Interview with Brigitte Le Normand on her ERC-funded project FeMMiWork

Brigitte Le Normand talks to us about her new ERC-funded project, Women Migrants from the Northern Mediterranean and Work in Postwar Northwestern Europe (FeMMiWork).

Andrea Talabér (AT): Before we dive into your project, Women Migrants from the Northern Mediterranean and Work in Postwar Northwestern Europe (FeMMiWork), could you say a few words about your academic background?

Brigitte Le Normand (BLN): I was trained as a historian at UCLA, which was at the time a really stimulating place to do history – my mentor was Ivan Berend, and I also studied with great historians like Arch Getty, Russel Jacoby, Lynn Hunt, Jan Reiff, and David Sabean. That period in my life left me with a great intellectual curiosity and a belief that the best conversations are had over wine and appetizers. The other thread running through my professional trajectory has been a love of interdisciplinary exchange. It all started with the Masters in Russian and East European Studies program I followed at the University of Toronto’s Munk School for International Studies, and it continued with my Max Weber fellowship at the European University Institute. At Maastricht University, I head an interdisciplinary research group on Globalization, Transnationalism, and Development, and teach in interdisciplinary programs.

AT: Postwar migration is often, wrongly, thought about as a masculine phenomenon. But as you point out, women made up about 25–30 percent of the migrants. How does acknowledging their presence and experiences change our understanding of postwar European migration?

BLN: We have a tendency to assume that women’s experiences were similar to those of men, and that they themselves played the same role in their societies of origin and destination. But this is obviously not the case. Women did other kinds of work, partly due to their reproductive roles, and also to gender norms. And work, conversely, played a different role in their lives, though its impact was not one-sided. Work had a certain emancipatory function, but for many women work was something they did to contribute to their households or their families in their countries of origin. 

It’s important to understand the specific role that women played in the growing economies of postwar Northwestern Europe, because their labour set the stage for precarious feminized labour starting in the 1980s, something we know far more about. And we can also learn more about the impact of work on these women’s lives.

AT: FeMMiWork reconstructs the experiences of female migrants from Italy, Yugoslavia, and Turkey to France and West Germany between 1955 and 1985. Could you elaborate on the rationale behind the selection of these specific countries and this particular timeframe?

BLN: The project aims to get at a broad array of experiences. It employs an intersectional approach, taking into consideration that various factors may have played into different trajectories.  I selected these case studies because they are three countries that all had significant migratory flows to both France and Germany, and each case presents specificities that might have led to different trajectories. Women from Italy were seen by the destination societies are culturally similar, whereas Yugoslav women – from a Communist state – were seen as culturally more alien. Turkish women were not only perceived as culturally alien, they were also racialized. Temporally, the flows of migrants from each state began and peaked at different times. Italians, for example, came before Turks and Yugoslavs.

The destination states, France and Germany, also present interesting differences.  France had a more liberal migration regime than Germany, allowing migrants to claim residence without having already secured employment, whereas this was not the case in Germany. Germany was resistant to the idea of becoming a country of immigration. For this reason, women faced more restrictive labour policies. I would like to understand the impact of different policies on women’s trajectories. 

The timeframe I have chosen starts in the 1950s, when the economies of Northwestern Europe that were desperate for labour were starting to seek workers beyond their national borders.  Women typically began to arrive later than men, because employers started asking for them specifically in particular sectors. They were also driven by processes of modernization in their home countries to seek job opportunities abroad, and others moved abroad as dependents and sought work subsequently. The end of my time-frame is the 1980s, when another flow of feminized migration from the Global South began to dominate.

AT: You intend to use some very interesting source material for the project. What methods and sources will you be using in your research for FeMMiWork?

BLN: The project is based on the idea of moving from the known to the as yet unknown, and from the macro to the micro. Our first task is to gain a comprehensive understanding of published and grey literature, as well as policies that shaped the trajectories of women migrants. From there, we shift our attention to archival research. Here we are looking for traces scattered in state and organizational archives that speak to the lives of individual women. Finally, having reflected on all this material, we proceed to co-create oral histories with women from each country of origin who worked either in France or Germany.

The aim of the project is to compare the trajectories of women from these three countries of origin to two destination states. As each of the researchers will be collecting a tremendous quantity of research materials for their case study, we will be using digital tools to carry out distant reading of the corpus of materials, to identify common patterns as well as interesting divergences. We will then turn to close reading to anchor our analysis in a careful reading of the sources.  

AT: You are at the very beginning of the project. Can you share any interesting or surprising findings—archival or otherwise—that you’ve come across so far?

BLN: The project is only starting in September, and to date I only have exploratory findings. I have been going through individual responses to a survey carried out with Yugoslav women in West Berlin in 1987, to explore the varieties of possible experiences and trajectories. I have only had the chance to look at a small number of records, but even so, some interesting patterns and questions have come up.  For example, it seems that  women who had been hired in Germany through a Yugoslav labour bureau stated that they had no opportunities for career advancement – whereas some women who found work on their own stated they did have such opportunities. This suggests that bilateral labour agreements may have had the effect of limiting women’s social and professional mobility. This is something I’d like to pursue further.

I have also discovered that one can also read the survey responses individually as a kind of life history. The stories I have pieced together validate the focus on trajectories using a transnational lens. For example, one woman had suffered domestic abuse and was now raising one child alone. She had not completed any education, had a menial job in the hostelry industry, and had trouble paying the rent. Her two other children lived with family in Yugoslavia. This woman’s trajectory resists simplistic framings of migration and work as emancipating, or alternatively, as only exploitative. While she was able to exit an abusive relationship and earn a living in Germany, her trajectory is not one of social mobility, integration into German society, and emancipation. We can infer that she was in some sense trapped in Germany, as the only place she could have gainful employment and live on her own. Her job however provided limited security and independence.

AT: Your project is funded by the European Research Council. What advice would you give to those applying for an ERC grant?

BLN: It’s really important to think through every aspect of the project, and explain its logic in a very clear way. This is sometimes hard to do because we have been working on our topic for such a long time that things seem self-evident. Why do we need to answer this research question? Why is it innovative? Why did you organize the teamwork in this way? I really recommend working with other researchers who are also applying for the same program, and reading one another’s applications. They can come from other disciplines; in fact it can be helpful that they are not familiar with your topic. If your argumentation is not clear to them, then it’s likely also not to be clear to someone on the committee. It’s really important to invest time in the application, as a persuasive application sets the stage for a constructive interview.

If you are working with human subjects in your interview, I would also suggest that you take the time to write a thorough ethics self-assessment. Even though it is not assessed as part of the application, doing a careful job at the beginning will avoid a lot of extra work later, should your project be selected.