Relating European emigration and marriage patterns
Sinke, S.M.
Immigrants and Minorities 20(1): 71-86
2001
ISSN/ISBN: 0261-9288 PMID: 18456966 DOI: 10.1080/02619288.2001.9975009Document Number: 456614
This article discusses a number of the ways in which marriage and migration interacted in European sending areas for migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also speculates as to some of the ramifications of those changes in marriage and migration patterns. In particular, it uses sources from the Netherlands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to illustrate a few patterns, some quantitative ones already well known to scholars of demography and some qualitative ones which have received less attention, and poses some hypotheses which other researchers can pursue for other emigration regions and periods. Unlike international migrants from many sending regions, where single men dominated the migration of this period, those from the Netherlands at the turn of the century tended more often to move in family units. In discussing these issues, this article demonstrates the degree to which marriage in the sending country was affected by migration, offering a variety of insights into the way in which these changes were of a gendered nature.