Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco

by Judy Yung

  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 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."'

  For women who worked outside the home, it was not an easy task juggling the double responsibilities of homemaker and wage earner. But as long as there were jobs for them and working outside paid more than home work, women were compelled to become factory laborers out of economic necessity. The piece-rate system and flexible schedule in some ways worked to the advantage of both employers and employees. The latter gained by being able to work whatever hours they could depending on family duties, while the former profited by paying women at piece rates they set. Against the backdrop of a cramped and unsanitary working environment, a grueling pace of work, and downward pressure on wages, this system also accounted for the unstructured work style, personal autonomy, and congenial atmosphere that made garment work more bearable to both Jewish and Chinese women. As the Industrial Welfare Commission investigator observed in 192.2.:

  Most of the women drift into the factory from ten to eleven in the morning. They return home when the children are due, around luncheon and at three in the afternoon before they go to the Chinese school. They give them their bread and butter or whatever corresponds to it in Chinese. Children who were in the plant frequently needed the mothers' attention and there was cessation of work very often when we came into a workroom. Sometimes the power was shut off, so that no one missed anything of our business. There was stoppage too when a worker felt the need of a cup of tea, the tea caddy being a feature of several places. 115

  Joining the labor market proved to be a double-edged sword for Chinese immigrant women: on the one hand, their earnings helped some to support their families and elevate their socioeconomic status; on the other hand, they became exploited laborers in the factory system, adding work and stress to their already burdensome family life.116 As immigrants and women of color, they were relegated to the lowest rungs of the labor market. On the positive side, however, working outside the home offered women social rewards-a new sense of freedom, accomplishment, and camaraderie. As was true for Jewish women who worked in the neighborhood garment shop, Chinese women developed long-lasting relationships with their employers and with fellow employees who shared a common past, culture, geographic origin, and concern for one another's well-being. The sewing factory was more than just a workplace. It was an arena for social interactions, where women could learn from one another, share problems, support one another, bicker and make up, and pass the time with storytelling and jokes, gossip and news, and singing while they worked. As one study pointed out, "It is apparent that some go to work in factories merely for a pastime so that they can mingle in groups and pass the time away quicker."' 17 Working outside the home also meant that Chinese women were no longer confined to the home; they were earning money for themselves or the family, and they were making new acquaintances and becoming exposed to new ideas. Some used their earnings to send remittances back to their families in China, while others invested in jewelry and property. As Jane Kwong Lee observed, having money to spend made the women feel more liberated in America than in China: "They can buy things for themselves, go out to department stores to choose their own clothes instead of sewing them."1 is Once released from the confines of the home and exposed to the outside world, they also became more socially aware, and some were even drawn to community activism.

  INTO THE PUBLIC SPHERE: COMMUNITY WORK

  For working-class women like Law Shee Low, family and work responsibilities consumed all their time and energy, leaving little left over for self-improvement or leisure activities, and even less for community involvement. This was not the case for a growing group of educated, middle-class women who, inspired by Christianity, Chinese nationalism, and Progressivism, took the first steps toward community activism in Chinatown. Prominent among these early leaders and activists were the wives and daughters of merchants and Protestant ministers.

  Chinese women's efforts to organize for self-improvement and community service paralleled those of the white and black women's club movements, although Chinese women's clubs developed much later and followed a different course in certain respects. While white and black women started their clubs in the early and late nineteenth century, respectively, the first major Chinese women's club in America-the Chinese Women's Jeleab [Self-Reliance] Association-did not appear until 1913. As Gerda Lerner points out, women's organizations usually got going only after a sizable group of educated, middle-class women with some leisure emerged."' Given their later arrival and smaller numbers in America, Chinese women were slower than white and b
lack women in developing the necessary leadership for organized activity. The orga nizational structure of these women's clubs was similar, though, since black and Chinese women patterned their clubs after those of white women. Indeed, one of the reasons black and Chinese women's clubs formed in the first place was that both groups were excluded from white women's clubs. Middle-class values such as support for education, socioeconomic mobility, and community improvement formed the basis for most women's organizations, but white women were more interested in self-improvement and gender equality, black women in racial equality, and Chinese women in national salvation for China.120 The driving force behind Chinese immigrant women's entry into the public sphere was the well-being of their family, community, and nation.