This exhibit provides access to a digital collection of oral history interviews of immigrant women in Stockton with teaching tools.
In the early 1980s, Sally Miller, Professor of History at University of the Pacific, and her students interviewed sixty immigrant women from at least twenty-five different nationality groups in Stockton. Most came to the United States between 1920 and 1960, during the period of strict immigration restriction framed by the 1920s quota bills. A fraction also immigrated under the benefits of the 1965 Immigration Act.
These interviews help us think about crucial immigration and women's history questions:
- What kinds of work did women do? What factors went into their job or career choices?
- What kinds of neighborhoods did Stockton’s immigrant women live in? Were they “ethnic enclaves”
- What difference did age make in the immigration experience?