CHINESE WOMEN IN EARLY SAN FRANCISCO and the Old American West
Merchant's wives, daughters of impoverished families sold into household slavery, and far too many involuntary prostitutes. This is the sad history,
According to Asian History in Park County March 15, 2022 Posted by South Park National Heritage Area This woman was known to her primarilly White neighbors as “China Mary,” and she operated a laundry in Fairplay, Colorado,, USA in the 1880s. Source: Park County Local History Archive Photographic Collection. She was one of many Chinese women who came to the Old American West.
Please consider this essential background knowledge to understanding not just the lives of Chinese in the Old American West, but also the Tong Wars of the Old West.
Please note, this week, I have moved my chatty introduction. It is now an afterpiece at the end of this article. Please let me know what you think of this change.
CHINESE WOMEN IN EARLY SAN FRANCISCO and the Old American West
Understanding the Tong Wars of San Francisco and the Old American West
In the Old American West, while it was normal for men to far outnumber women in most of the newly developing, frontier territories, among the Chinese the discrepancy in numbers between men and women was even worse.
As stated in a recent piece here 1 in 1850, at the height of the California Gold Rush, there were 7 women, yes, “7” – seven — if you want to see it in Spanish just to ensure that is not a typo: “siete mujeres y ningunas mas”— living in San Francisco along with 4,018 men. Although five years later the number of women, as well as Chinese men, had increased, the percentage of women was still less than 2 percent. (Yung, p. 18)
Another source states that in 1852, the state of California did a survey and counted 2,954 Chinese males and only 19 Chinese females, a ratio of 155 to 1. ( Tong, p. 3)
There were many reasons for this imbalance, including the difficulty of making the trip, the intention that living in the USA was simply supposed to be a temporary thing until one got rich and returned home, and the Chinese cultural belief that women should remain in the home, the home being in one’s hometown which was considered to be where one’s ancestors had usually lived, and it was in China. Another reason is that until 1911, the year the Republic of China was founded, it was illegal under Chinese law for Chinese women to emigrate. (Yung, p. 19; I suspect however, that like a lot of Chinse laws this was only rarely enforced.)
Therefore, in the American west even before the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, there were more Chinese men than women. Judy Yung, a historian, estimates that on the average, the ratio was 19:1. (Yung, p. 24) Of course, as the Chinese Exclusion act specifically targetted immigration by Chinese women, after its passage things got even worse.
This shortage of women led to many problems, and was a major underlying factor behind the Chinese-American Tong Wars that flared up in San Francisco and other places in the American Old West.
Three Distinct Social Classes of Chinese women lived in the Old American West
Chinese and Chinese American Women of the Old West fell into three distinct social classes.
MERCHANTS’ WIVES
The smallest and wealthiest group of Chinese women in the USA of the time were the wives of the wealthy Chinese merchants who settled in San Francisco or other parts of the Old West to do business.
These women had access to a great deal of wealth, and with this wealth could buy or hire servants. (Yes, I said “buy.” Despite the ending of African American slavery in the USA by this time, many Chinese owned household slaves and often brought them to the USA. More on this later.)
These merchant’s wives often had bound feet unlike lower and working class Chinese. The entire history and social background to the Chinese practice of binding women’s feet is, like many things, a sad and ugly one, but essentially for centuries, among upper class Chinese families, it was felt desirable to bind the feet of little girls, often breaking their bones in the process, so that their feet would not grow to normal size. This was considered a refined thing to do, and, among other things, demonstrated very clearly that this woman came from a family with sufficient wealth so that she need not be a contributing worker and if needed, could be carried by others, perhaps in a sedan chair, instead of walking on her own two feet. (Foreman)
The US customs people of the time noted that if a Chinese woman had bound feet she was probably safe to admit as she was not a prostitute. The bound feet, after all, were an indicator that this woman did not need to work or labor and, in fact, was unlikely to leave the home much at all . (Yung, p. 24)
MUI TSAI
Many of the Chinese women in the Old West were “mui tsai,” people who had been sold as girls by their (generally impoverished) families and were working as servants to other Chinese. They were slaves, again enslaved by other Chinese and shipped to the USA for this purpose. ( I hate to cite Wikipedia, but in this case will do it anyway. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mui_tsai ).
PROSTITUTES
Many Chinese women in the Old West were prostitutes. In some places, 60% of Chinese women were prostitutes, and the majority of them had not entered this profession voluntarily, instead having been shipped to the USA for that purpose by other Chinese. They were treated terribly, by both Chinese and non-Chinese. ( Yung p. 29 and Tong, throughout)
Of course, one reason for the demand for prostitutes was California’s anti-miscegenation laws and one reason for the difficulty in combating the social problems of Chinese prostitution was not just racism on both sides of the equation, but a California law of the time that forbid courtroom testimony against Whites by non-Whites. There were however organizations, often Church missions, that worked to help and rescue enslaved Chinese women in 19th and early 20th Century America, and the history of these is fascinating as well.
According to Benson Tong, the 1870 census for California showed 2,794 Chinese female workers of whom 77 percent declared themselves to be prostitutes. Of the remaining 23%, they listed their occupation as laundresses, miners, servants, seamstresses, cooks, or lodging house operators. ( Tong, p. 30)
Tong says that the 1880 census showed a drop in the number of Chinese women, but of the 1,726 women counted, the census states 44% were engaged in prostitution. ( Tong, p. 30)
This makes an interesting context for the widespread anti-Chinese sentiment, and later passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act (passed 1882 and rescinded in WW2) and the ugly stereotype that Chinese and Chinatowns were disease ridden. Prostitution does tend to spread disease.
Issue of Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
Although it’s obvious that of the three classes of Chinese women who lived in the Old American West, two were clearly enslaved, these being the Mui Tsai, the women and girls who had been sold by their family and were generally used as household servants, and the prostitutes, who almost always had been forced or tricked into years of involuntary time as forced sex workers. However, it’s questionable if the third class, the merchants’ wives, had much free will or personal choice in their lives either.
As Yung has pointed out, and is widely recognized among people familiar with traditional Chinese culture, while neither Chinese men nor women had choice in their spouse at this time, arranged (forced) marriage being the norm, while the men had the right to divorce and remarry, the women did not. Similarly, men were allowed to commit adultery, practice polygamy, and take concubines, visit prostitutes, and discipline their spouses anyway they chose. ( Yung, p. 19)
Running the Numbers
Some numbers will help make a clearer picture. Numbers are great things if a historian can get accurate numbers.
As shown, the number of Chinese men greatly outnumbered the Chinese women. Furthermore, a surprisingly large percentage of these women lived in San Francisco. According to Yung, in 1860 654 or 37 percent of all Chinese women in the USA lived in San Francisco. According to the same source, in 1900, 47 percent of the Chinese women in the USA, 2,136 of them, lived in San Francisco. (Yung, p. 24)
CONNECTION WITH THE TV SHOW WARRIOR
By contrast, if we see the TV show Warrior, there are no bound feet (as near as I can recall). In fact there seems to be little representation of the Chinese merchant class, at all. (at least as far as I can recall.) And I do not recall seeing any Mui Tsai, the Chinese women sold into slavery as young girls.
EXAMPLES of biographies of actual Chinese Women of this Era
Again apologies for sending people off to Wikipedia, but good luck finding easily accessible biographies of these people elsewhere on the web.
Wikipedia biography of Maria Seise, a Chinese woman who lived in early San Francisco
A wikipedia biography of Ah_Toy, a Chinese woman who lived in early San Francisco
Bibliography
Berglund, Barbara. Making San Francisco American, Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846-1906. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007.
Dillon, Richard H. The Hatchet Men. New York: Coward-McCann Inc, 1962.
Foreman, Amanda. “Why Footbinding Persisted in China for a Millennium.” Smithsonian.com, February 1, 2015. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-footbinding-persisted-china-millennium-180953971/.
Tong, Benson. Unsubmissive Women, Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco. Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Yung, Judy. Unbound Feet, A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995.
https://sfmuseum.org/hist6/evans.html
https://grapefruitmoongallery.com/62875
Greetings, today more on the Chinese in 19th Century San Francisco and the Old American West, part of my on-going project on researching the Chinese of the Old West and the Tong Wars that took place during time. As a major factor in several of these tong disputes was control of a prostitute, it is essential to have some understanding of both Chinese prostitution in the Old American West as well as the types of Chinese women who lived in the Old American West, why they were there, and what sort of lives and opportunities they had. Consider this an introduction. It’s often an ugly subject, sadly a lot of history involves looking at ugly subjects, but it is an important one.
To research the subject of Chinese in the Old West further, I am currently doing research into opium and other drug use in 19th Century America, and reading Elizabeth Kelly Gray’s excellent book, Habit Forming, Drug Addiction in America, 1776-1914. (2023, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK). While it discusses drug use and addiction among Americans of all types during that time period, with excellent coverage of addiction and drug use during the early days of this nation, it makes a point of including a full spectrum of diverse Americans including the Chinese. I look forward to sharing.
Also, just FYI, when I started this project, my plan was to produce two pieces a week for three months, and then re-assess how it went and adjust. This will occur in mid-June. While I like the format where I offer links to news pieces and give my quick thoughts and comments and offer context, it seems few are actually enthused about this enough to open the links, something that confuses me. Regardless, please feel free to share thoughts on this, if you have them.
Thanks.
The San Francisco Tong Wars, Founding of the City -Focused Investigation (substack.com)