For some time already, migration studies have become an established area of scholarship in the social sciences. Institutional, historical, and cultural perspectives have offered a comprehensive view of the sweeping global phenomenon of migration. Nicoleta Roman and Beatrice Micheletto’s work explored in this review, Women, Migration and the Exchange of Knowledge from the Sixteenth to the Twenty-first Century, represents a special contribution to the field, as it connects early modern and contemporary migrant realities and narratives from a longue durée view point, thus shifting the exclusive focus on the present-day implications of migration. Moreover, other studies have dealt with migration from a gendered viewpoint too, but this work discusses through individual stories the personal and professional contribution of female migrants to their places of destination and of origin in their migrant trajectories. In other words, the current study examines the role of female migrants as agents of knowledge transfer.
This book is a collection of interdisciplinary texts that investigate women’s migration and, particularly, see them as catalyst of exchanges across Europe from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This collection serves as a historical analysis, a socio-cultural reflection, a qualitative and quantitative surveys alike; it presents women of distinct geographic/ethnic areas from Baltics to Greece, and of contrasting socio-ideological background, including Swiss, French, German upper bourgeoisie versus Slovene peasants, Greek communists, and first generation Romanian college students. These are all meant to challenge the stereotypes associated with women migrants by depicting them as makers of their own lives and shapers of their environment.
Roman and Micheletto’s compilation can be integrated in a series of attempts that survey multiple peripheralities and integrate them into a global narrative. For example, the book edited by Luisa Passerini, Women Migrants from East to West: Gender, Mobility, and Belonging in Contemporary Europe (Berghahn Books, 2007) explores specific contemporary examples of east European migrant women. The international research network “Women on the Move,” comprised of specialists from fifty-two countries and drawing on expertise from domains as diverse as demography, anthropology, art, and political science aims to elaborate a complete picture of migrant women’s contribution to the construction of Europe by incorporating themes like motherhood, exile, and European similarities with trans-border dynamics of distant lands, such as the Andes. Other studies from the last four years have addressed the institutional aspect of female migration, with a focus on labor networks but also other legal implications, such as the theme of violence against women: (Micheletto, Gender and Migration in Historical Perspective: Institutions, Labour and Social Networks, 16th to 20th Centuries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); Catherine Briddick, Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law (Oxford University Press, 2025).
This book is divided into two parts. Part I examines the circulation of women and knowledge: migration for education, work, along the socio-cultural contributions of women under discussion:
“by relying on the recent feminist literature, the section shows that focusing on educated/skilled women challenges the (stereotyped and racialized) image of female migrant as victims of their partners and of their…backward society and as a problematic presence for the hosting society…” (2). Part II explores boundaries, societies, and identities by highlighting migration’s impact on traditional social, legal, and institutional structures.
The sixteen chapters comprised in these two parts reflect on the experiences of women coming from or moving within eastern Europe. This choice demonstrates that migrant women were the initiators of their actions through their work, property, and knowledge (3). This is a highly relevant finding, given the economic and educational restrictions of women throughout history: the technological skills they could acquire were indirect and mediated by their male relatives and through family businesses (10). Moreover, by showcasing gendered migration dynamics in or out of eastern Europe, the book defies the image of east European female migrants as exclusively low skilled and low income, at the same time proposing an inclusive definition of Europe and Europeanness “by integrating the Eastern European countries into the history of migration” (4).
Eight chapters of Part I illustrate specific stories such as: the cultural influence through salons and charitable work of German wives of west European consuls in nineteenth century Russia; the impact of west European governesses on the nineteenth century Baltic education system; the connection between nationalist movements and women’s emancipation, as seen in the case of some Cypriot migrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the pioneering work in rural child welfare and breastfeeding of pediatrician Erna Eckstein-Schlossmann, a refugee of Nazi Germany in Turkey; the profile of female intellectual elites of eastern Europe (1860s–1920s) as inferred analytically from the digital archives of the University of Zurich, one of the first European universities to admit women to study; the political and economic migration of Slovene, Greek, and Romanian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to Italy or to socialist eastern Europe.
Part II discusses early modern dynamics of marriage, trade, and urban economies in sixteenth and seventeenth century Prague; the interplay between gender, ethnicity, and religion in the Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, fifteenth to eighteenth centuries; the impact of legal realities such as dowries for women in cross-border marriages, such as in late eighteenth century Ottoman and Habsburg Empires; work patterns bouncing between ethnicization and informality in the context of east European migrant women in England, Wales, and Italy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Part II ends with a theoretical chapter that singles out narratives hid in public spaces and cemeteries, alluding to “gendered memoryscapes,” which are transcultural memory builders and markers (479).
The research in Roman and Micheletto’s volume is constructed around two methodological pillars: gender and intersectionality. The latter takes into consideration how gender, ethnicity, religion, class, and education backgrounds affect women’s identities and their migration and settlement choices in fluid socio-economic contexts (12). Equally important, the study has a multidirectional approach when it comes to geography and the individual: southeastern or Mediterranean Europe is not seen in a “fixed hierarchical position.” These are not peripheries in a hierarchical position toward northwestern Europe, since “territorial geographies do not necessarily overlap with cultural borders” (21); depending on the context, the discussed women promoted, adapted, or altered foreign ideas and practices, thus testifying to the complexity of gender identity and the migration experience.
It must be said that some theoretical viewpoints of the book are arguable. The statement, backed by resources, according to which it is a stereotype to say that patriarchal and backward attitudes towards gender equality are more widespread in eastern Europe when compared to western Europe (8) is somewhat gratuitous, given that, statistically speaking things incline towards enforcing this…“stereotype”; the gender emancipation discrepancy between the two sides of the continent, particularly in the nineteenth century, which, again, was real, should be rather explained than rejected as bias. Secondly, there is a certain tendency to include nineteenth century social criticism in contemporary social deconstruction. While today, seeing women as victims in need of protection is sexist, the social activists who criticized the patriarchalism of their societies, as expressed in the 1890s/1900s in female exploitation for sexual work and thus called for their protection, were ahead of their time and cannot be considered as contributing to current biases. Finally, some chapters, such as the one about Cypriot pioneers travelling for educational purposes would have benefitted from a comparative perspective with similar cases of women elsewhere, even outside Europe.
Nonetheless, thanks to its chronological coverage, intellectual depth, methodological refinement, wealth of archive documents and photos, and attractive and clever graphs and charts, this work represents a remarkable contribution to multiple fields and scholarships. It is an excellent scientific resource for students of intellectual and economic history, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and wider audiences interested in hearing the story of less known Europeans and of their contribution to what Europe is today.
