ABSTRACT

At the crossroads of the history of migration, urban history and gender, historical research on the work experiences of migrant women and men and urban labour markets is a flourishing area of early modern and modern social history. 1 No longer conceived as exclusively composed of men and young individuals, migration flows are now portrayed the way they were: variably mixed depending on ethnicity and destination. Rural areas were traditionally considered a preferred destination for international family migrations and therefore gender balanced. Nowadays, the opposition between rural and urban immigrant destinations is less pronounced. 2 The historical understanding of the immigrant urban experience has profoundly changed over the last 40 years. Without denying the importance of pioneering male migrant flows, the historiography has introduced, at least since the end of the 1980s, autonomous female figures in urban spaces. 3