Portuguese Women in Toronto: Gender, Immigration, and Nationalism

Linda Cullum is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology
and Women’s Studies at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and
the author of Narratives At Work: Women, Men, Unionization and the
Fashioning of Identities.

As a graduate student in the 1990s, I lived in a working-class area of
Toronto, with many Portuguese families as neighbors. Until I read this
slim volume, however, I did not realize the vast differences among and
between my neighbors, and how those differences of gender, class,
regional origins in Portugal, and immigration histories profoundly
influenced their experiences of life in Canada.

The author draws on her research conducted in the late 1980s and early
1990s in the Toronto area. Her focus is on the 1968–77 period, the
height of Portuguese migration to Canada. She combines over 60
interviews with first- and second-generation women from mainland
Portugal and the Azores islands with statistical representations of data
from her interviews, Statistics Canada data on immigration and
employment, and various theoretical perspectives to tease out a complex
anti-essentialist story of immigration, multicultural policies, and
gender household relations.

Giles argues against the liberal notion of a single nationalist
identity and homogeneity in an ethnic immigrant population in Canada.
Rather, in six tightly written chapters, she links women’s immigration
stories, Canada’s gendered and familistic immigration policies, and
ideas of citizenship with the consequences of globalization and
restructuring on Portuguese women in particular. She fleshes out
StatsCan data with her own findings, putting a very human face on this
study. We see how census categories such as “manufacturing” or
“other services” obscure the often multiple jobs held by Portuguese
women. We hear stories of negotiation and struggle (between women and
men, and mothers and daughters) for the right to define and construct a
life in Canada.

Portuguese Women in Toronto is not just an important work; it is a
pleasure to read.