| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion. By George Anthony Peffer. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xviii, 164 pp. Cloth $35.00, ISBN 0-252-02469-9. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-252-06777-0.)

The history of Chinese immigration to the United States is not a new field. The immigration of Chinese women before 1882, however, has received little attention from historians. George Anthony Peffer's illuminating, well-designed, and compellingly written work, If They Don't Bring Their Women Here, fills this gap and presents a truly comprehensive explanation of the severe shortage of female immigrants in America since the enactment of an 1875 law sponsored by Rep. Horace F. Page of California to restrict the immigration of prostitutes. 1

Challenging prevailing assumptions, the author shows in chapter 1 that the period before 1882 was one not of free immigration, but of a combination of male sojourning (1852–1868), unrestricted family immigration (1869–1874), and female exclusion (1875–1882), which was followed by general exclusion (1882–1943); he demonstrates that the major reason why fewer Chinese females migrated to America was not traditional cultural restraints, but the official United States gender-specific exclusion, that the prostitution problem was exaggerated, and that women who were not prostitutes were ignored. . . .

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