| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

George Anthony Peffer. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration before Exclusion. Foreword by Roger Daniels. (The Asian American Experience.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999. Pp. xv, 164. Cloth $35.00, paper $17.95.

George Anthony Peffer tackles a perennial question in the study of early Chinese-American communities: why did so few Chinese women immigrate to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Though the number of Chinese women increased slowly, significant changes came only after World War II, and early Chinatowns were characterized as "bachelor societies." Traditionally, scholars turned to cultural arguments to explain the failure of Chinese women to immigrate. Chinese culture militated against the immigration of women as a married woman was expected to care for her husband's parents. So, too, it was argued, Chinese men came to the United States with a "sojourner" mentality and were thus less apt to bring their wives and families. While not discounting the influence of cultural factors, Peffer shifts attention to the host society. He argues that a hostile atmosphere in the United States toward Chinese women, made manifest in the Page Act of 1875, posed the central obstacle to the immigration of Chinese women. . . .

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