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“Our Sisters in China Are Free”: Visual Representations of Chinese and Chinese American Suffragists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2020

Cathleen D. Cahill
Cathleen D. Cahill*
Affiliation:
Penn State University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: czc335@psu.edu
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Abstract

Both white and Chinese American suffragists in the United States closely watched and discussed the events of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). They were aware of the republican revolutionaries’ support for women's rights, which conflicted with American stereotypes of China as a backward nation, especially in its treatment of women. Chinese suffragists, real and imagined, became a major talking point in debates over women's voting rights in the United States as white suffragists and national newspapers championed their stories. This led to prominent visual depictions of Chinese suffragists in the press, but also their participation in public events such as suffrage parades. For a brief time, the transnational nature of suffrage conversations was highly visible as was the suffrage activism of women in U.S. Chinese communities. However, because Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship by U.S. immigration law, white activists tended to depict Chinese suffragists as foreign, resulting in the erasure of their memory in the U.S. suffrage movement.

Keywords

suffrageChinese RevolutionAsian American
Type
Photo Essay
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 4 , October 2020 , pp. 634 - 641
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

1 Edwards, Louise, Gender, Politics, and Democracy: Women's Suffrage in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar

2 Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (2003); Shah, Nayan, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco's Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Ngai, Mae M., Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

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6 Lange, Allison K., Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. DuBois has called on scholars to consider the Pacific influences on the U.S. suffrage movement. See DuBois, Ellen Carol, “Woman Suffrage: The View from the Pacific,” Pacific Historical Review 69:4 (Nov. 2000): 529–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Wu, Judy Tzu-Chun, Doctor Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: The Life of a Wartime Celebrity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Suh, Chris, “‘America's Gunpowder Women': Pearl S. Buck and the Struggles for American Feminism, 1837–1941,” Pacific Historical Review 88:2: 175-207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 “Chinese Women Warriors,” Los Angeles Express, Mar. 2, 1912. See also “The Chinaman's Better Half,” New York Daily Tribune, Jan. 21, 1912.

9 “Chinese Women Encourage their English and American Sisters,” Woman's Journal, Mar. 30, 1912; and “Suffragists Feel Like Going to China,” New York Daily Tribune, Mar. 23, 1912.

10 “Chinese Talk Suffrage,” New York Tribune, Apr. 11, 1912; “College Equal Suffragists, Chinese Women Dine Together,” The Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR), Apr. 12, 1912; and “Mabel Lee,” New York Tribune, April 13, 1912.

11 “Persons and Happenings of Present Interest Pictorially Set Forth,” New York Daily Tribune, Dec. 17, 1911. See also “Chinese Suffragists First to Register in Los Angeles,” Day Book (Chicago), Apr. 9, 1912; “A Chinese Suffragette Casting Her First Vote for President,” San Francisco Call, Nov. 6, 1912; “Photograph of Chinese Woman Voting Will Be Suffrage Campaign Issue,” Perth Amboy Evening News (Perth Amboy, NJ), Nov. 18, 1912; and “Chinese Heroine Drives Flanders,” The Pomona Progress (Pomona, CA), June 18, 1912.

12 Marino, Katherine, Feminism for the Americas: The Making of an International Human Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Tingfang, Wu, America, Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1914), 116–43Google Scholar; and “5,000 Women in Suffrage Parade,” The Baltimore Sun, Mar. 4, 1913.

14 Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress. See also “National Woman's Party Dedicates New Home Opposite the Capital,” Washington Post, May 22, 1922; and “Finding A New Leader is Women's Aim Now,” Baltimore Sun, Feb. 17, 1921.