Amid the social upheaval of World War II, women entered the American workforce on an unprecedented level. And, for younger Chinese American women in the San Francisco Bay Area, the war made it possible to smash not just entrenched gender barriers, but racial ones as well.
“To a large extent, the war provided an entry for Chinese American women into the larger American society, something for which their ancestors had struggled a hundred years,” writes historian Zhao Xiaojian, who argues that second-generation Chinese American women “grasped the wartime opportunity to enter the larger American society” by joining the Bay Area’s defense industry.
“Partly because of a scarcity of English-language sources on this topic, some scholars simply have assumed that Chinese American women did not share the experience of ‘Rosie the Riveter,’” she reports. But she uses newspapers, company records, and oral histories to push back on this view.
Many Chinese American women already worked out of economic necessity. Yet racial discrimination and social isolation typically restricted them to jobs in Chinatown enclaves.
“It was difficult for many Chinese American women to go outside their communities to work, even when they wanted to,” Zhao explains. “The decades-long isolation had also limited the ability of immigrant Chinese working women to communicate with the outside world.”
During the war, women were also encouraged to adopt domestic roles—preparing “nutritional food” for their families and “show[ing] our fighting men that we are… absolutely behind them.”
But World War II still marked a major turning point—especially for younger, unmarried daughters of Chinese immigrants. Many of these women had either a high school or college-level education.
“With relatively few household responsibilities, in contrast to their mothers, they had the freedom and independence to work outside the home,” Zhao writes. “Since most of them were already living in the Bay Area before the war, these younger Chinese American women were among the first American women to join the Bay Area’s defense labor force.”
In fact, Zhao’s research turned up only four women who were older than forty during their wartime jobs. Still, those wives and mothers capably juggled their duties at home and on the home front.
Some couples labored side by side. For example, Fred Yam was a pipe-fitter at the Mare Island Navy Shipyard in 1942, while his wife, a fresh high school graduate, was an electrician’s helper.