Race, Gender, and Laundry Work: The Roles of Chinese Laundrymen and American Women in the United States, 1850–1950

JOAN S. WANG

SCHOLARS OF Chinese American history have long known of the disproportionate number of Chinese males who made the passage from China to the New World in the nineteenth century. Yet despite a greater understanding today of hegemonic power relations between men and women, there is still a need to study the gendered world of men of color, specifically within the context of industrializing American society. Barred by the Page Law in 1875 on suspicion of prostitution, Chinese women were subsequently forbidden from coming to the United States until World War II. The Chinese American community was thus unbalanced in terms of demographic distribution. With few women and children in the community, the lives of Chinese American men were markedly different from those of many other immigrants, even other Asian immigrants, such as the Japanese.