"Day by day, day by day": A study of immigrant women's entrepreneurship and settlement in Halifax, Nova Scotia

Abstract

This research illuminates the gendered nature of immigration and business ownership in the Atlantic Canadian context. A feminist analysis of semi-structured interviews with 15 immigrant women entrepreneurs in Halifax, Nova Scotia, shows that immigrant women face many barriers to meaningful employment, but entrepreneurship in the food sector can facilitate substantive citizenship. The research explains why and how stores, restaurants, and farmers’ market stalls exist. The processes through which participants come to open their businesses and settle in Canada align with twentieth century anthropological understandings of rites of passage as developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Liminality – a key element of every rite of passage – is found to be a time in which participants feel lost betweentheir old and new lives, so conclusions in this research advance policy and programming recommendations aimed at reducing the length of time immigrants’ feel like outsiders in Halifax and the business realm.