Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (18 page)

Whereas divorce was increasing in the white middle class by the 19zos,
it remained rare among Chinese American women. No woman was listed
as divorced in the 19oo or 1920 manuscript censuses for San Francisco.
Only one woman was listed as such in 191o-a twenty-year-old immigrant who resided at the Presbyterian Mission Home. Between 1867 and
1929, the divorce rate rose 2,000 percent in the United States, and by
the end of the 19205 more than one in every six marriages ended in
court.95 For Chinese Americans, the divorce rate in 1920 was only five
times as great as that in 1890. Most of these cases were filed by missionary women on behalf of rescued prostitutes or abused wives.96 Chinese women such as Mrs. Chan Sung Chow Bow, who filed for divorce
on her own, were exceptional. According to newspaper accounts, she
sued for divorce in 1921 because her husband gambled and refused to
take her out, "telling her that movies and other amusement places were
intended for men and not for women." As she argued, that might be all
right in China, where they were married in 1911, but it was not acceptable in San Francisco, where she observed that "as many women as
men attend the movies and other places of amusement. "97 Yet another woman knew how to take advantage of this legal option when she wrote
Donaldina Cameron in 192-3, asking, "Let me enter your Home and
study English [because] I am going to divorce with my husband for the
sake of free from repression."9s Even with the help of Protestant missionaries, it was not an easy decision for Chinese women to file for divorce. As Mrs. Hsieh Gin, a long-time resident of Chinatown, recalled,
"In 1929, there was one divorced woman in Chinatown, and she was a
marked woman. Men made nasty remarks to her while women even refused to talk to her."99 The Chinese community may have been willing
to support women's emancipation, but it was not ready to condone
divorce.

INTO THE PUBLIC SPHERE: WAGE WORK

Although housebound because of cultural constraints
and child care responsibilities, immigrant women like Law Shee Low were
still able to achieve a degree of socioeconomic mobility and to some extent reshape gender relations. But as the anthropologist Michelle Zim-
baldist Rosaldo once argued, women remain oppressed, lacking value
and status, as long as they are confined to the private sphere, cut off from
other women and the social world of men. One way women could gain
power and a sense of value was by transcending domestic limits and entering the men's world.100 In some ways, this framework is applicable to
Chinese immigrant women like Jane Kwong Lee, who did indeed attain
social mobility and status after she entered the public sphere as a wage
earner and social activist. Nevertheless, as feminist critics of the /files/13/30/32/f133032/public/private dichotomy have pointed out, female devaluation has no one
cross-cultural cause. Other related factors, such as class, race, sexuality,
institutional setting, place, and time, need to be acknowledged as well.101
In Jane's situation, her class and educational background facilitated her
entry into the public sphere, but she still encountered difficulties owing
to institutional racism and sexism.

Compared to Wong Ah So and Law Shee Low, Jane Kwong Lee had
an easier time acclimating to life in America. Not only was she educated,
Westernized, English-speaking, and unencumbered by family responsibilities, but she also had the help of affluent relatives who provided her
with room and board, financial support, and important contacts that enabled her eventually to strike out on her own. B. S. Fong's family, with
whom she stayed, lived in a three-bedroom unit over a Chinatown storefront. Jane had her own bedroom. During the first few weeks after her arrival she was taken shopping, to restaurants and church, to visit relatives, and introduced to a group of young women who took her hiking.
Arriving in the middle of a school semester, she was unable to enroll in
a college, so she decided to look for a job to support herself.

In spite of her educational background and qualifications, she found
that only menial jobs and domestic service were open to her. "At heart
I was sorry for myself; I wished I were a boy," she wrote in her autobiography. "If I were a boy, I could have gone out into the community,
finding a job somewhere as many newcomers from China had done." 102
But as a Chinese woman, she had to bide her time and look for work
appropriate for her race and gender. Thus, until she could be admitted
to college, and during the summers after she enrolled at Mills College,
Jane took whatever jobs were open to Chinese women. She tried embroidery work at a Chinatown factory, sorting vegetables in the wholesale district, working as a live-in domestic for a European American family, peeling shrimp, sorting fruit at a local cannery, and sewing flannel
nightgowns at home. Finding all of these jobs taxing and low-paying,
she did not stay long at any of them; but she came away with a better
appreciation of the diligence and hard work that immigrant women
applied to the limited jobs open to them. She described one job at a
Chinese-owned cannery:

We worked in rows alongside immigrant women from Italy and other
European countries. First we sorted cherries. I liked cherries so much, I
just ate, ate, and ate. Then we sorted apricots. That was easy. After apricots, we had to open peaches. I was so slow at it I hardly made any money.
With cherries and apricots, I could make a dollar a day, but with peaches,
I couldn't keep up with the women who worked very fast and made almost ten dollars a day because they were used to doing field work in
China.'03

Here she acknowledged the class difference between herself and peasant women from China, knowing full well that while she could leave these
jobs and move on to something better, they often did not have the same
option.

As was true for European immigrant women, the patterns of work
for Chinese women were shaped by the intersection of the local economy, ethnic traditions, their language and job skills, and family and child
care needs, but in addition, race was an influential factor.104 At the time
of Jane's arrival, San Francisco was experiencing a period of growth and
prosperity. Ranked the eighth largest city in the country, it was the major port of trade for the Pacific Coast and touted as the financial and corporate capital of the West. Jobs were plentiful in the city's three largest
economic sectors-domestic and personal service, trade and transportation, and manufacturing and mechanical industries-but they were
filled according to a labor market stratified by race and gender. Nativeborn white men occupied the upper tier, consisting largely of white-collar
professional and managerial positions; foreign-born white men dominated the middle tier, which included the metal and building trades and
small merchants; and minority men were concentrated in the bottom
tier as laborers, servants, waiters, teamsters, sailors, and longshoremen.
In a similar racial scaling, native-born white women occupied the professional, manufacturing, trade, and transportation sectors; white immigrant women, the domestic and transportation sectors; and minority
women, personal and domestic services. Within this occupational hierarchy, most Chinese could find work only in the bottom tier. Chinese
men worked chiefly as laborers, servants, factory workers in cigar and
garment shops, laundrymen, and small merchants, while Chinese women,
handicapped further by gender, worked primarily in garment and foodprocessing factories for low piece-rate wages.101

The majority of Chinese factory women were employed in the garment industry, which had been dominated by Chinese men since the
18 70s. But as competition from Eastern seaboard manufacturers with
superior equipment and labor resources cut into the margin of profit
and lowered wages, the ranks of male operators shrank, and garment
factories began looking to Chinese women as a source of cheap labor.
As early as 19o6, a Chinese sewing factory advertised jobs for thirty
women workers in CSYP. Still, it wasn't until women's emancipation
took hold in China that they began to leave the home to work in Chinatown factories."' After World War I, Chinese immigrant women came
to dominate the trade, working in Chinatown sweatshops that contracted
work from white manufacturers. By 1930, there were over three hundred Chinese women employed in forty-six shops, sewing ladies' and
male workers' garments for substandard wages and without the benefit
of a labor organization. 107

According to an Industrial Welfare Commission investigation in
i9zz, Chinese women operated power machines and did handwork,
pressing, and finishing for piece rates that fluctuated between factories
and depended on the complexity of the task at hand. Aprons ranged
from $o.6o to $1.75 a dozen, and nightgowns from $i.io to $t.5o a
dozen. Coveralls were $0.4 5 a dozen, while shirts and overalls were $ r .oo
a dozen. Those making buttonholes earned $0.3o a shirt, while those sewing on buttons made $o.18 a dozen. Based on the reported weekly
earnings of women who did similar piece-rate work at home, we can calculate that the wages of garment workers averaged $3 r a month. 101 In
contrast, Chinese houseboys averaged $8o a month, and Chinese cooks,
$95 a month in 192.6.109 As no time records were kept and there was
no set pay period, and as women worked on an irregular schedule that
revolved around family responsibilities, it was impossible for the Industrial Welfare Commission investigator to determine whether state minimum wages were being paid, though it was obvious that the eight-hour
law was being violated. There was at least one indication of dual wages:
one woman told the investigator that she earned z o cents less per dozen
sewing on fancy buttons than the men. With inadequate child care services in the community, most worked with their children close by or had
their babies strapped to their backs. Women took breaks whenever family duties called. In the investigator's opinion, sanitary provisions were
inadequate, particularly ventilation and lighting, but the toilet facilities
were fairly clean.' 10

Unlike the situation for Jewish women in the New York garment industry, Chinese women remained trapped in this seasonal, low-wage occupation with no opportunity for upward mobility. The garment industry
in both New York and San Francisco operated under the same contracting
system, in which manufacturing firms farmed out work orders to contractors who produced the clothing with the help of sweatshop labor
paid on a piece-rate basis. Jewish and Chinese contractors who set up
small sewing factories in their respective ethnic enclaves drew their cheap
labor from a network of kin and landsleit (same geographic origins) connections. Whereas both Jewish men and women were recruited to the
trade in New York, only Chinese women were available and willing to
do garment work in San Francisco by the zgaos. Although Jewish
women worked at a disadvantage because of the sexual division of labor (in which women are given the harder and less profitable tasks to
perform) and dual wages (in which women are paid less than men for
the same work), they had more options than Chinese women to change
their circumstances. Jewish daughters could be promoted from lowpaying, unskilled jobs to better-paying, skilled jobs within a factory, move
on to work for larger factories outside the ghetto, and organize to improve conditions in the workplace." Chinese immigrant women, lacking the same language skills and political consciousness and further
hindered by racism, often could not avail themselves of the same opportunities.

Immigrant women who worked outside Chinatown in the 192os also
experienced discrimination on the basis of race as well as gender and
cultural differences. The records of the Chinese YWCA provide three
concrete examples of the extent of this discrimination. In one large cigar
factory that employed fifty to sixty Chinese to strip tobacco, one-third
of whom were women, Chinese workers worked in a separate room from
non-Chinese workers and were paid only half the minimum wage. According to the YWCA worker who investigated the situation, "This group
of Chinese did not speak any English and had no knowledge of a minimum wage law, nor did they know of provisions for piece rate." In a
similar case, a fruit preserve factory that employed a large number of
non-English-speaking Chinese women continued to pay the women at
the old rate, while English-speaking European workers who knew about
the raise in the minimum wage and demanded such were paid at a higher
rate. In the third case, Chinese immigrant women employed at a glace
fruit factory contracted sugar poisoning because the employer had not
printed warnings in Chinese of job-related dangers.112

Given these circumstances, for Jane Kwong Lee, being Chinese and
a woman was a liability in the job market, but because she spoke English, was educated, and had good contacts among middle-class Chinese
Christians, she was better off than most other immigrant women. She
eventually got a scholarship at Mills College and part-time work teaching Chinese school and tutoring Chinese adults in English at the Chinese Episcopal Church in Oakland. After earning her bachelor's degree
in sociology, she married, had two children, and returned to Mills, where
she received a master's degree in sociology and economics in 193 3. She
then dedicated herself to community service, working many years as coordinator of the Chinese YWCA and as a journalist and translator for a
number of Chinatown newspapers.

Most immigrant women, however, because of their limited skills and
economic needs, had no choice but to take menial jobs. Wong Shee
Chew, whose husband was injured in a tong battle in 1918, supported
her two sons single-handedly by laboring in a cannery from 6 A.M. to 8
P.M., six days a week. She also peeled shrimp and sewed garments on the
side.113

Margaret Leong Lowe, a widow with three children, embroidered
flowers and sewed evening gowns to support her family. She said,

I worked about six days a week. Sometimes I bring home work. I never
go to somebody's house. I haven't got time. Sometimes the next door
neighbor comes over to my house to talk a little bit. Sunday? Same work at home. Take three children to Sunday church. I be mother, I be father.
I had to make money and take care of children.... I worked fifty-two
years. Seventy-two years old stopped. I worked my whole life."'