Chinese Women Entering New England Chinese Exclusion Act Case.docx

Chinese Women Entering New England: Chinese Exclusion Act
Case Files, Boston, 1911-
1925
Author(s): Shauna Lo
Source: The New England Quarterly , Sep., 2008, Vol. 81, No. 3
(Sep., 2008), pp. 383-409
Published by: The New England Quarterly, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20474653
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Chinese Women Entering New England:
Chinese Exclusion Act Case Files, Boston,
1911-1925
SHAUNA LO
IN June 1911, Lee Lou, an eighteen-year old woman from
southern China, arrived in Montreal to marry Ling Walley,
a merchant who had been living in New York City. Although
Lee's route is not known, she probably traveled by ship from
Hong Kong to Vancouver and there boarded a train bound
for Montreal. She had not previously met her husband, as was
typical for traditional Chinese marriages. The couple planned
to settle in New York, but before they did so, Lee would have
to be approved for admission to the United States, not an easy
task given the strict laws regulating Chinese immigration. Ling
and Lee believed, however, that possessing a Canadian mar

riage certificate would facilitate her entry. They were correct.
Although Lee and her new husband were subjected to inten
sive interrogation when they appeared at the U.S. immigration
office in Boston, they encountered no serious problems, and
the young bride was admitted that day.'
Lee and Ling's strategy was one of many that prospec
tive Chinese immigrants coming to New England pursued
during the six decades in which the Chinese Exclusion Act
(1882-1943) was in effect. The first U.S. law to control the
1 National Archives, Northeast Region, Waltham, Mass.,
Records of the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, RG 85, Chinese exclusion acts case
files, Lee Lou, file no.
2500/219. The translations of Chinese names and places in the
case files are inconsistent
and unreliable. Officials also often confused surnames (which
by Chinese custom are
listed first) and given names. I have retained the spellings of
people and places as
officially recorded in the case files.
The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXI, no. 3 (September
2008). ? 2008 by The New England
Quarterly. All rights reserved.
383
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384 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY
immigration of a group based on race, the restrictive legislation
determined the characteristics of the Chinese American com
munity for more than half a century. Most research on Chinese
Americans has focused on the men who settled in the West, but
much is to be learned from a small group of Chinese women
who were processed at the Boston District Immigration Office
in the first quarter of the twentieth century and who hoped
to take up residence in the Northeast. The tedious process
they underwent, often including lengthy interrogations, is doc
umented in the regional office's case files. Women, a small mi
nority of the Chinese living in America during the Chinese Ex
clusion Act period, were uniquely affected by immigration
laws.
The risks they took as they ventured half way around the world
to form or to reunite families or to seek educational opportu
nity were often rewarded with success but occasionally ended
in
tragedy. The evidence shows that despite facing immense legal,
social, and geographical barriers, Chinese women and men be
came adept transnational migrants who negotiated complex im
migration policies to reach their destinations in the Northeast.
Chinese Exclusion Laws and Demographic Patterns
In the mid-nineteenth century, as commerce boomed in the
United States, thousands of Chinese migrated to California to
fill a labor void in the sparsely settled West and to escape po
litical upheaval and natural disasters in southern China. The
immigrants worked in the railroad, fishing, agriculture, and
lumber industries, and they performed services such as cook
ing and cleaning.2 But white organized labor, which feared
competition for jobs, soon developed a hostility for the Chi
nese, which was manifested in numerous local ordinances dis

criminating against Chinese as well as violent riots protesting
their presence. In 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion
Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating to the
2Shih-Shan Henry Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America
(Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1986), p. 25.
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CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT CASE FILES 385
U.S. and sustained an existing prohibition on the naturalization
of Chinese. A series of additional exclusion laws were subse
quently enacted. Not until 1943 was the act repealed, at which
time Chinese were given permission to naturalize.3
Although the exclusion laws severely curtailed Chinese
immigration, over 85,000 Chinese men and women were
admitted to the U.S. during the period in which they were in
force.4 Some immigrants gained entry as members of classes
the Exclusion Act exempted. Directed toward elite individuals
or those engaged in trade, exemptions were extended to gov
ernment officials, teachers, students, and merchants.5 Many
more immigrants, however, made their way into the country
by other methods. They found and slipped through loopholes,
manipulated laws, and challenged decisions in the courts.6 Still
others purchased false papers or paid to be smuggled across
the border. Over time, the Chinese developed innovative legal
and extralegal strategies for getting into the country.7 The

1906 earthquake in San Francisco, for example, presented
Chinese with an extraordinary opportunity to claim citizenship.
Because virtually all Chinese birth records were destroyed in
3Chinese Exclusion Act of May 6, 1882, United States Statutes
at Large 22, 58 and
Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of December 17, 1943, United
States Statutes at Large,
57, 600-601.
4This number refers to unique immigrant admissions (see table
2 in Judy Yung,
Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San
Francisco [Berkeley: Uni
versity of California Press, 1995], p. 294). The total number of
Chinese admissions,
which would include repeated entries as well as U.S.-born
citizen returns, is over
300,000 (see Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese
Immigration during the Exclu
sion Era, 1882-1943 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003], p. 111).
5The most used exempt category was merchant, which small
business owners and
their employees could claim. The definitions of the categories
changed over time. The
most important concern on the part of U.S. immigration
officials was that a Chinese
was not engaging in manual labor (see Lee, At America's
Gates, p. 90).
6 Because the exclusion laws were clearly discriminatory, the
government was re
peatedly confronted with legal challenges. Judges presiding
over those cases frequently

ruled in favor of Chinese defendants. See Qingsong Zhang,
"Dragon in the Land of
the Eagle: The Exclusion of Chinese from U.S. Citizenship,
1848-1943" (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Virginia, 1994), and Lucy Salyer, '"Laws Harsh
as Tigers,'" in Entry
Denied, p. 58.
7 For an extensive discussion on methods of immigration
during the exclusion era,
see Lee, At America's Gates.
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that catastrophe, officials had no way to disprove an
individual's
assertion that he was a citizen. And if a man was able to
establish that he was a U.S. citizen, his children were eligible,
as derivative citizens, to enter the country as well. In addition,
the man might agree-for a fee-to bring over what are known
as "paper" sons and daughters, that is, individuals who were
not his actual offspring but his sons and daughters on paper
only. During the exclusion period, the majority of Chinese
entered the U.S. by such roundabout and illicit means.8
Because the vast majority of Chinese settled in California, the
histories of Chinese Americans in other regions of the coun
try, like New England, have been largely ignored. Some of

New England's earliest Chinese residents arrived in the United
States via the China trade, which had been operating out of
Salem, Massachusetts, and other New England ports since the
late eighteenth century, and for years, the Chinese who lived
in or visited the region formed a diverse array of merchants,
sailors, officials, and students.9 In 1870, however, a cohort of
Chinese laborers were recruited to work as strikebreakers in
a North Adams, Massachusetts, shoe factory. When their con
tract came to an end, many of the men left for Boston, where
they found jobs constructing the Pearl Street Telephone Ex
change and settled in the South Cove area, near what would
become Boston's Chinatown.10 After the transcontinental rail
road was completed, opportunities in the West declined and
anti-Chinese violence escalated. Pursuing new options, a num
ber of Chinese migrated eastward. Immigration directly from
China increased to the East Coast as well, and the composi
tion of the Chinese population in the Boston area and in New
England more generally became more like that of the West
8 Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, Island: Poetry
and History of Chinese
Immigrants on Angel Island, igio-ig40 (Seattle: University of
Washington Press,
1980), p. 20.
9Doris C. J. Chu, with research assistance by Glenn
Braverman, Chinese in Mas
sachusetts: Their Experiences and Contributions (Boston:
Chinese Culture Institute,
1987), pp. 34-43.
10Loh-Sze Leung, "Toisan to Boston: A Unique Model of
Transnationalism" (un
published paper, August 1996), p. 12.

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Coast, with male laborers and small business merchants from
Guangdong Province predominating.
Although New England's Chinese population remained
small until after World War II, when immigration policies
were reformed, during the years between 1900 and 1930,
Massachusetts' Chinese population, numbering about two
to three thousand individuals, ranked fourth or fifth among
all states in the nation. In the first quarter of the twentieth
century, contrary to what one might assume, less than half of
the commonwealth's Chinese lived in Boston's Chinatown."1
Because mainstream society offered them few resources,
New England's Chinese residents turned to associations and
businesses in Chinatown to address a variety of their social,
economic, and cultural needs. In Boston, and in cities across
the nation, employment opportunities for Chinese were
extremely limited. Excluded until the mid-twentieth century
from many professional positions and often prohibited from
joining unions in which membership was required to enter a
trade, Chinese were concentrated in low-level jobs.12
According to the 1940 U.S. Census, two-thirds of Boston's
Chinese worked as "Service and Kindred Workers." Of
the fifth classified as "Proprietors and Managers," a large
number were undoubtedly employed in small Chinese-owned
laundries, restaurants, and shops. The 1931 Chinese Directory
of New England lists 110 restaurants and over 500 laundries

in Massachusetts alone. Other New England states, particu
larly Connecticut and Rhode Island, also had a number of
Chinese-owned laundries during this period.13 Because many
Chinese settling in the East entered the laundry or restaurant
business from the outset, either working for themselves or for
11 U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of
Statistics, Statistical Ab
stract of the U.S. igo6 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1907); U.S.
Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic
Commerce, Statistical
Abstract of the U.S. 1931 (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, 1931), and
The Chinatown Coalition, The Chinatown Community
Assessment Report (Boston:
Chinatown Coalition, 1994), p. 2.
12Xiao-huang Yin, "The Population Pattern and Occupational
Structure of Boston's
Chinese Community in 1940," Maryland Historian 20, no. 1
(1989): 65.
13i93i Chinese Directory of New England (Boston: Hop Yuen
Co., 1931).
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other Chinese, they did not directly compete for jobs with
native-born whites. Thus, although the migrants' presence in
the area caused alarm, the widespread anti-Chinese violence
that occurred in the West did not break out in New England.
Most important, New England's Chinese population was signifi
cantly smaller than California's. In addition, some researchers
have suggested that its diversity, with a mix of intellectuals,
Christians, and members of the upper class-including schol
ars, diplomats, and wealthy merchants-created a favorable
impression with the general public in New England.'4
In the commonwealth, as in the rest of the country, the
male to female ratio among Chinese was dramatically skewed.
For example, in 1900 only 28 of the 2,968 Massachusetts Chi
nese enumerated in the U.S. Census were women; by the 1930
U.S. Census, the gender ratio had evened somewhat, with 443
women to 2,530 men.15 Of course, this extreme gender imbal
ance inhibited Chinese Americans' ability to form families and
to develop their communities. As Sucheng Chan, Judy Yung,
and Huping Ling have observed, the low numbers of Chinese
women entering the U.S. in the late nineteenth century can
be attributed to both cultural and legal factors. Social norms in
China dictated that women serve their families, bear children,
and look after the home; rarely did women have the freedom
to travel. Chinese men usually emigrated to the U.S. alone,
intending to return home after earning some money. Even if
men did settle in the U.S., they often found that they could
not afford to bring their families over.'6
14See Margaret Holmes, "East of the Golden Mountain: The
Chinese in Mas
sachusetts," in History: Graduate Studies in Immigration
Seminars, vol. 3, ed. Adele
L. Younis (Salem, Mass.: Salem State College, 1979), p. 14. Of
course, violence was
prevalent in some areas of the frontier West because law

enforcement was all but
nonexistent.
^Statistical Abstract of the U.S. igo6, and Statistical Abstract
of the U.S. 1931.
Nationally the numbers of Chinese women over the period were
as follows for selected
years: 1900, 9 women admitted to 4,522 total in country; 1910,
172 women admitted
to 4,675 total in country; 1920, 429 admitted to 7,748 total in
country; and 1930, 249
admitted to 15,152 total in country (see table 1, "Chinese
Population in the U.S. by
Sex, 1860-1990," in Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 293.
l6Sucheng Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women,
1870?1943," in Entry Denied:
Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-ig43,
ed. Chan (Philadelphia:
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In the legal realm, Chinese exclusion laws also worked to
suppress female Chinese immigration. Although exclusion laws
did not specifically restrict Chinese women's entry into the
United States, as Sucheng Chan and Lucy Salyer have noted,
few of them qualified as members of one of the act's exempt
categories.17 Most women claimed eligibility, instead, based

on their relationships to Chinese men or by nativity. Chan
has identified several main categories of Chinese females who
sought entry as dependents during the exclusion period: wives
of Chinese merchants; wives and daughters of U.S. citizens of
Chinese descent; wives of laborers; and U.S.-born women.'8 A
few merchants' daughters also applied for entry. Most women
sought to immigrate for the purpose of reunifying their families
or of joining men who wanted to marry them and establish
families in the United States.'9
Female Chinese Immigrants and the Boston
District Immigration Office
Although barring Chinese laborers from entering the United
States received widespread support from American citizens
and federal legislators, it is doubtful that anyone anticipated
just how problematic it would be to enforce the Chinese
Exclusion Act. The act consumed hundreds of thousands of
dollars and man-hours and established an unwieldy, complex
bureaucracy. Historians and social scientists are the secondary
beneficiaries of that process, for the case files generated by
Temple University Press, 1991), pp. 94-97; Judy Yung,
Unbound Voices: A Documen
tary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1999), pp. 16-41; Huping Ling, Surviving
on Gold Mountain: A
History of Chinese American Women and Their Lives (Albany:
State University of New
York Press, 1998), pp. 25-28. Violence was also a factor in
persuading Chinese men
against bringing their families to the U.S.
17Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," p. 109, and
Salyer, "'Laws Harsh as

Tigers,'" p. 61. Not until the 1920s did Chinese women begin
entering the U.S. as
students (see table 1.1 in Ling, Surviving on Gold Mountain, p.
26).
l8Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," pp. 110-23. Chan
discusses federal
court rulings during the exclusion period that affected the
chances of women in each
category of gaining admission to the U.S. Most laborers' wives
were barred from entry.
19Ling, Surviving on Gold Mountain, p. 22.
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the act's enforcement offer a wealth of information about
the policies and practices of the U.S. government and the
responses of the immigrants struggling to surmount them.
Case files contain transcripts of interviews conducted with
those Chinese applying for entry into the United States as well
as with their relatives and with witnesses. These files can be
an inch or two thick, with dozens of typewritten pages of testi
mony. In addition, many files contain lists of related individu
als and their case file numbers, demonstrating that inspectors
tracked family networks, as well as copies of correspondence
to and from the Bureau of Immigration in Washington, D.C.,

lawyers, and other relevant parties. Not all case files involve in
dividuals seeking initial admission; many were opened for per
sons seeking return certificates, documents that would facilitate
their bearers' entry back into the country after they made a trip
abroad. Even if he or she had been born in the United States,
a person of Chinese descent had to submit to an interrogation
before being granted a return certificate, without which he or
she might be investigated as a non-native upon returning to the
U.S. The case files reflect the enormity of the government's ef
fort to monitor the movements of Chinese across its borders,
which reveals the level of anxiety their presence inspired. Vir
tually all Chinese who came to the U.S. during the exclusion
period had a case file opened on them.
I have selected a sample of files from the years 1911-25 that
addresses the cases of women and girls attempting to enter the
U.S. Northeast.20 These women were processed at the Boston
District Office of the Bureau of Immigration, the adminis
trative headquarters for the New England region, and their
20I chose to focus on the years 1911-25 primarily for practical
reasons (earlier
records were destroyed in a fire, and records within the last
seventy-two years are
subject to confidentiality laws), but there were also key
national events that occurred
during this period that significantly affected Chinese
immigration. For example, in
1910 the Angel Island Immigration station opened, and anti-
Chinese sentiment was at
a peak. I also wanted to compare cases before and after 1924 to
see if the immigration
act of that year affected Chinese women's immigration. I
reviewed all the files from
1911 and 1925 and a sample of files from 1915 and 1920 and
identified those involving

females.
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case files are now stored at the National Archives and Records
Administration, Northeast Region, at Waltham, Massachusetts.
Of particular interest to me were the women's histories, their
routes to Boston, the bases of their claims for admission to the
U.S., the immigration processing procedures, and the results
of their attempts to enter the country. In addition, if the
women were coming to join husbands or fathers, as most were,
I attempted to collect information about the men as well. The
information available in the case files is limited. Because immi
gration officers were focused on the bureaucratic task at hand
judging the eligibility of an individual for admission-they had
little interest in recording particulars about the women's lives
or histories that were not immediately relevant. Moreover, an
applicant's answers to the questions posed to her cannot be
taken at face value because she may have been modifying cer
tain facts or even have assumed a false identity to improve her
chances of gaining admission. Even given these caveats, much
valuable material can be gathered from the case files,
especially
concerning the effects of immigration policies on individuals.
Of the 942 Boston office case files I examined for the period
1911-25, 35 (3.7%) concern a woman, sometimes accompanied
by children. Forty-one women and girls, ranging in age from a

few months to forty-nine years, are addressed in the 35 files.
Twenty-eight were seeking admission, and 13 were applying
for return certificates. Of the 28 applicants seeking admission,
25 were ultimately admitted (one file remained incomplete),
although 4 were denied at least once before winning their cases
on appeal.21
The largest group of applicants was comprised of wives of
merchants, of which there were eleven (see table 1). Because
of U.S. treaty obligations with China, merchants generally
enjoyed preferential treatment, including rights to freedom
of movement and family reunification.22 The applicants for
21There were approximately 7,000 case files generated by the
Boston office for the
period 1911-25.
22Tsai, The Chinese Experience in America, p. 61.
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TABLE 1
Chinese Female Applicants for Admission and Return
Certificates,
by Type, out of a Sample of 35 Records, Boston Immigration
Office Records, 1911-25

Applicants for Admission
No. admitted, No. denied, then
first try admitted No. denied
Merchant's wife 10 1
U.S. citizen's wife 5 1 1
Merchant's daughter 2 1
U.S. citizen's daughter 3
Student 1
Servant 1
Traveler 1
Total 21 4 2
Applicants for Return Certificates
No. granted No. denied
U.S.-born 8
Student 2
U.S. citizen's wife 1 1
U.S. citizen's daughter 1
Total 11 2
admission also included seven wives of U.S. citizens, three
daughters of merchants, three daughters of U.S. citizens, one
student, and one traveler. Only the student and traveler were
admitted with their own documents. The two women who
were ultimately denied admission were a servant brought from
Asia with an affluent American family and a U.S.-born man's
wife whose situation will be described in more detail below.23
All but two of the twenty-eight females were seeking entry
to the U.S. for the first time. Of the thirteen females in the
category of those applying for return certificates, eight were
children born in the U.S., two were students, two were wives
of U.S. citizens, and one was the daughter of a U.S. citizen. All

23National Archives, On Ah Yin, file no. 2500/6242; Winnie
Cheng Moy, file no.
2500/6368.
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the children born in the U.S. were granted return certificates,
while two of the other five accepted return permits.24
As with the majority of Chinese immigrants before World
War II, a good number of the women in the study (at least
85%) traced their heritage to Guangdong Province and, more
specifically, to Taishan County (75%).25 There were a few ex
ceptions to this trend: Chi-Liang Kwei was a student from
Hubei Province in Central China, and Winnie Cheng Moy was
from Macao. Also, two women came to the U.S. by way of
Britain or a British territory: Reilda Marie Choy Kee was a
student from Trinidad, and Winnie Purcell was a biracial trav
eler from England.26 Most of the women were illiterate, and
many could not write their own names, instead signing their
testimonies simply with a "+" or an "X."
The majority of the women traveling from China came to
New England by way of Canada, having first landed in Van
couver and then ridden a train across the continent to Montreal.
From Montreal, they either took a ship around Nova Scotia or
a train down to Boston. Although U.S. immigration policies on
Chinese Canadian border crossings have not been examined in

depth, they clearly changed over time. In 1911, all the women
were routed from Montreal to Halifax and then to Boston by
ship, but by 1920, women were making the trip between Boston
and Montreal via the Boston and Maine Railroad. By 1925,
pathways to Boston had multiplied. Some immigrants were still
routed around Nova Scotia, but some arrived straightaway from
Asia aboard a ship passing through the Panama Canal, which
had opened in 1914. Still other women landed in Seattle and
apparently were permitted to cross the United States by train
to Boston.
24Return permits for aliens, as specified in the 1924
Immigration Act, carried certain
limitations, including expiration after one year. Some of the
women in the study chose
not to leave the country because they could not secure a return
certificate.
25The specific origins of five women are unclear. The chances
are high, however,
that they too came from Guangdong or Taishan.
26National Archives, Chi-Ling Kwei, file no. 2500/6316;
Winnie Cheng Moy, file
no. 2500/6368; Reilda Maria Choy Kee, file no. 2500/2316;
Winnie Purcell, file no.
2500/241.
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Some women in the sample were interrogated in Vancouver
or Seattle before traveling east, but most were processed at
the immigration station located at 287 Marginal Street, in East
Boston, which opened in 1920. Before the station was built, the
federal government rented space on Long Wharf.27 Hearings
were conducted within a couple of days, and decisions were
delivered anywhere from less than a day to thirty-eight days,
a waiting period considerably shorter than those experienced
by immigrants processed at Angel Island in San Francisco, the
facility processing the greatest number of Chinese immigrants.
There, backlogs could cause delays of several weeks for hear
ings and, while cases were being investigated, from months to
years for decisions.28 From their entry at Boston, the women
were destined for a variety of locations across the Northeast,
including Portland, Maine; Providence, Rhode Island; Newark,
New Jersey; New York City; and Baltimore, Maryland. Several
of those remaining in the area expected to live in Chinatown,
but a significant number planned to travel to smaller cities and
towns in the region, including Wobum, Mansfield, and Cam
bridge. This finding suggests that the Chinese population was
quite dispersed, likely because so many Chinese were engaged
in the laundry and restaurant businesses and individuals set up
shop in areas where they would experience as little competition
as possible.29
The interrogations conducted in Boston appear similar to
those performed at Angel Island, where an applicant was gen
erally asked anywhere "from two to three hundred questions,
to over a thousand," and transcripts ran from "twenty to eighty
typewritten pages."30 Interviews could be quite lengthy as im
migration inspectors sought to uncover discrepancies that
might

27National Archives, Waltham, Mass., photocopied memo, p.
11.
28For more about Angel Island, see Lai, Lim, and Yung,
Island.
29The occupational range of the men that the women and girls
were coming to
live with was extremely narrow. If the man was not a merchant
or working in a
store owned by a Chinese merchant, then his occupation was,
without exception,
restaurant worker or laundryman, a fact that demonstrates the
dearth of employment
opportunities available to Chinese men.
30Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 66.
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signal fraudulent claims. If officials identified problems with a
case, they could order that an individual be detained; some Chi
nese, especially those entering in San Francisco, spent months
or even years in detention.31 Generally, in the case of the
women entering Boston, the woman, the husband or father, and
one or more witnesses were questioned. Children over the age
of about five were also interrogated or asked to identify pho
tographs. Applicants were consistently referred to as "alleged

wife" and "alleged son," which indicates that suspicion was the
guiding force in the interrogation process. Even individuals
who
held U.S. birth certificates were called "alleged citizens."
Like their male counterparts, women were asked numer
ous detailed questions about family members, their houses,
villages, and neighbors in China, and the locations of various
landmarks. Early in the period, they were also asked whether
they had "bound" or "natural" feet, often an indicator of class
status. Women whose feet had been bound tended to come
from wealthier families and were not expected to work to sup
port the family; women whose feet had not been bound were
generally from a lower-class family, and immigration officers
considered them less desirable for admission. Many lines of
inquiry were prompted by immigration officials' tacit suspicion
that wives and daughters were actually prostitutes. In fact, the
1906 Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the
Chinese Exclusion Laws reported that "most if not all 'wives"'
were really women who would be sold into prostitution.32 This
presumption affected the overall treatment of Chinese women
seeking to immigrate.
Immigration officers also spent a good deal of time question
ing married women about their spouses and weddings. Some
inquiries were clearly intended for the purposes of verification,
for example: When did you first meet the groom? When was
the wedding? How many feasts were held and where? At times,
31 Lai, Lim, and Yung, Island, p. 22.
32U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of
Immigration and Natu
ralization, Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of
the Chinese-Exclusion
Laws (Washington: GPO, 1906). In 1911, the newly formed

Chinese republic outlawed
footbinding, and so by 1925, the question about feet had more
or less dropped away.
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however, Chinese marriage customs aroused distrust. With ar
ranged marriages, the prevailing Chinese custom, the bride and
groom rarely met before their marriage day, and for Chinese
men living overseas, the practice was all but universal. The
case of Wong Hing provides an illustration. She traveled from
China to Vancouver, where she married a Chinese man who
was a resident of Baltimore. The husband's brother chose his
wife for him; the couple knew each other only by photographs
before they met in the United States. Expressing disbelief that
the couple had not previously encountered one another, in
terrogators questioned them relentlessly. The inspectors may
have been wary that Wong Hing was trying to dodge immigra
tion restrictions and might actually be a prostitute, but it also
appeared that they disdained Chinese marriage customs.33
As one might imagine, discrepancies in applicants' answers
were quite common. A daughter might have forgotten or never
have known how many children a neighbor's son had. Or, a
woman's calculation of the distance to the nearest village well
may simply have been a poor estimate. It was the immigration
inspector's prerogative to evaluate the legitimacy of a claim. If
he decided that a testimony contained significant incongruities

or that a statement could not be convincingly substantiated,
he had the authority to deny an applicant entry to the United
States.
Selected Case Studiesfrom the Boston District
Immigration Office Case Files
Examining a few case studies from the Boston District Immi
gration Office files will allow us to move beyond statistics and
generalizations to understand the impact of immigration laws
on individual Chinese women as well as the strategies they
developed to surmount the limitations imposed on them.
Wong Shee, wife of a merchant.34 -In December 191O, Lem
Wah, a merchant living in New York City, traveled to Boston
33National Archives, Wong Hing, file no. 2500/76.
34National Archives, Wong Shee, file no. 2500/46. Note that
Shee is not a name but
a title that traditionally followed a woman's maiden surname
and indicated that she
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to meet his wife and daughter, Wong Shee and Lem Haw,
who would arrive there the next day aboard a ship from Mon
treal via Halifax (see fig. 1). During her immigration interview,

Wong stated that she was twenty-six years old, had natural feet,
and was from the Bok Seuk village in China's Sunning
district.35
Her husband's second wife (the first had died), she had married
him about seven years earlier in China. Wong, who was illiter
ate, signed the transcript of her testimony, which was several
pages long and contained many questions about her relatives
and her village, with an "X." Lem Haw, Lem Wah's sixteen
year-old daughter from his first marriage, was also questioned.
Testifying as well was Lem Fong, a partner in Lem Wah's
grocery store. Apparently, the various interviews differed on
several points, for the commissioner of immigration, denying
FIG. i.-Wong Shee and Lem Haw.
was married. Likewise, Wah following a married man's
surname indicated that he was
married.
35 Sunning is the Taishanese pronunciation of Xinning, the
former name of Taishan.
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admission to both Wong and Lem Haw, expressed doubt that
they were actually related to Lem Wah.
Confronted with his wife and daughter's predicament, Lem

Wah hired a lawyer and filed an appeal with the Bureau
of Immigration in Washington, D.C. As the appeal wound
its way through bureaucratic channels, his wife and daugh
ter were detained at Commercial Wharf in Boston, while the
New York City office communicated to Washington informa
tion about Lem Wah's prior migration. After about a month,
the commissioner-general of immigration in Washington, D.C.,
gave notice that the original decision would stand. Ten days
later, Wong and her stepdaughter were deported back to China.
Retracing their route through Canada, Wong and Lem Haw
found, however, that the Canadian government would permit
them to disembark in Montreal, and they did so. In February
1911, Lem Wah traveled to Montreal and (re)married his wife.
Wong, accompanied by her husband, returned to Boston, once
more seeking admission to the United States-but this time
she held a marriage certificate.
Wong's interview was brief, but Lem Wah was interrogated
at great length about several prior trips to China and Canada,
about his first wife, and about his previous testimonies.
Because
he could not remember some dates and ages, his testimony was
called into question. Again, Wong's application was denied:
immigration officers reported that they could not find proof
that Lem Wah's first wife had died and so believed he might
be a polygamist. With new evidence in hand showing that Lem
Wah's first wife had left New York for China a number of years
earlier, Lem Wah's lawyer filed an appeal. Apparently it was
successful, for in March 1911 Wong was admitted to the United
States. Three months after having first arrived in Boston, she
left on a train bound for New York City.
Lem Wah's daughter, however, was still in Montreal. As

recorded in the case file, Ng Bing Chung, a merchant from
New York City, claimed status as a merchant and stated his in
tention to proceed to Montreal, marry Lem Haw, and bring her
back to the United States. But that November, when he applied
for a return certificate, Ng was denied on the grounds that he
had not shown adequate proof that he was indeed a merchant
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nor, as he declared, that his first wife had died in China. Immi
gration officials noted their concern that Ng was marrying Lem
Haw simply to give her the means to enter the United States,
a tactic that, they stated, violated the intent of the Chinese
Exclusion Act. In less than a year, however, by means that are
not entirely clear, Ng received his certificate and married Lem
Haw in Montreal; in January 1912 she applied for admission
to the U.S. at Boston. Like her stepmother, she was denied a
second time, but on appeal, the decision was reversed.
This complicated and fascinating series of failures and even
tual successes illustrates several important points about
Chinese
immigration. In some instances, it was easier to gain admission
to Canada than to the U.S.-at least for a merchant's fam
ily during this time period. The experience of Lem Wah and
his family reveals that immigration officials were adamant that
Chinese men's professional status be well documented, given

the benefits that membership in an exempt category conferred.
When an immigrant found his or her way around the stringent
exclusion laws, word quickly spread in the Chinese commu
nity, and others copied the maneuver. Because Wong had suc
ceeded in entering the United States after securing a Canadian
marriage license, Lem Haw felt empowered to try the same
approach. Clearly other women had discovered this strategy as
well. In 1911, four women in my sample who were planning to
immigrate to the United States first met their fiances/husbands
in Canada to marry or remarry them before applying for ad
mission to the states. This tactic was not found in later years
and, indeed, probably was not feasible by the 120os, when
the U.S. pressured Canada into complying with its immigration
laws and Canada had, moreover, passed a Chinese exclusion
act of its own. Finally, as in the case of Wong and Lem Haw,
persistence, such as filing repeated appeals, could produce the
desired reward.
Lew Shee, wife of a U.S. citizen.36 -Lew Shee and her ten
year-old daughter, Wong Oi Gem, arrived in Boston in Decem
ber 1920 (see fig. 2). At the time, and for the next few years,
36National Archives, Lew Shee, file no. 2500/2325.
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Fic;. 2.-Lew Slhee and( WVoiig Oi Gemi.
the num-ber of Chinese wom-en adm-itted at Bostoni increased,
and their cases seem- to have been hiandled in a simiilar
fashion.
Lew and Wong had landed on Canada's West Coast (probably
Vancouver, although this could not be confirmed), ridden the
Canadian Pacific Railroad to Montreal, and takeni the Boston
and Maine Railroad to Boston. Applying for entry as the wvife
of a U.S. citizen, Lew testified that she was thiirty years old, a
housewvife, and hiad m-arried Wong Fook Quong in 1909. She
and her daughter were adm-itted without any comiplications.
Her husband was also interrogated, anid hiis testimiony reveals
that he was a waiter at Park Restaurant, 3 Harrisoni Avenuie, in
Boston's Chinatown district.
Before Lew arrived, her husband had taken the precaution
of having his citizenship status preinvestigated at the Boston
immi-igration office. Those files reveal that hie was alm-ost
surely
not native born and, because the law prohibited it, neither hiad
he been naturalized. He was, however, a citizen nonethieless.
In 1902 or 1903, Wong Fook Quong crossed the Canadian
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border at Malone, New York, where there was no immigration

station. Arrested and jailed as a laborer attempting to evade the
Chinese exclusion laws, Wong brought his case to court, where
he claimed that he had been born in the U.S. and, therefore,
was a U.S. citizen. In U.S. vs. Wong Fook Quong, a judge
found that Wong had been held unjustly and, in February 1903,
discharged him. Thus was Wong's U.S. citizenship established,
a condition that considerably improved his chances of bringing
a family into the country.37
The strategy that Wong adopted arose in the mid-18gos and
continued for about a decade. Chinese would land in Vancou
ver, ride a train east to a Canadian town close to the U.S.
line, walk across the border into New York or Vermont, and
allow themselves to be arrested and jailed. They would then
request a trial, at which they would claim to have been born
in the U.S. and, by prior arrangement, often presented a wit
ness who would verify their nativity. Many federal judges
some of whom (as Qingsong Zhang suggests) preferred to err
on the side of caution rather than risk violating the rights
of a bona fide citizen and others who disapproved of the
Chinese exclusion laws-discharged the defendants as U.S.
citizens.38
The Bureau of Immigration quickly caught on to the border
crossing ploy and described it at length in its early-twentieth
century reports.39 The maneuver was considered to be an
extremely serious problem since it resulted in Chinese gaining
citizenship. The fact that the district courts were discharging
Chinese men and giving them rights "to vote and . . . parti
cipate in the political affairs of this country" was characterized
as an "evil [that] cannot be overestimated." One report named
Felix McGettrick, a U.S. commissioner and judge for the
37If Lew Shee's testimony is accurate, Wong must have
returned to China in 1909,
married her, and fathered a child. Once he received his court

discharge papers, he held
the rights of a U.S. citizen to leave the country and to return.
Immigration inspectors
checked dates of trips back home and ages of children very
carefully to make sure they
matched.
38Zhang, "Dragon in the Land of the Eagle," p. 365.
39U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of
Immigration, Annual Re
port of the Commissioner-General of Immigration for the Fiscal
Year Ended June 30,
1903 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903),
pp. 97-99.
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District of Vermont at St. Albans, as a particular target for
concern. McGettrick admitted to discharging about eleven
hundred Chinese between 1894 and 1897 as citizens.40 The
bureau struggled for years to halt this clever stratagem for
establishing U.S. citizenship. Finally, by working with the
Canadian government to restrict Chinese entering the U.S. to
only a few selected points along the border and by reducing
the power of the courts along it to render decisions on Chinese
Exclusion Act cases, the bureau was able to curtail the practice.
Although none of the women in my sample entered the U.S.

in this manner, a significant number of their husbands or
fathers
had. These men produced discharge papers from courts in
border towns such as Plattsburgh, New York, in addition to St.
Albans and Malone, papers that affirmed their recipients' status
as U.S. citizens.
Additional information, gathered during the course of an in
vestigation ten years later, is contained in the case file for
Lew. In 1926, Wong Oi Gem married Jim Lee; in due course,
the couple had four children. At some point, they moved to
Providence, Rhode Island, and opened a laundry. Lew and her
husband had also moved, to Lowell, Massachusetts, where they
too opened a laundry. Lew died there in 1934.
Chi-Liang Kwei, student.41-In June 1925, Chi-Liang Kwei
appeared at the Boston immigration office. Having just com
pleted her bachelor's degree at Wellesley College, she wanted
to visit her sister in Shanghai before returning to the U.S. to
attend Johns Hopkins Medical School in the fall. But she had
lost her passport and therefore needed to apply for a return
permit. Kwei, who had been born in Shashi, Hubei Province,
China, testified in English and gave her American name as Lil
lian. She brought paperwork with her to prove that she had
attended Wellesley (including a letter from the dean) and had
received a scholarship to study at Johns Hopkins.
4? Compilation of Facts Concerning the Enforcement of the
Chinese-Exclusion Laws.
41 National Archives, Chi-Liang Kwei, file no. 2500/6316.
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Kwei's case is particularly noteworthy because she was
one of the approximately thirteen hundred students who had
participated in the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship program,
1909-29, an initiative to bring Chinese students to the U.S.
and offer them a Western education that had resulted from
negotiations between the U.S. and Chinese governments after
the Boxer Rebellion in China had erupted. These individuals,
some of China's top students, had undergone rigorous training
to prepare them for entering American colleges. The first
group of nine women, many of whom majored in medicine or
teaching, professions considered proper for women, traveled
to the United States in 1914.42 Kwei's case illustrates that
opportunities for Chinese women were changing radically
around the 1920S. At twenty-five years old, she was well past
the usual age at which a Chinese woman was expected to marry
and represented, instead, a rising generation of career-minded
Chinese women.
Even though Boxer Indemnity students were among China's
elite, they frequently encountered problems with U.S. immi
gration.43 In Kwei's case, she was granted a return permit after
showing proof of her student status.
Winnie Cheng Moy, student/wife of a U.S. citizen. 44-Winnie
Cheng Moy's case represents the dire effects that U.S. immi
gration policy could have on the lives of Chinese (fig. 3). Moy
was born in 1906; her birthplace is not clear, but Macao was
listed as her last place of residence. In Macao, she married
Samuel Moy, an American-born Chinese from a prominent

Boston family, after which she accompanied him back to the
United States. Leaving Hong Kong in July 1925, the Moys trav
eled first class by steamship and arrived in Boston in August.
Mrs. Moy attempted to enter the U.S. as a student; she could
not enter as Samuel's wife.
42Weili Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name: Chinese
Students in the United
States, 1900-1927 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
2001), pp. 8-10, 142.
43Ye, Seeking Modernity in China's Name, p. 88.
44National Archives, Winnie Cheng Moy, file no. 2500/6368.
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FIG. 3.-Winnie Cheng Moy with two of her children.
The year before Winnie Moy sought to immigrate to the
United States, Congress passed a new immigration act that, al
though not specifically directed against Chinese, dealt a serious
blow to Chinese women's attempts to join their husbands and
reside in the country. The 1924 act barred any "0aliens ineligi
ble to citizenship" from entering the U.S., affecting virtually
all
would-be immigrants from Asia, who were still denied the op
portunity to naturalize. The two primary categories of Chinese

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women who were adversely affected were wives of merchants
and wives of natives. In May 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court
ruled that wives of merchants could be cleared for entry but
wives of natives could not. Chinese American men born in the
U.S. could no longer expect to enjoy the company of their
wives
in their own country.45 In 1920, approximately eighty to ninety
Chinese women were admitted to the United States in Boston;
in 1925 only three women were admitted and none was the
wife of a Chinese American citizen.46
At her interview, Mrs. Moy produced a letter of acceptance
from Boston's Burdett College, where she was planning to en
roll in the secretarial program. But when she was given a read
ing test consisting of passages from the Bible, she was able
to pick out only such words as is, a, and, you, and him.47
Immigration officials therefore judged her to be ill prepared
to attend school in the U.S. and denied her admission to the
country. She was, they assumed, attempting to enter the U.S.
to join her husband, not to receive an education. On 5 Septem
ber, after posting a five-hundred-dollar bond, Samuel Moy did
manage to get his wife temporarily admitted as a student. She
was, however, required to submit regular reports of her school
attendance, and she could stay in the country only as long as
she was enrolled in college.

Mrs. Moy remained in the U.S. for several years. She at
tended Burdett College as planned in the fall of 1925 and con
tinued to enroll for the next two and a half years, although she
requested time off twice when she became pregnant. As stipu
lated, Burdett College sent regular reports to the immigration
45Immigration Act of May 26, 1924, United States Statutes at
Large 43, 153; Mae
Ngai, "The Architecture of Race in American Immigration Law:
A Reexamination of
the Immigration Act of 1924," Journal of American History 86,
no. 1 (June 1999):
67-92; Chan, "The Exclusion of Chinese Women," pp. 123-26;
Chang Chan et al. vs.
John D. Nagle, 268 U.S. 346 (1925), and Cheung Sum Shee vs.
Nagle 268 U.S. 336
(1925).
46For the year 1920, I looked at the first 100 out of 878 case
files and found that
11 were for women who were admitted. At the same rate for the
remaining cases, the
total number of women admitted that year would be between 80
and 90.
47One of the passages is as follows: "Who is a wise man and
endued with knowledge
among you? Let him show out of a good conversation his works
with meekness of
wisdom" (James 3:13, 14).
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office to notify them of her attendance. When she became
pregnant a third time, she left Burdett College "indefinitely."
During this period, Mr. Moy graduated from MIT and took a
job working for the federal government in Washington, D.C., as
a mechanical engineer.48 In 1931, while the couple were living
in Washington, they received a letter dated 9 March from the
immigration office informing Mrs. Moy that she must leave the
country by i April. She had apparently managed to extend her
temporary immigration status until, as recorded in her case file,
a "bill before Congress . . . authorizing the admission to the
U.S. of the wives of American citizens where the wives were
ineligible to citizenship" had been decided. The amendment
was approved in June 1930, but it applied only to Chinese
women who had married an American citizen before 26 May
1924, when that year's immigration restrictions took effect.49
The Moys had married after that date, in September of 1924.
The Moys, who now had three children, immediately sent
letters to the commissioner of immigration in Boston request
ing that an exception be made for her. The commissioner re
sponded that he would look into the case and consult
authorities
in Washington. Mrs. Moy did not leave the country by 1 April,
but she apparently despaired of her future. Early that month
the Moys had returned to Boston to share with his parents
the honor of hosting the daughters of a Chinese foreign min
ister and a Chinese general. On 10 April, while the family was
out, Mrs. Moy hanged herself in the bathroom of her husband's

mother's Back Bay apartment. The suicide was widely reported,
including in the Boston Herald and the Daily Record (both
dated 11 April 1931). The headline of the Daily Record reads,
"First Chinese Woman Suicide in Boston." The newspapers did
not mention Mrs. Moy's deportation order, commenting only
that she had had a "nervous and physical condition."
Certainly there are success stories to be found in the history
of Chinese American immigrants during the exclusion period,
48The file indicates that Samuel Moy had previously owned a
Chinese restaurant.
49Chan, Entry Denied, p. 127; An Act to Admit to the U.S.
Wives of Certain
American Citizens, of June 13, 1930, United States Statutes at
Large 46, 581.
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but hardship, fear, and disappointment were commonplace.
Even in the limited number of case files I examined for this
study, there is ample evidence that residence in the United
States did not always produce the results immigrants hoped for.
For example, Wong was admitted as an inmate at the Central
Islip State Hospital shortly after she arrived in Boston. And
newborn Mary Wing Gee was sent to live outside her family
the day after she was born because her mother "went insane"

and was subsequently sent to Foxboro State Hospital.50 These
episodes, mere factual notations in the women's case files,
offer
frustratingly brief glimpses into the challenges they faced as
they attempted to settle and raise their families in an alien
country. In addition, those who entered the country illegally
would worry about being discovered for many years afterwards.
Conclusions
Exclusion laws were federally mandated, and so their en
forcement theoretically should have been uniform across all
areas of the country. In practice, however (perhaps not sur
prisingly), there appears to have been regional variation in the
execution and application of the laws. Local social and
political
contexts as well as available resources influenced the treatment
of Chinese entering at different ports. Erica Lee has found,
for example, that immigration officials in San Francisco were
under intense public pressure to bar as many Chinese as pos
sible from entering the country. Some officials, allied as they
were with West Coast labor leaders or having themselves been
politicians who helped foment anti-Chinese sentiment, readily
complied. By the turn of the twentieth century, San Francisco
had gained a reputation as the most difficult port of entry for
immigrating Chinese.51 Armed with this knowledge, many Chi
nese tried to avoid entering the U.S. at San Francisco if at all
possible; instead, they would land in Vancouver, cross Canada,
and attempt to enter the U.S. in the East.
50National Archives, Mary Wing Gee, case file no. 2500/6474.
51 Lee, At America's Gates, p. 51.
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00:25:06 UTC��
In the East, many hoped, Chinese would have an easier time
being admitted as immigrants. Indeed, at least one U.S. com
missioner of immigration at Boston was accused of prejudice in
favor of the Chinese. In 1915, Congress was holding hearings
on a bill that would restrict Chinese immigration even further.
To offer support for the bill, the Laundrymen's National Asso
ciation of America sent several of its members to Washington,
where the Boston representative testified at length that U.S.
Commissioner Hayes was "pro-Chinese" and was contributing
to the city's problem of illegal Chinese immigrants, many of
whom, they asserted, were establishing laundries that unfairly
competed with legitimate American businesses.52
The story of Chinese immigration to the U.S. before World
War II is a remarkable one, not only because of the unusu
ally extreme measures taken by the U.S government to exclude
Chinese but also because of the extraordinary resourcefulness
and determination Chinese demonstrated in believing that they
had as much right as any ethnic group to seek opportunity in
the United States. The experiences of this group of immigrants
reveal the racial and socioeconomic underpinnings of immigra
tion policy as well as immigrants' persistence-despite legal,
social, and geographic barriers-to manipulate those policies
to achieve their goals.
The number of Chinese females admitted to the U.S. during
the exclusion period numbered less than ten thousand,53 and
only a small fraction of them entered through New England

ports. Most sought status as dependents of Chinese men who
had already established themselves as legitimate U.S. residents.
The largest group consisted of wives of merchants, with a few
girls entering as daughters of merchants or of U.S. citizens,
and a handful as students. Immigration officials treated women
much as they did men-including subjecting them to extensive
interrogation-and if denied entry, many women, too, hired a
52U.S. House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization,
Entrance of Chinese
Aliens into the United States: Hearings on H.R. 20037, 63rd
Cong., 3rd sess. on H.R.
20037, 1915, p. 7.
53See table 2 in Yung, Unbound Feet, p. 294.
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lawyer, appealed their case, and reapplied, a process that often
produced the desired result. Aside from the fact that Chinese
destined for New England experienced an extra journey across
the continent, they also commonly faced the added complica
tion of crossing the Canadian border. It appears, though, that
they were sometimes able to use this situation to their advan
tage, at least until the 1920S, when both U.S. and Canadian
immigration policies were tightened. The relatively small num
ber of Chinese entering the U.S. through New England seems
to have expedited their immigration process, while the lack

of widespread anti-Chinese hostility in this region may have
improved their chances of gaining admission.
Shauna Lo is the Assistant Director for the Institute for Asian
American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston
and a board member of the Chinese Historical Society of New
England. Her research interests include Chinese American
history, Asian American immigration, and comparative race
and ethnic studies.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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Contentsp. 383p. 384p. 385p. 386p. 387p. 388p. 389p. 390p.
391p. 392p. 393p. 394p. 395p. 396p. 397p. 398p. 399p. 400p.
401p. 402p. 403p. 404p. 405p. 406p. 407p. 408p. 409Issue
Table of ContentsThe New England Quarterly, Vol. 81, No. 3
(Sep., 2008) pp. 379-554Front MatterEditorial [pp. 381-
382]Chinese Women Entering New England: Chinese Exclusion
Act Case Files, Boston, 1911-1925 [pp. 383-409]"I Believe
They Are Papists!": Natives, Moravians, and the Politics of
Conversion in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut [pp. 410-
437]The Mother Church: Mary Baker Eddy and the Practice of
Sentimentalism [pp. 438-461]George Bancroft's Civil War:
Slavery, Abraham Lincoln, and the Course of History [pp. 462-
488]Memoranda and Documents"These Stray Letters of Mine":
Forgery and Self-Creation in the Letters of Cardinal William
o'Connell [pp. 489-502]The Oreades Hear Emerson in Worcester
[pp. 503-505]Communications [pp. 506-519]Book
ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 520-523]Review: untitled [pp.
523-525]Review: untitled [pp. 525-527]Review: untitled [pp.

549-551]Review: untitled [pp. 551-554]Back Matter
GEN/201 v11
Finding and Using Information Worksheet
GEN/201 v11
Page 2 of 2
Finding and Using Information Worksheet
Complete Parts 1 and 2
below.
In Part 1, you will find and evaluate two sources from at least
two different databases in the University Library. EBSCOhost
and ProQuest are the most popular databases in the University
Library.
In Part 2, you will write a brief 150- to 200-word response
describing your experience using the library databases. This
is a required part of the assignment.
Part 1: Source Evaluation
Select one of the following topics for this assignment:
Obesity
Affordable Care Act
Healthcare disparities
Cyberbullying
Online predators
Information security
Social media
Renewable energy
Financial literacy
Technology in education
Healthy life habits

Career exploration
Mindfulness in business or education
Immigration
Homeland security
Global women's rights
Concussions and the NFL
Highlight or
bold your topic selection in the list above, so your
faculty member can easily see which topic you selected.
Locate 2 articles related to your selected topic from different
databases, such as EBSCOhost and ProQuest, in the
University Library. You may use the course-specific
library resources found on the
GEN/201 University Success page to locate your
articles.
Complete the tables below for each article you have chosen. An
example table is provided first. Make sure to refer to the
How Do I Evaluate Sources information in the
University Library as you evaluate each article.
Example
Article Information and Questions
Responses
Chosen topic
Social Media
Title of the article
“Facebook as a Platform of Social Interactions for Meaningful
Learning”
Author(s) of the article
Jumaat, Nurul Farhana; Ahmad, Noriesah; Abu Samah,
Norazrena; Ashari, Zakiah Mohamad; Ali, Dayana Farzeeha;
Abdullah, Abdul Halim
Currency: When was the article published? Is the article
current?

2019 – The article was published within the past 5 years so the
information can be considered current.
Relevance: Is the article relevant to your selected topic?
Explain your response.
The article is relevant because it discusses issues related to the
selected topic of social media.
Accuracy: Is the information in the article accurate? How do
you know?
The information in the article can be considered accurate. First,
the article is peer-reviewed which ensures that it has been
verified by other experts on this topic. Also, there is cited
evidence and research throughout the article.
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credible? How do you know?
The article was published in a reputable academic publication,
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A "Test of Chiffon Politics": Gender Politics in Seattle, 1897-
1917
Author(s): John Putman
Source: Pacific Historical Review , Nov., 2000, Vol. 69, No. 4,
Woman Suffrage: The View
from the Pacific (Nov., 2000), pp. 595-616
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3641226
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https://www.jstor.org/stable/3641226
A "Test of Chiffon Politics":
Gender Politics in Seattle, 1897-1917
JOHN PUTMAN
The author is a member of the history department at San
Diego State University.

In the fall of 1910, when Seattle voters went to the polls,
these men no doubt passed working-class residents stumping on
behalf of the United Labor Party. If they paid any attention,
Seattle voters would have likely heard about capitalist
oppression
and demands for the exclusion of Japanese workers from the
city. Yet the United Labor Party and its Democratic and Repub-
lican opponents did not have the street to themselves. Voters
could not have escaped the posters, or the banners, or the pres-
ence of numerous women distributing handbills with "VOTES
FOR WOMEN" spelled out in large letters. While most male
vot-
ers turned a deaf ear to the anticapitalist rhetoric, they did heed
the pleas of Seattle women and granted the women of Wash-
ington suffrage.1
The 1910 fall election signaled a turning point in Seattle's
political evolution. Although voters defined the limits of Pro-
gressivism by overwhelmingly rejecting the highly charged
class
rhetoric of organized labor, they did not wish to backtrack or
1. This paper is derived from my dissertation entitled, "The
Emergence of a
New West: The Politics of Class and Gender in Seattle,
Washington, 1880-1917"
(University of California, San Diego, 2000). The author would
like to thank the
many members of the "Woman Suffrage in International
Perspective" panels at the
1999 Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association
annual conference for
their insightful comments and inspiring presence.
Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4, pages 595-616. ISSN

0030-8684
@2000 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical
Association. All rights reserved.
Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and
Permissions,
University of California Press, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303,
Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. 595
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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596 Pacific Historical Review
close the book on Progressive reform. While they repudiated
politics in which organized labor defined the issues, voters ac-
cepted a more inclusive political environment by providing
women greater access to public life than was the case in all but
four states in the union. Nevertheless, organized labor and
Seat-
tle suffragists recognized in the first two decades of the twenti-
eth century that their dreams for a better future were linked.
Unable to fashion a class-based political movement, labor lead-
ers increasingly turned toward middle-class women as potential
allies. Likewise, suffragists recognized that any chance to gain
the ballot rested on securing working-class support. Class
preju-
dices, however, were difficult to overcome. A cross-class
alliance
would have been quite difficult to forge without a strong,
shared

interest; working-class women quickly emerged as this bond.
This nexus of class and gender politics momentarily but pro-
foundly redefined Seattle's political landscape early in the
twen-
tieth century.
Most recent studies of woman suffrage in the United
States have concentrated on the national effort to secure a
constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.
Most correctly note that nearly all the western states granted
women the franchise several years before the passage of the
Susan B. Anthony amendment, but few scholars have sought
to explain why these state campaigns succeeded. Furthermore,
the political activity of these newly enfranchised women has
re-
ceived scant attention. Washington state, especially its largest
city, Seattle, offers an illuminating case study for both the ef-
fort of western women to obtain the ballot and the ways that
gender shaped local politics after the 1910 statewide suffrage
campaign. Seattle actually witnessed two successful woman
suffrage crusades. In the mid-1880s, male political leaders
granted women the right to vote for more than three years, un-
til Washington's territorial Supreme Court revoked the privi-
lege. The 1910 campaign was the first suffrage victory of the
twentieth century; several neighboring states quickly followed
suit. Washington's early suffrage triumph also offers scholars
the opportunity to explore how enfranchised women both
viewed and used the ballot and how this changed local and
statewide politics.
After losing the vote in 1887, Seattle suffragists tried to
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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Woman Suffrage in Washington 597
regain it in two unsuccessful statewide referenda.2 Forced to
re-
think their strategy and wait for a more propitious time,
middle-
class women built the foundation of the 1910 suffrage
campaign
through the club movement. Women's clubs not only helped
construct communication networks but also encouraged women
to expand their horizons beyond the home. Troubled by the so-
cial deterioration accompanying Seattle's rapid growth after the
1898 Alaska gold strike, clubwomen set out to improve condi-
tions in the city. In the early 1900s, the local Young Woman's
Christian Association (YWCA) helped working women by pro-
viding lunchrooms and employment services. The organization
also appointed a full-time matron to protect young women at
the city's train depot. By 1905 Seattle's middle-class
clubwomen
joined with the head of the waitresses' union, Alice Lord, to
lobby for the eight-hour day for women workers. This budding
cross-class alliance was a crucial step toward equal suffrage. In
1909 the favorable environment for which suffragists had
waited
nearly a decade materialized. Growing concern about prostitu-
tion and its negative impact on the city's image erupted into a
full-blown political crisis and quickly thrust woman suffrage
into
the forefront of public debate.3
Seattle stood at the center of Washington's suffrage move-

ment. The election of Emma Smith DeVoe as the president of
the Washington Equal Suffrage Association (WESA) in 1906
marked the beginning of the successful 1910 campaign. One of
DeVoe's great strengths was her ability to exploit the diversity
of
both her followers and their ideas. "Unity in Diversity"
emerged
as the theme of the Washington campaign. Just as Aileen Kra-
ditor outlined in her study of national suffrage ideology, ar-
guments for both inherent rights and political expediency
2. A study of a similar suffrage struggle in the late nineteenth-
century trans-
Mississippi West is Michael Goldberg, An Army of Women:
Gender and Politics in Gilded
Age Kansas (Baltimore, 1997).
3. Dora P. Tweed, "Woman in Club Life: Her Duties and
Responsibilities," The
Washington Women, n.d., and The Clover Leaf June 1899, both
in Accession 3463-10,
box 4, Federation of Women's Clubs: Seattle Federation
District, Manuscripts and
Archives, University of Washington, Seattle; Western Woman's
Outlook, Dec. 21, 1911;
Seattle YWCA: Annual Report, 1901-1902, p. 7; Seattle
YWCA: Annual Report, 1903-04,
p. 8. For a study of the evolution of clubwomen's social and
political activities, see
Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood
Redefined, 1868-1914
(New York, 1980).
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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dominated Seattle's campaign. In an article in Votes For
Women,
a local suffrage magazine, Mrs. George Smith invoked both the
Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution to sup-
port her claim of equality with men. Yet, a few paragraphs
later,
she stated that "women are different from men in aspirations,
needs, and point of view," proceeding to argue that enfran-
chised women would use their unique abilities to cure the ills
that plagued the city.4
Ideological inconsistency was one of the strengths of the
movement. Both Seattle suffragists and state leaders recognized
that victory depended upon convincing a diverse population.
Not only did they have to incorporate women of all classes and
ethnic groups into the movement, but they also had to tailor
their arguments to appeal to a similarly diverse male electorate.
No single argument or idea could sway all voters to break with
tradition and grant women the right to vote. Thus the Seattle
Suffrage Club offered not one but a score of reasons to extend
the franchise to women. Opponents might successfully combat
one particular argument, but they could not deflect such a
multi-
front assault.
Though many of the ideas and arguments espoused by
Seattle and state suffragists differed little from similar debates
throughout the nation, they did add a particular regional flavor.
In the inaugural issue of Votes For Women, the editor proudly

pro-
claimed the "Spirit of the West." Freedom, she argued, "has al-
ways come out of the West-the West which has always been
peopled by those free souls who gladly gave up the luxuries of
the East in order to escape its slavery." The editor concluded
with the hope that the West would grant equal opportunity to
all
and that this would be "washed back over the East with the re-
turning tides of humanity." This idea that the American West
was special or exceptional was pervasive among suffrage lead-
4. Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of Woman Suffrage, 1890-1920
(New York, 1965),
chapter 3; Alice M. Smith, "Why I Believe in Political
Equality" (1901), Alice Smith
Papers, Accession 4155, box 5, Manuscripts and Archives,
University of Washing-
ton, Seattle; Votes for Women, May, Oct. 1910; Cora Smith
Eaton King, "History of
Washington Suffrage," folder 29, box F, Emma Smith DeVoe
Papers, Washington
State Library, Olympia; "The Seattle Suffrage Club Offers A
Score Of Reasons Why
Women Should Be Enfranchised," Accession 123, box 2, Nellie
M. Fick Papers,
Manuscripts and Archives, University of Washington, Seattle.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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ers.5 In Washington they understood the power of this line of
thought and made sure to include women in this image of the
West. They often paid homage to female pioneers who "helped
win the West" and maintained that the present generation was
"winning not only the West, but helping to win all the land to
freedom, to right and justice." DeVoe declared that the
response
to women's call for political equality "came from the broad-
shouldered, big-brained men of our great Northwest who made
good their popular Western phrase 'A square deal for men must
be accompanied by a square deal for women.' " Soon after
Wash-
ington men passed the 1910 suffrage law, one female observer
noted that men had accepted the presence of women in politics
partly because western men did not want "to be considered out
of date in this part of the world."6
Such regional appeals point to one other way suffrage
forces employed the West in the debate over the ballot. Propo-
nents of the equal franchise not only played upon the sense of
competition between West and East but also encouraged an
intra-
regional rivalry. Suffragists outlined the benefits the ballot had
produced in the four western states where women already
voted.
Votes For Women, for example, claimed that property values in
these four states jumped by 37 percent to 160 percent, while
Cal-
ifornia, lacking woman suffrage, had witnessed less than a 3
per-
cent increase.7 Not so subtly, suffragists also suggested that
Washington would remain inferior to these four smaller states.
An advertisement in Votes For Women declared: "WOMEN
VOTE

5. Votes For Women, Oct. 1909, Dec. 1910. For more on the
West in the Ameri-
can mind, see Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None
of My Own": A New His-
tory of the American West (Norman, Okla., 1991), 57-58, 612-
629. Many westerners
believed that one of the special or unique qualities the West
possessed was a pen-
chant for reform, or what many at that time referred to as
Progressivism. In a
speech before the King County Political Equality Club in 1909,
Professor Edward
McMahon of the University of Washington made an urgent
appeal to western set-
tlers to grant women the franchise. He stated that they must
hasten reforms "be-
fore we are swamped by conservative settlers from the East."
Votes for Women, Jan.
1910.
6. Votes For Women, Dec. 1909, Jan. 1910; Emma Smith
DeVoe, "What Next?"
Nov. 1910, folder 20, box 1, DeVoe Papers; Western Woman's
Outlook, Jan. 1912, p.
5. An additional argument suggested that equal suffrage would
aid women in pro-
tecting the special privileges, like liberal community property
laws, that western
men had provided women in the region.
7. Votes For Women, June, Oct. 1910.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022

00:24:22 UTC��
FOR PRESIDENT AND ALL OTHER OFFICERS IN WYO-
MING, UTAH, IDAHO, AND COLORADO. WHY NOT IN
WASHINGTON? ARE THE WOMEN OF THOSE STATES
MORE WORTHY OR ARE THE MEN OF THOSE STATES
MORE JUST?"8
Good ideas alone, suffrage leaders perceptively recognized,
would not result in equal suffrage. Suffragists had to walk a
fine
line because some tactics tended to alienate voters and under-
mine their efforts. Just like national leaders, suffrage workers
in
Seattle and the state searched for methods that best fit the sen-
sibilities of local residents. The key to victory, it seemed, lay
in
making personal contact with voters and various organizations
and in avoiding large public demonstrations that might provoke
a reaction by opponents, especially the liquor industry. In the
campaign's early months, suffragists simply attempted to draw
attention to the amendment. In the long run, they came to un-
derstand that success depended on convincing large numbers
of women to join their effort. Women not only could help sway
their voting husbands but also were needed to spread the mes-

sage and keep the issue alive in the twenty-month campaign.
Scheduled less than four months after the legislature authorized
the suffrage amendment, the upcoming Alaska-Yukon-Pacific
Exposition (AYPE) in Seattle seemed to suffrage leaders a
unique opportunity to launch the campaign.
The AYPE offered suffragists a public stage from which they
could build the necessary momentum. DeVoe and other
officials
invited several national women's organizations to hold their an-
nual conventions at the exposition. Both the National American
Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National
Coun-
cil of Women came to Seattle in the summer of 1909. National
suffrage activists, including NAWSA president Anna Shaw,
made
quite a splash on their way to Seattle by organizing a whistle-
stop
campaign from one end of the state to the other. The conven-
tions sparked enthusiasm among women attending the exposi-
tion and attracted substantial local press coverage. However,
relations between state and national suffrage leaders soured
soon after the convention. When an untimely dispute between
two suffrage camps in Washington surfaced during the annual
8. Ibid., Oct. 1909.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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convention, NAWSA officials fired DeVoe, a paid national
orga-
nizer, for her handling of the problem. No longer financially
tied to NAWSA and now free to ignore its eastern-based
leader-
ship, DeVoe and other suffrage leaders were able to tailor both
the campaign's strategy and message to their particular North-
west audience.9
Throughout the summer and fall of 1909, Seattle suffrage
leaders continued their outreach to women. While articles in
newspapers or traditional campaign literature attracted some
fe-
male support, suffragists tried more innovative ways to get
their
message out. Mrs. George Smith of Seattle, for example, hosted
a "suffrage tea" in her home; others held card parties or put on
plays and balls to attract younger women into the movement.
The WESA published a special cookbook, entitled Votes For
Women: Good Things to Eat, which helped bridge the public
and
private spheres with political messages sprinkled among
recipes.
Suffragists opened up the 1910 campaign with a special
"Woman's Day" at a county fair just outside Seattle. Following
speeches by DeVoe and Marion Hay, the state's governor,
women staged a parade at the fairgrounds, complete with a spe-
cial suffrage float. While suffragists had avoided public
demon-
strations during the earlier battle in the state legislature,
leaders
recognized that, to achieve victory, they now needed both to
arouse more women to the cause and capture the votes of men.

Hence, reflecting the intraregional rivalry theme, the suffrage
float carried six women, four representing the "free" western
states where women already voted, another the state of Wash-
ington, and the last depicting the "Goddess of Liberty" who
stood ready to remove the shackles from Washington women.10
9. 41st Annual Convention of the National American Woman
Suffrage Association,
Seattle, Washington, July 1-6, 1909, in Seattle AYP Exposition
Miscellany (1909), Pacific
Northwest Collection, University of Washington, Seattle;
Clarence Bagley, History
of Seattle from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time
(Chicago, 1916), 495; Seattle Post-
Intelligencer, June 30, 1909.
10. On the social activities, see Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
April 23, May 27, 1909;
Adella M. Parker note in folder 29, box 5, DeVoe Papers. On
the cookbook, see
Washington Women's Cook Book (Seattle, 1909), Seattle
Public Library; King, "History
of Washington Suffrage," 7. On the various suffrage activities
at the fair, see Votes
For Women, Jan. 1910; Letter to Women of Washington from
Emma Smith DeVoe,
n.d., folder 21, box 1, DeVoe Papers. On other activities, see
Votes For Women, Jan.,
Feb., Dec. 1910; letter to Mrs. Baker (no author), Oct. 28,
1908, folder 2, box 1, De-
Voe Papers; The Patriarch, Oct. 22, 1910.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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While such tactics helped attract women to the movement,
suffrage leaders also employed more traditional political meth-
ods to swell WESA's ranks and, perhaps more importantly, gar-
ner male support for the amendment. Suffrage leaders adroitly
exploited the press. Virtually every newspaper in the state car-
ried news of the campaign, and WESA's publicity bureau ran
"Suffrage Columns" and "Suffrage Supplements" in many of
the
state's largest papers. One observer estimated that suffrage ac-
tivists put out more than one million pieces of literature over
the two-year effort. Without a doubt, the most important paper
to champion equal suffrage was Votes For Women. Published
by
Mrs. M. T. B. Hanna of Seattle, the monthly periodical-the
only suffrage journal on the Pacific coast-filled its pages with
articles, speeches, cartoons, and even advertisements that ex-
tolled the benefits of equal suffrage. The paper proved a valu-
able asset, not only permitting suffrage officials to shape and
disseminate arguments in favor of the ballot, but also acting as
a
direct, unobstructed conduit between WESA leaders and the
rank and file.'1
Suffrage leaders borrowed strategies from male-dominated
political campaigns while adding a few of their own. Following
the example of Seattle businessmen who used billboards in
their
successful campaigns, Washington women papered the state
with large posters and billboards. WESA leaders likewise

recog-
nized the importance of political alliances with certain key or-
ganizations, in particular, organized labor. DeVoe and other
officials spoke at union meetings, underscoring the benefits of
the equal franchise to the working class. They argued that labor
should support woman suffrage because millions of working
women needed political power to defend themselves. Receptive
to these arguments, Seattle's Central Labor Council supported
the ballot campaign through numerous articles and editorials in
the weekly labor paper, the Seattle Union Record. Suffragists
also
recognized the importance of stirring ethnic working-class
women to pressure state legislators. WESA leaders, for
example,
urged ethnic women to write to their local Norwegian or Finn-
ish societies to encourage them to join the movement.
11. King, "History of Washington Suffrage," 7-10; Bagley,
History of Seattle,
494; Votes For Women, Jan., Oct. 1910.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
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This support notwithstanding, suffrage leaders believed
face-to-face campaigning was the key to victory. DeVoe
ordered
followers throughout the state to canvass each precinct to de-
termine support for the amendment. With this information,

leaders could shift resources to areas where they faced stiffer
re-
sistance. The success of this approach, however, rested entirely
upon women. Female activists did the precinct-by-precinct can-
vassing, and the wives, daughters, and sisters of male voters
who
opened the doors provided the responses. The network of
women's clubs significantly aided this effort. In 1907, for
exam-
ple, local women's clubs had formed a correspondence network
by dividing the various clubs scattered throughout the city into
precincts and districts to facilitate a city beautification plan for
the upcoming 1909 AYPE. This earlier effort paid off hand-
somely in the battle for the ballot. Not only did women canvass
their neighborhoods in the weeks before the 1910 election, but
on the day voters went to the polls, Cora Eaton coordinated a
precinct-level picketing campaign. As captain of Seattle's third
ward, she sent letters to fellow picketers explaining how best to
approach male voters. From precinct canvassing to the use of
billboards, suffrage leaders thus demonstrated their clear un-
derstanding of the techniques of local and state politics.12
The campaign intentionally soft-pedaled what women
would do with the vote. Seattle suffrage leaders avoided
directly
mixing the ballot with politics or other reforms. While their
rhetoric may have emphasized cleaning up the city, they rarely
addressed specific concerns like prohibition or prostitution.
Nevertheless, the emerging social-political movement we call
Progressivism no doubt aided their success. Many voters in
Seat-
tle connected the franchise for women with political and social
reform. Westerners, in the end, envisioned "votes for women"
as
not simply an aspect of the region's political culture but as an

12. DeVoe to Suffrage Co-Worker, July 22, 1910, folder 17,
box 1, DeVoe Pa-
pers; Cora Eaton to Fellow Campaigner, Oct. 31, 1910, Emma
Smith DeVoe Scrap-
books, vol. 7, Washington State Library, Olympia; Seattle
AYPExposition Scrapbooks,
Vol. 2 (Jan. 1, 1907-June 27, 1907), Pacific Northwest
Collection; King, "History of
Washington Suffrage," 6; Abigail Scott Duniway, Path
Breaking: An Autobiographical
History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States
(1914; New York, 1970),
242; Seattle Union Record, July 9, 1910; form letter from
DeVoe (1910), folder 20,
box 1, DeVoe Papers; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, April 28, May
16, July 11, 17, 1909.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
00:24:22 UTC��
effective political instrument, like the recall or direct primary,
in achieving other goals.13
Immediately following the successful vote for woman suf-
frage in the 1910 election, Seattle's residents discovered how
enfranchised women would change local politics. The first few
years following the suffrage victory were critical. Feminist
lead-

ers understood that newly enfranchised women not only had
to prove themselves but also that most female voters had to
undergo a rapid politicization. The increasing political tension
surrounding the local vice industry provided the setting for vot-
ing women's first political venture. A crusade to recall Mayor
Hiram Gill immediately captivated female voters. Large num-
bers of citizens blamed the mayor and his lenient vice policy
for
tarnishing the city's image. Newly enfranchised women formed
a separate "Woman's Campaign Committee" for mayoral chal-
lenger George Dilling. Committee leaders claimed that their
initial meeting was the "first of its kind ever held on the
Pacific
Coast" and the largest gathering of women ever held in Seattle.
In the following weeks, thousands of women eagerly registered
to vote in the February 1911 recall election.14
Weeks before that election, a popular local newspaper de-
clared that female voters had to prove that equal suffrage was
deserved. The turnout by more than 20,000 Seattle women and
the successful recall of Mayor Gill, McClure's magazine pro-
claimed, "must be regarded as a triumph for woman's suffrage."
Newspapers throughout the nation, and even Gill himself,
attributed the recall to the large number of women voters. The
return of "Gillism" in the 1912 municipal elections again put
women voters on trial. Not only was the political reputation of
Seattle's female population at risk, a local magazine warned,
but
13. Votes For Women, Dec., Oct. 1910. One suffrage leader,
Adele Fielde, was
also a key advocate of direct legislation. One of the major
reformers in Seattle, Joe
Smith, spoke to the WESA in 1907 on direct legislation and
suffrage. He argued
that direct legislation and woman suffrage were closely related

because both sought
to expand political participation and provide the people more
control over their
government and society. See his speech before the Washington
Equal Suffrage As-
sociation, folder 6, box 10, Joseph Smith Papers, Manuscripts
and Archives, Uni-
versity of Washington, Seattle.
14. Votes For Women, Jan. 1911; New Citizen, Feb. 1911; "To
the Women of Seat-
tle from Mrs. Thomas F. Murphine," Woman's Dilling
Campaign Headquarters,
n.d., folder 1, box 8, Smith Papers.
��54.84.104.155 on Fri, 28 Oct 2022
00:24:22 UTC��
suffrage efforts in other states also hinged on this "test of 'chif-
fon politics.' " The city's second repudiation of Gill, the
Literary
Digest noted, confirmed women's contributions to American
pol-
itics. Passing these tests signaled the dawn of a new political
era
in Seattle and greatly aided suffrage efforts throughout the
nation.15
Seattle's highly charged elections on the heels of the suf-

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