Content area
Full Text
In November 1909, suffragists began to hawk their new journal, The American Suffragette, near the Brooklyn Bridge. Appropriating language commonly used during the Progressive Era to describe the threats that a modernizing Asia was seen to pose to America and the rest of the world, the New York Tribune comically described the "small and apparently harmless women with yellow bags full of yellow-backed magazines" who descended on innocent bystanders as a "yellow peril," aligning the "militant sisterhood" engaged in a "feminine uprising" with the Chinese.1 In many ways, disenfranchised U.S. women had much in common with China, a feminized nation that, because of military defeats, had ceded its autonomy to foreign powers.2 Some suffragists identified with Chinese women, and saw in Chinese efforts to end foot binding and sex slavery a feminist movement that paralleled America's. "China may even yet be one of the prime movers in the suffragist campaign," The American Suffragette predicted.3 However, for most white suffragists in the nativist Progressive Era, connections with Chinese women were in tension with beliefs in white racial and U.S. national superiority. In consequence, suffrage discourse frequently deployed Orientalist tropes such as bound feet as metaphors for the oppression of women worldwide at the same time that it participated in anti-Asian discourses.
Chinese North American author Sui Sin Far (born Edith Eaton) experienced firsthand the ambivalent relationship between discourses of American suffrage and Chinese modernization during the Progressive Era. Between 1900 and 1910, when she lived in California and Washington, Sui Sin Far published fiction, essays, and articles that focused on Chinese women's collisions with Western feminists, efforts to preserve their culture amid philanthropic campaigns to "Americanize" them, and painful reactions to the U.S. government's anti-Asian policies. Her works depict suffragists as anti-domestic, individualist, classist, racist, and dismissive of the needs of the less fortunate, while her journalistic pieces champion the Chinese democratic, modernizing reform movement that had, among other goals, gender equality and women's enfranchisement.4
Although early scholarship on Sui Sin Far read her portraits of women struggling against arranged marriages, sex slavery, and patriarchal Confucianism as uncomplicatedly feminist, more recent scholarship has criticized her work for its problematic politics.5 The editors of Aiiieeeee! and Lorraine Dong and Marlon K. Hom, for example, fault Sui Sin...