Wellesley Centers for Women 

Wellesley Centers for Women

Wellesley Centers for Women

Gender Equality Gets a Boost from an Unexpected Corner

One hot August afternoon in 1999, after the day’s cooking and cleaning were done, I asked some of the young women of Miraflores, a Dominican village I studied for my dissertation, to talk with me about how their lives had changed since so many of their friends and neighbors began migrating to the United States. Mirafloreños have been moving to Boston since the early 1970s, settling in and around the neighborhoods of Dorchester, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain. By the mid-1990s, nearly three-quarters of its households had family members living in Massachusetts. Close to 60 percent received some monthly income support from migrants. It seemed to me that the exchanges of people, money, goods, and what I call social remittances or ideas, practices, social capital, and identities that circulate regularly between people who move and people who stay behind had dramatically transformed aspects of daily life. In particular, I wanted to know how women’s lives had changed.