UCLA Center for the Study of Women

This presentation is based on the findings of my ten-month ethnographic fieldwork in the Ukrainian community in New York, NY, combined with archival research and interviews with the members of the UNWLA, and lays out some of the directions of my PhD dissertation. The Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA) was founded in New York in 1925 and saw as its primary aim an active involvement of Ukrainian migrant-women into an organized community life. Today it is a non-partisan charitable organization which combines cultural activities with political lobbying, thus fully occupying the space allowed by their location in the diaspora, as discussed in current works on the construction and maintenance of global diaspora communities (Werbner 2002). Over the past five years, the UNWLA has been among the most successful diaspora organizations in engaging newly-arrived migrants into its work. At the beginning of the 1990s, when new migrants from Ukraine started to arrive to the U.S.A., the communication between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Ukrainians in this country was marked by certain tensions – ranging from mutual suspicion to even hostility; and the emerging dialogue, in which women seem to take the lead, marks changes in the diaspora’s orientation and calls for a closer attention to the place of women in the life of a migrant community. Instead of looking at the history of the organization as a coherent story, I suggest examining conflicts and negotiations within that history; I am analyzing the negotiations between or among women that belong to different waves of Ukrainian migration to the U.S.A., have a different social background, belong to different age groups, and whose relation to the homeland and understanding of women’s role in the nation- and community-building are sometimes conflicting. But instead of asking whether women’s interests were once again surrendered for the greater community’s good , I suggest that the success and failures of the dialogue between those different groups provide convenient grounds for analysis of the intersection of gender and ethnic identities of the diaspora at large.