Contesting the Meanings of Migration: German Women’s Immigration to Canada in the 1950s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Twenty-five thousand German women immigrated to Canada as domestic servants between 1947 and 1962. Pushed by West German society that was increasingly hostile to women’s employment and emancipation, the female migrants, in their search for freedom, independence, and adventure, used Canadian immigration schemes that were based on patriarchal and paternalistic understandings of gender and class. The male Canadian bureaucrats who recruited the German women viewed them as cheap and docile labour for the growing middle class and as future citizens and mothers who fit the racial and religious criteria of immigration policy. The article illuminates the clashes between the female migrants and the mostly male bureaucrats over divergent meanings of migration within larger discourses of gender, class, and ethnicity. The article documents the women’s agency in the face of state control and how the women benefited from privileges received as white, Christian, Northwest Europeans. It argues that domestic servant immigration failed as a labour market policy, but, in the short term, supported Canada’s racial demographic policy to keep Canada white and Christian. It further argues that the migrants’ perspectives and actions must be taken into consideration in order to understand government policy and its implementation. 25 000 Allemandes ont immigré au Canada comme employées de maison de 1947 à 1962. Poussées par une société ouest-allemande de plus en plus hostile à l’emploi et à l’émancipation des femmes, les immigrantes se sont servies dans leur recherche de liberté, d’indépendance et d’aventure du système d’immigration canadien basé sur une interprétation patriarcale et paternaliste du sexe et de la classe sociale. Les bureaucrates canadiens masculins qui ont recruté les Allemandes voyaient en elles du personnel docile et bon marché pour la classe moyenne en expansion et de futures citoyennes et mères qui correspondaient aux critères raciaux et religieux de leur politique d’immigration. Cet article met en lumière les heurts entre les immigrantes et les bureaucrates, pour la plupart des hommes, sur les différences de signification de la migration au sein du discours portant plus largement sur le sexe, la classe et l’ethnicité. Nous y documentons l’agence des femmes face au contrôle étatique et comment celles-ci ont bénéficié de privilèges reçus en tant qu’Européennes du Nord-Ouest, blanches et chrétiennes. Nous y démontrons que l’immigration d’employées de maison a échoué en tant que politique de marché du travail, mais qu’elle a appuyé dans le court terme les principes démographiques raciaux du Canada pour y maintenir son caractère blanc et chrétien. Nous argumentons de plus que l’on doit tenir compte des perspectives et des actions des immigrants afin de comprendre la ligne de conduite du gouvernement et sa mise en œuvre.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".