Freedom's Frontier by Stacey L. Smith

Author:Stacey L. Smith [Smith, Stacey L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, West (AK; CA; CO; HI; ID; MT; NV; UT; WY), Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Social Science, Slavery
ISBN: 9781469607689
Google: 6-fxohGj9XgC
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2013-01-15T16:06:23+00:00

Trafficking Chinese Women in California

In 1861, the Trinity Journal, a northwestern California newspaper that carried dozens of stories about the dangers of squaw men, turned its attention to a different social evil. Since the early 1850s, gold deposits had lured thousands of miners to the Trinity-Shasta area. Among these new migrants were hundreds of Chinese men and a lesser number of Chinese women. Like many other California newsmen before him, the Trinity editor fretted about the dangers of this new population, and he repeated familiar anti-Chinese arguments. Chinese men depressed white men’s wages by working cheaply; they carried the state’s mineral resources off to China; they were coolie slaves owned by Chinese merchants. He concluded, however, that Chinese gender relations posed the greatest problem for the state. “Most Chinese women in California are slaves,” he assured his readers, “as abject and servile as the blackest, kinky-headed negro in Louisiana.” Chinese women’s enslavement was predicated on sex rather than on race. It was their fate, as women, to be “bought and sold among male Chinamen as any other property.”45 Combating California’s “Chinese Problem” required eliminating the sale of women that underpinned Chinese gender relations.

The Journal editor’s focus on the enslavement of Chinese women illuminates the shifting ground of anti-Chinese sentiment in California across the 1850s. Ever since the gold rush, calls for Chinese exclusion focused on the alleged unfree status of male Chinese “coolies.” The arrival of greater numbers of Chinese women, many of whom worked in the commercialized sex trade, brought the status of Chinese prostitutes to the forefront of the anti-Chinese critique. Taking aim at Chinatown brothels, opponents of Chinese immigration insisted that the way Chinese migrants organized their sexual and gender relations posed as much of a threat to the state’s social and moral order as the coolie trade. Much like the protests against Indian women’s captivity, criticisms of Chinese prostitution focused on women’s sexual servitude and the way it subverted idealized white visions of middle-class home and family life. Anti-Chinese critics argued that rather than being wives and mothers, almost all Chinese women in the state were enslaved prostitutes whose bodies, labor, and sexual virtue were freely bartered among their countrymen. At times, whites blamed this trade on male Chinese procurers and brothel keepers, brutal slaveholders who profited from buying and selling both the persons and the sexual services of Chinese women. At other times, however, they attributed the traffic in bound prostitutes to Chinese gender, family, and household relations. They argued that all Chinese men were tyrannical patriarchs who claimed outrageous property rights in their female kin and freely bought and sold their wives and daughters into prostitution. Instead of shielding women from the market, Chinese men regarded them as commodities and treated intimate relations of home and family as mere economic transactions. Chinese women were never wholly innocent victims in these narratives. They lacked natural feminine virtues of modesty and chastity, and these weaknesses often contributed to their downfall. Ultimately, traffics in Chinese women came

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