Editor’s Note: In 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, this political entity was replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), also known as the former Soviet Union (FSU). References in this article to “Soviet Jews” refer to Jews from both the USSR per se (before 1991) and its component republics (after 1991).

In the largest Jewish immigrant wave since the 1920s, nearly three hundred thousand Soviet Jews settled in the United States after 1970. More than two-thirds of all Jewish immigrants to the United States since 1980 have been from the (former) Soviet Union. Women, who comprised fifty-three percent of those who arrived during the wave’s peak, between 1970 and the 1990s, came to the United States with an unusually high degree of professional and technical skills.

In contrast to the 16.5 percent of American women who worked as engineers, technicians, or other professionals, over two-thirds of Soviet Jewish émigré women had worked in these occupations prior to their arrival. As is consistent with their occupational status, these Soviet Jewish women immigrants were also highly educated. Their average number of years of schooling was 14.2. Despite their high degree of educational and occupational attainment, women’s salaries in the USSR were only fifty-seven percent of those of men.

Due to economic need, as well as to a cultural expectation that women work, more than sixty percent of Soviet Jewish émigré women held full-time jobs in the American labor force in 1980. The types of jobs women received were different from those of their male counterparts. Thirty-eight percent of working women held managerial, professional, or technical positions, compared with sixty-nine percent of men. Another thirty-one percent of the women émigrés were employed in clerical and sales jobs, compared with just seven percent of Soviet Jewish male immigrants.

Similar to their experience in their country of origin, Soviet Jewish women’s earnings in the United States remained fifty-seven percent of those of their male counterparts, a proportion only slightly below that of American women’s earnings relative to those of men. Despite these income disparities and their lower job statuses than the ones they had in the USSR (or FSU), 42.5 percent of Soviet Jewish women (versus 35.4 percent of men) were very satisfied with their work, and another 40.2 percent (versus 51.1 percent of men) reported being somewhat satisfied.

In addition to being satisfied with work, surveys show that Soviet Jewish women émigrés were content with other economic features of their new country. In the United States, they attained better housing, higher incomes, and an overall higher standard of living than in the Soviet Union. They also reported being satisfied with the Jewish component of their lives. Life in the United States is less dominated by antisemitism than in their former home.

In other realms, however, Soviet Jewish women immigrants found the quality of their lives deficient. Compared with the Soviet Union, most female Jewish immigrants found life in the United States to be less emotionally and intellectually fulfilling. They perceived cultural life as thinner in the United States, friendships as weaker, and their social status as lower. Their departure from their homes, then, was not motivated by discontent in their personal lives. Rather, antisemitism, combined with a desire to seek occupational and educational opportunities for themselves and their children, led the great majority of the Jewish émigré women, as well as men, to leave the USSR.

Detailed observations reveal another source of discontent among Soviet Jewish women immigrants. Although the majority of Soviet émigrés are still part of two-income families, evidence suggests that upwardly mobile men increasingly pressured their wives to leave the labor force, undermining Soviet Jewish women’s triple role as wife-mother-worker. Working had been such an integral part of Soviet Jewish women’s identities that female émigrés were surprised when, upon their arrival, their social workers did not automatically expect them to work.

As wives and mothers, Soviet Jewish women tend to have smaller families than the norm, with an average of 1.4 children (the U.S. average is 2.1), although they are likely to marry at a younger age than women of other ethnic groups. Demographic data released in 2004 indicate that Russian-speaking women in the United States are marrying more rapidly, at an earlier age and in greater numbers than most other women. Only four percent of forty-year-old women born in the FSU had never married, compared with fifteen percent for all women of that age.

A study begun in 1998 found that eighteen to thirty-two-year-old Russian-Jewish women in the New York metropolitan area married earlier than any other group of women surveyed, while another study showed that half of Russian-speaking women were married by age twenty-two (the average age for women’s first marriage in the United States is 25.3). The important role family plays in the lives of women from the former Soviet Union is reflected also in their immigration patterns: they often immigrate as part of extended families that include three generations. As a result, a high proportion of Soviet Jewish émigré families are multigenerational and include a very elderly population. Settling in the United States with elderly parents and grandparents is one sign of the permanent character of the Soviet Jewish immigration.

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