After all in order to make this grand narrative work, to draw together the entire story of immigration in the context of women and gender, she had to reconcile many conflicting themes into a single narrative. She had to reconcile time, place of origin, destination, class, race, and age along with her key issues of gender and immigrant status. At times she falls into the same trap of the earlier historians who worked from a male-centered framework. But we do not learn how immigrant men internalized American definitions of masculinity. If this is a book about gender and not just women, as the title claims, it falls short.
Men stand here as the cardboard figures just as women did in earlier studies.
This detracts from the analysis of women as well as men. The dramatic transformation of immigrant women, and of America, ends up being incomplete. Immigrant women's identities and activities cannot be disconnected from those of their husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers. If immigrant women struggled with their gendered identities, as Gabaccia so ably illustrates, so too did the men among who they lived. Those two processes ran in tandem.