Slavery, Sex, and Reconstruction in Nineteenth-Century California: The Case of the Twenty-two Chinese Women

In 1874, California immigration officials boarded the steamship Japan and proclaimed twenty-two of the ship’s Chinese female passengers to be prostitutes. They detained the women and prepared to send them back to China. The officers acted under the authority of an 1870 California immigration law that commanded port officials to incarcerate and deport Chinese women who appeared to be prostitutes or had been kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. Within hours, a group of Chinese San Franciscans challenged the women’s detention and the case wound its way through state and federal courts for two years.

This paper examines the case of the twenty-two Chinese women to explore how ideas about gender, sexuality, racial difference, and female freedom intersected with Reconstruction policy in California. State officials who favored deportation argued that California’s discriminatory immigration law dovetailed with the antislavery spirit of Reconstruction and the Thirteenth Amendment. They contended that Chinese gender relations were predicated on the enslavement of women, rendering nearly all Chinese female immigrants sex slaves. Excluding Chinese women prevented slavery from taking root in the nation yet again. Alternately, those who defended the women asserted that they were the free wives and daughters of Chinese workingmen, not enslaved prostitutes. They also mobilized Reconstruction policy by arguing that the deportation ran contrary to the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise of equal protection under the law, regardless of race.

The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled that the California immigration law violated the Fourteenth Amendment and set the women free. In the end, though, California’s distinctive mixture of antislavery, anti-prostitution, and anti-Chinese policy became a vital component of the federal Page Law of 1875 that restricted the immigration of Chinese women. California’s local struggles over the content of race and freedom ultimately reshaped the national landscape of Reconstruction-era racial policy.