, Serbian, Slovene, Macedonian, or Yugoslavian - first, second, and third generation.
A trickle of immigration from the Yugoslav region started even before the first major wave of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries came to Australia immediately after World War II. Just under 4,000 immigrants from the Yugoslav region already lived in Australia in 1933 (BIR, 1990). These first arrivals came mostly from the Croatian areas of Dalmatia, the Dalmatian islands, and Istria - areas that have long been sources of immigrants, especially for distant countries such the U.S., New Zealand, and Australia. Macedonians from the region of Bitola, Slovenes, Montenegrans, and immigrants from Medigurje also started to swell the ranks of these settlers especially after 1920 (Price, 1963). At this period, many fewer immigrants from all these groups came to Australia than went to the U.S. - then a target country for most Dalmatian villagers (Zivkovic, Sporer, and Sekulic, 1995) - but for pre-War Australian society, with its tiny population, their societal impact may have been greater. As with Greeks and Italians, whose Australian presence was even larger than that of the Yugoslavs before World War II (Borrie, 1954; Tsounis, 1975), the first Yugoslav immigrants mainly came from poor farming or coastal areas, with little education and few skills, perhaps not surprisingly since Australia faced tough competition from the U.S. as a destination for skilled workers (Cobb-Clark and Connolly, 1997). Farmers, gardeners, and laborers predominated, with some Macedonians also working in restaurants and as timber workers, and Dalmatians working as seamen and miners (Price, 1963). Many of them continued their traditional family occupations brought from the country of origin. Almost a third of all southern Europeans in Australia were farmers by 1946 (Price, 1963). Children of these first Yugoslav immigrants often joined their parents working on their farms.
A large portion of the Yugoslavs who came in the 1920s later left Australia (Price, 1963), so that their communities had dwindled by the end of World War II, when a fresh wave of immigration renewed them. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the war refugees coming to Australia under the Displaced Persons Scheme included many from Yugoslavia (Martin, 1965; Kunz, 1988). Twenty-three thousand, eight hundred sixteen displaced persons born in Yugoslavia came to Australia between 1947 and 1951 (McArthur, 1983). It was then that...
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