Gendering migration in a patriarchal society: assisted female migration from Greece during the early post-war period

ABSTRACT In 1954 the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) launched a program for the recruitment of domestic workers from Greece for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. ICEM gave single women of rural background and with scarce resources the opportunity to migrate and later sponsor the migration of their relatives. Furthermore, ICEM assisted them with orientation and language courses, training programs and loans, and oversaw their transportation and recruitment, as well as of their adjustment to work and life in economically and “culturally” developed countries. In doing so, the Committee tried to imbue women from the periphery of the “Free World” with “superior” western technical skills, cultural values and modern behavioral patterns that reproduced the dominant gender, ethnic, race and class prejudices of the destination countries. The article highlights the way receiving states expanded their capacity to control their borders and select the “qualities” of their foreign female workforce, by standardizing their skills, behaviors and rights. By comparing the implementation of the scheme in three British Commonwealth countries, it problematizes the role of the international organizations in the construction of labor patterns and the dissemination of hegemonic Western gendered economic, social and cultural scripts in a peripheral European country. It also explores the changes brought about by the ICEM in domestic work and women’s response to intergovernmental migration planning.