Contesting the Meanings of Migration: German Women's Immigration to Canada in the 1950s

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.