Remarks on Women in History

From the Commission on Women in U.S. History meeting, Albuquerque 9/25/98

By Elaine H. Kim, UC-Berkeley

I feel deeply honored to be part of the effort to bring women, especially less privileged women, women of color, immigrant and refugee women, to a stage usually monopolized by powerful men.

We all know that history, including the history of our country, is usually a story told by its "winners." We learn about the Great Wall from the perspective of the Chinese kings, not from the viewpoint of the nameless peasants whose worn out and discarded bodies lie buried along its curves. Much of what we know of European history came down to us from rulers and their scribes. How many ordinary people lived, labored, and died without leaving any record of their existence, not even a scribbled trace? And of course since women have held so little social power no matter when or where, their identities and marks are even fainter and more deeply buried under the stories of the Great Men of History and a handful of queens and consorts. But because the same apparatus of History operates today - that is, the Winners or the Great Men paradigm of historical recording - we can somehow feel the ghostly presence of others waiting to be called forth into cultural memory.

Much has been written and said about how the distortion or omission of our images and stories from the national discourse, whether in visual or print media, diminishes and disempowers us.

It's a matter of perspective. My high school U.S. history textbooks barely mentioned women, let alone men or women of color because they were about the power and supremacy of Western maleness and whiteness. American Indians were savages vanishing before the advance of white civilization; African Americans were property over which white men fought. My son's U.S. history textbooks have some different facts, but the viewpoint has not changed. Indians brought "us" corn, they say; blacks gave "us" jazz; Chinese completed "our" railroad and built "our" bridges. When I was young, the few Asians appearing in the popular culture were lotus blossom geisha girls, dragon ladies, gungfu fighters, buck-toothed sidekicks and servants, and goofy nerds. Today, our children can pretty much choose between contemporary forms of those old stereotypes and total absence of images. Thus the distance between the positions has not diminished enough. We can't attack racism by ignoring race and pretending that we have achieved a "color blind society." We need to notice race, including race in history. We need to pay attention to difference without hierarchicizing them. That's why I am so gratified that this commission was selected with racial diversity in mind.

And now a word on immigrants and U.S. history and American identity. I often hear people talk about global culture, transnationalism, the Pacific Century. From my vantage point, our country has everything to gain and nothing to lose from mining the rich lode of world history that immigrants have always brought and continue to bring with them to America. By this I do not mean quaint customs and exotic food. I mean languages, ideas, values, beliefs, and histories that can give all Americans a more balanced understanding of the world and our location within it.

I am often alarmed by ignorant scapegoating of Arab people, who are stereotyped as fanatics and terrorists. I am so glad that there are Arab Americans in our midst who assertively contradict those stereotypes and challenge that ignorance and racism with their vocal and visible diversity and humanity.

Immigrant Americans can suggest new ways to imagine American identities. Historically, Asian Americans have been seen as metonyms for Asia and forcibly distanced from U.S. national culture, which defines the citizenry - that is, who can be American - as well as which histories and experiences can be remembered and which are to be forgotten. But in response to the frequent exhortation to go back where they came from, they could answer, "We are here because you were there."

My grandmother came to America in 1903 as a sugar plantation worker, recruited by the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association. Though born in Korea, my mother lived all her life in this country, but she was not able to vote because as a person born in Asia she wasn't able to become a naturalized citizen until she was over 50 years old.

My father arrived in America as a foreign student at 26 and died here, still not a U.S. citizen, when he was 89. He and his brothers and sisters sought refuge in various parts of the world because their homeland had been colonized and raped, with the help of the U.S., by Japan.

Now my brother's family lives in Los Angeles, my sister's family lives in Seoul, and my half-brother lives in Osaka, Japan. I have five cousins in North Korea, six cousins in South Korea, and five cousins in mainland China. It would take me an hour to explain how this all happened. Suffice to say that my family story, like the stories of many other Korean American families I know, could tell us a lot about world history, Korean history, and U.S. history. Many Korean families during my father's time were scattered over the world because of Japanese, American, and Soviet aggression and intervention.

Many displaced dislocated Asians - not only Koreans, but also Vietnamese, Laos, Cambodians, Filipinos - have migrated to the very imperial center that disrupted their lives. Their memories, their histories, and their experiences, even when they directly contradict U.S. national narratives, are not just Asian history; they are American history.

It is profoundly alienating for me as a Korean American that the partition and the civil war in Korea remain opaque and uninteresting to most Americans, despite the U.S.'s central role in both and despite the importance of the division and the Korean war in the history of the U.S., which was for decades shaped by Cold War politics.

This commission will contribute to the vitally important work of re-membering buried histories. We can and should look at the world through new eyes, and bringing forth immigrant American stories might help us do this. After all, Europe, Africa and Asia were named by the ancient Greeks to identify the land masses bordering the Aegean Sea. Although the idea of these three continents has since become hegemonic, Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen point out that from a geographical standpoint Europe is merely a peninsula of the Eurasian land mass, which hardly justifies continental status. According to them, "It would be just as logical to call the Indian peninsula one continent while labeling the entire remainder of Eurasia - from Portugal to Korea - another."

We have been asked to suggest a few dates that we'd like to see included in a "re-visioned" American history. Besides dates usually thought of as dates in Asian history, such as the dates of the partitions of Korea and Vietnam, the dates of the Philippine insurrection against the U.S. forces during the Spanish-American War, I'd like to suggest a few dates that I think bring into visibility Asian women in the U.S.- whether as individuals or groups - whose acts of courage and integrity have contributed to the struggle for fairness and justice. These are a few items on which we might shine floodlights.

April 8, 1885: Mary McGladery Tape protests, in a letter to the San Francisco Board of Education, the exclusion of her daughter from the public schools as the deed of "race prejudice men." The Board decision to institute Oriental Schools in San Francisco derived from Tape's earlier and successful challenge before California's superior court that had ruled in January 1885 that school segregation on the basis of race violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. To skirt that court decision, the legislature enacted a law mandating segregated schools, prompting Tape's letter.

January 20, 1920: Japanese and Filipino men, women, and children struck on Oahu's sugar plantations. The strike involved 8300 workers, or about 77 percent of the island's total plantation workforce. The strikers wanted wages equal to those of white workers. They demanded, among other things, an increase in the minimum wage from 77 cents to $1.25 per day for men, from 58 to 95 cents for women, and an eight-week paid maternity leave for women workers. Although the strike failed, the workers ultimately won most of their demands.

December 18, 1944: The U.S. Supreme Court, in the decision ex parte Endo, ruled that Japanese Americans could no longer be held in the concentration camps or prohibited from moving back to their former communities along the West Coast. When she agreed to go forward with this constitutional challenge to the mass detentions, Mitsuye Endo was a 22-year old ex-clerical worker for the Sacramento Department of Motor Vehicles.

March 21, 1996: Historically, garment work has been at the center of poor, immigrant, and "minority" women's lives. For many years, clothing manufacturers have engaged in superexploitation through piece work systems, subcontracting, and homework, partly because they could take advantage of the special vulnerabilities of women, especially women held back by racial and language barriers. Sadly, unions were often unable or unwilling to serve the needs of racial immigrant women garment workers; among the more creative solutions they considered was trying to get the garment shops shut down even if that would throw the women out of work. In 1992, a community-based advocacy group called Asian Immigrant Women Advocates (AIWA) began an historic and imaginative boycott of a big manufacturer on behalf of a group of women workers who had not been paid after their subcontractor went bankrupt. AIWA contrasted feminine fantasy with female reality by comparing the $150 price tag for a lacy prom dress with the $5 paid to the woman who made it. They garnered much public support, including among young middle class women who refused to patronize Jessica McClintock-Gunne Sax. In March, 1996, the Garment Workers Justice Campaign's national boycott was successfully settled, establishing a precedent for community-based organizations supplementing union support for immigrant women workers and for going after manufacturers that had been protecting themselves behind the subcontracting system for many decades.

From experiences of dislocation and disidentification, we can bring back subjugated knowledges and buried histories of women, including women of color and immigrant women, and by doing so create countersites and alternative spaces where the dangerous memory of the future might be dreamed.

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Elaine Kim is a Professor of Asian American Studies and Chair of the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written and co-authored numerous works including Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context and East to America: Korean American Life Stories. She has also been active in television, as the Associate Producer for Slaying the Dragon: Asian Women in U.S. Television and as co-producer of Sa-I-gu: From Korean Women's Perspectives. Dr. Kim served as President of the Association for Asian American Studies and as a member of the National Council of the American Studies Association. She is a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of the Asian Women United of California, and a co-founder of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates.