Unsubmissive Women

In Unsubmissive Women, Benson Tong explores the lives of Chinese prostitutes who lived and worked in nineteenth-century San Francisco but survived subjugation, maintained the will to alter their fate, and quite often established families in the American West. In the second half of the nineteenth century, male sojourners from China arrived in search of the mystical riches of California. Bound by tradition not to plant their roots in a "barbarian" country, many had left their wives and children in villages at home. Restrictive immigration laws further solidified the phenomenon of split-household families among the Chinese population in the United States. Bereft of female companionship and family life, the men sought sexual gratification from prostitutes. Their contemporaries stereotyped these women as hapless victims of male exploitation, passive victims thrown unwillingly into a subculture whose sole escape was death, particularly suicide. This description applies to only a few women. From 1849 to 1882, the year of the Chinese Exclusion Act, fighting tongs, federal, state, and local governments, and San Franciscans of all ethnic origins pushed Chinese prostitutes to the fringe of society. Though a number failed to survive these pressures, Tong argues that some adapted to their new environment and others made use of available resources to change their lives for the better.