The Chinese Exclusion Act was proposed to prohibit the immigration of
Chinese laborers to protect jobs of white workers. It was passed in 1882 for 10 years but extended for decades until
1943 before it was repealed.
This legislation also prevented many Chinese immigrants
already in the United States from bringing wives and children from China.
As a consequence, it unintentionally created a lucrative opportunity for
Chinese tongs to bring Chinese women to the United States, many only just past puberty, for sexual purposes. They deceived many of these women and led them to believe they
would be married off to wealthy Chinese bachelors or “Gold Mountain men.”
Instead, they were held captive and forced to become “sex slaves.”
Unlike
“prostitutes,” who could be said to have some degree of choice in deciding their
sexual lives, the “sex slaves” had no control over any aspects of their
lives.
The front page of the
San Francisco Call on May 3, 1900 described in detail the devious method that
unscrupulous Chinese tongs devised to bring over young Chinese girls with false
documents on ships of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company. They made huge
profits by selling the girls into slavery to fulfill the sexual needs of the
thousands of bachelor Chinese laborers, not to mention the sexual desires of
American men.
Such profiteering from
the exploitation of Chinese women was not limited to Chinese organizations.
Some Chinese who had American born daughters would send them to China to live. They could then sell their documents to women in China who wanted to emigrate to the United
States in hopes of a better life, only to be sold into slavery.
Three young Chinese girls who escaped their captors and received refuge at Chinatown Mission
Houses in 1897 claimed that their own mothers had sold them into slavery. Their captors argued that the girls were stolen from them, and threatened one mother that if she could not bring her daughter back, she would receive "a touch of Chinese justice."
The magnitude of the problem led to a petition to the
President of the United States requesting that there be an end to the
enslavement of Chinese women into forced prostitution.
It is not known how many signatures were submitted on the
petition and whether it had any impact on the problem.
Concerned Protestant missionaries led by Donaldina Cameron who led police raids to rescue many sex slaves in San Francisco testified
in 1901about the extent of the problem and urged city officials and police take
action to terminate this deplorable exploitation of Chinese women as sex
slaves.
A newspaper article in 1919 asserted that the Chinese sex slave problem was being solved and that the work of missionaries such as Donaldina Cameron was instrumental in rescuing many girls and bringing the problem to the attention of the public.
In addition, by the 1920s there were more American-born Chinese women who were prospective brides for Chinese immigrant men. By then, society became more tolerant toward marriages of Chinese immigrant laborers and non-Chinese women. These factors reduced the demand for Chinese sex slaves.
