This Day in Labor History: November 20, 1872

On November 20, 1872, San Francisco police arrested a man named Lora Marks in San Francisco for beating Chinese a prostitute in the street. There is nothing overly significant about this moment, but it gives us a date to talk about Chinese sex work in 19th century California.

From the moment of the California gold rush, the gender ratio among all groups was widely skewed toward men. This was true enough for whites and many of the women who did arrive early in the California gold era were sex workers to service this population. But it was even more true of the Chinese, who were escaping extreme poverty at home and had no family or hope of having family in the United States. So Chinese prostitutes showed up pretty early at first. Initially, they were seen more like the white prostitutes and like them, some early Chinese sex workers created pretty successful careers in San Francisco.

But after 1854, the tongs took over the sex trade. Not surprisingly, organized crime came to San Francisco with the Chinese, as it would with the Italians, Irish, Jews, and many other ethnic groups. They took over sex trafficking and started importing large numbers of extremely poor women to work in the sex industry. Nearly all the women in the mining industry were sex workers. They 1870 Census showed that in Virginia City, Nevada, there were 87 Chinese women and 71 were prostitutes. I am sure a number had once been prostitutes as well. This created a more violent world for these women.

Now, whites were both racists and hypocrites on the issue of Chinese prostitution. Again, prostitution was common in mining camps across the West and very much not just with the Chinese. But whites created artificial differences between their prostitutions and the Chinese prostitutes. Euro-Americans were totally ignorant about the real conditions of Chinese women and just damned them as subhuman. The idea was that the Chinese were already debased due to their physiognomy and then Chinese women were worse, a depraved class within an already depraved society. Because sometimes white men did purchase their services, they were blamed for the spreading of venereal disease into the white population. Again, there were plenty of white prostitutes doing the same thing. But the language around them was pretty different in California. Basically Chinese prostitutes were supposed to live up to the gender norms of both Chinese and whites without having any control over their bodies and how were they supposed to do that?

Of course, all of this was framed by the terrible physical condition of Chinatown, a pretty inevitable result of extreme poverty combined with the city government of the San Francisco unwilling to do anything to promote sanitation. Whites committed massive acts of violence across California and the West through these years, often murderous, which culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, though that did not end the violence either. Writers from Frank Norris to Jacob Riis would play up the exotic dangers of the Chinese brothel and warn people to stay away, which probably also attracted readers looking for excitement.

So, on November 20, 1872, a guy named Lora Marks was drinking heavily. He stumbled into an alley and saw a Chinese prostitute. He started screaming racial epithets at her and then started beating her. A cop came and actually rescued the woman. Marks had to serve 110 days in the county prison since he did not have the money to pay the fine. In some ways, this is a surprisingly positive outcome. It really wasn’t in the city’s interest to allow for endless assaults on the Chinese, not because they loved the Chinese but for the sake of order. In fact, the lives of these women was riven with violence, whether beatings from customers or from the tongs or just random issues with white people on the street. Another case from 1872 saw a white guy start beating up a Chinese prostitute in the brothel; the owner of it stabbed him in the back, though the guy survived. But the woman got to testify in court under the Civil Rights Act of 1870. Of course, Chinese customers could be just as violent to the women as whites and there plenty of cases of assault and murder as well.

But before we go into narratives of extreme victimhood, which can be too simplistic, let’s note that these women did fight back, They wanted their work to be safe. They didn’t want to be attacked. They would rob drunk clients blind, regardless of their race. They did prosecute the violence they faced. Moreover, lots of Chinese prostitutes got out of sex work and lived the rest of their lives in the United States the best they could. A lot of these cases were through marriage. The rise of social agencies to help women, almost always staffed by white women, could help as well. Prostitutes who wanted to marry would also use the court system to challenge the idea that they were “owned” by the brothel head and the courts generally found in the women’s favor.

Chinese prostitution also began to slip by the late 1870s, as fewer women came to the United States from China generally. The 1866 Act for the Suppression of Chinese Houses of Ill Fame in California discouraged more Chinese women from coming there. What did these women end up doing for work? Housekeeping was common. Those who were married helped their husbands in San Francisco trades the Chinese dominated, including laundries, tobacco, sewing, and shoe production. A lot of this was sweatshop labor, but honestly, as bad as that work was, it was about the same as what eastern Europeans were facing in the U.S., so it wasn’t like they were really treated worse than people at least marginally more white in the late 19th century American mind.

In fact, Chinese prostitutes almost certainly had more social mobility than white prostitutes. It was hardly as big a deal in the Chinese American community to have worked in the sex trade. Couldn’t be if you were a man and wanted to marry. So plenty of former sex workers rose to have perfectly respectable lives, whereas that was much harder for white prostitutes, even if they were sometimes treated less poorly when working in the sex trade.

I borrowed from Benson Tong’s 1994 book, Unsubmissive Women: Chinese Prostitutes in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco to write this post.

This is the 543rd post in this series. Previous posts are archived here.