Women's History Month: Discrimination against Asian women codified in 1875 still resonates today
2021 CIVILRBRF 0048
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By Busola A. Akinwale
WESTLAW TODAY Civil Rights Briefing
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March 31, 2021
(March 31, 2021) - Seven years before passage of the more widely known Chinese Exclusion Act, President Ulysses S. Grant in March 1875 signed the first federal statute restricting immigration, which specifically targeted Asian women.
Named after California Rep. Horace Page, who sponsored the law, the Page Act, Pub. L. 43-141, 18 Stat. 477, on its face was an anti-prostitution measure prohibiting people from China, Japan or "any Oriental country" from entering the United States for "lewd and immoral purposes."
In practice, the Page Act banned nearly all Chinese women from immigrating to the U.S. due to officials' assumption that most were prostitutes, sociologist Catherine Lee explained in her 2010 article "'Where the Danger Lies': Race, Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870-1924."
Seeds of anti-Asian stereotypes planted in U.S.
Chinese immigrants began coming to the U.S. in large numbers in the 1850s, drawn to the California gold rush.
When the U.S. fell into a recession in the early 1870s, politicians and labor leaders accused Chinese people of sexual depravity and claimed that Chinese immigration and settlement depressed wages and increased white unemployment, according to Lee.
A New York Tribune piece from 1854 described Chinese immigrants as "uncivilized, unclean and filthy beyond all conception ... lustful and sensual in their dispositions; every female is a prostitute, and of the basest order."
Under the Page Act, Chinese women could not board ships to the U.S. unless they proved to officials that they were "respectable women," historian Sucheng Chan wrote in "Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882-1943." They had to have photographs taken, swear to a certain set of facts and produce witnesses who also swore to the required facts.
Attorney Ming M. Zhu's 2010 article "The Page Act of 1875: In the Name of Morality" argued "the focus on prostitution was essentially a smoke screen" for legislators' true target: cheap Chinese labor.
Congress acted without such pretense in subsequently enacting the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Pub. L. 47-126, 22 Stat. 58, which banned immigration of all Chinese laborers.
From exclusion to violence
As Women's History Month 2021 draws to a close, it is important to recognize that regardless of the Page Act's intentions or impacts, its underlying bias against Asian women is still evident today.
In 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes increased 149% in 16 of the largest U.S. cities, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. These crimes began to spike in March and April, coinciding with the spread of COVID-19 and negative stereotypes about Asian people.
On March 16, a gunman killed eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at two day spas and a massage parlor in the Atlanta area. According to local law enforcement officials, the accused shooter, a self-described sex addict, said he was motivated by a desire to eliminate the temptation posed by the businesses.
The Page Act was repealed in 1974, but there is work left to do to eradicate its discriminatory treatment of Asian women from American society.