4. After the Gold Rush in 1849, San Francisco became a place of lawlessness; full of crime and what Barbara Berglund, author of Making San Francisco American, called vicious amusement. Women during this time were scarce and were treated as second class citizens. However, since they were so rare, women were highly sought after. Opportunities for women were limited so many rose to the experience and did what had to be done to support themselves (Madams of the Barbary Coast, film). “In the city’s predominately male society, the pleasure and companionship offered by the burgeoning cultures of saloons and prostitution was also widely sought” (59). In San Francisco’s history of prostitution and its vice district, the Barbary Coast, we can also analyze its history with class, gender, and race discrimination.
Before the Barbary Coast was born, San Francisco was filled to the brim with immigrants from all over the world, who came in hopes to strike it rich in the Gold Rush. In 1848, immigrants from Central America and Mexico sold women as indentured servants. The first organized prostitutes were these indentured Latin women who were supposed to entertain men in the mining camps. These women experienced prostitution as imprisonment and punishment rather than a profession. Along with Latin women, Chinese women experienced a somewhat similar experience. “The importation of Chinese women for prostitution began in the 1850s” (Berglund,67). In comparison to the total amount of Chinese immigrants that came to the United States, only two percent were women (Takaki,1998). Bringing women to the US was a financial and dangerous risk. There was an “anti-Chinese attitude” growing in the many minds and hearts of Americans and as a result many Chinese men feared to bring their wives or families. The opportunities for Chinese women to migrate here was reduced drastically and this altered the ratio of men to women. This also led Chinese men, and most men in general, to seek sexual release at brothels. After seeing the profit they could make them, women in China were kidnapped, lured or bought for a small sum and sold for profit in the US. “Their home culture devalued them sufficiently because of their class and gender to allow them to be prostituted” (69). These women lived as “virtual slaves, serving out contracts of indenture that they did not understand…” (67). Chinese prostitutes were patronized by white men, despite being seen as apart of the diseased, foul-smelling, and dirty race that most Americans saw them as. Berglund quotes an author who positioned “Chinese prostitutes as a physical and moral danger to virtuous white manhood as well as the domestic realm of the American home and hearth” (68). Minority prostitutes were blamed for the sins committed by white men. Black women were not particularly known for their role in the Barbary Coast because of slavery in the South at this time. However, some parlor houses would employ black maids to signal “racial exclusivity”. At the same time, white American and European women were creating a different culture surrounding prostitution. This culture was seen as elegant, sophisticated and white prostitutes set the stage for all women in the city. These white women were height of decadence and were considered proper ladies compared to their minority counterparts. They lived in parlor houses with the latest fashion and beautiful furniture. There was a radical difference between the experiences these racial groups encountered. “The American culture that they entered into radicalized them as less than white women but enough of a woman—as sexual object—to be used by white men…” (69). Berglund explains that women, especially Chinese, were seen as nothing more than a sex toy.
The Barbary Coast was a place that often faced scrutiny and was disapproved of by most. However, the curiosity that most people had about the vice district kept it alive. The conflicting outcomes of the Barbary Coast is probably most perplexing thing about its history. In some ways it brought together and gave all men of different races and classes a common ground; “the shared culture through their pursuit of leisure” (62). Berglund also states that “…even as the Barbary Coast frequently operated as both a racially and sexually transgressive space, it was by no means free from San Francisco’s dominant racial hierarchies. In fact, at times it both reflected and reinforced them” (66). Women of color were not allowed to work in the higher paying, more sophisticated parlor houses and were forced into the lower paying, crowded cribs. These cribs were seen as the most vicious of them all.
San Francisco was emerging as the metropolis it is known as today during the nineteenth century but it’s wild west past was kept alive with the birth and life of the Barbary Coast. It became a place of emerging feminism and womanhood but only for white women. Women of color were discriminated against because of their gender and race and fetishized for their use as sexual objects.
5. If you have ever visited the famous Chinatown of San Francisco, you will see a plethora of tourist phenomena. The dumpling houses, Chinese shops with the various types of souvenirs, and the many street vendors selling traditional items. In the 19th century, the attitude towards this San Francisco staple had quite a contrast to the one many Americans may have today. Chinese people have a long history with the discrimination and an accompanying sense of entitlement white people had over them.
“Tourism boomed during the second half of the nineteenth century as developments in transportation and communication made travel easier and a middle class emerged flush with the financial resources, leisure time and inclination to explore America” (99). White middle class families, women and children started traveling. This included destinations to Chinatown in San Francisco. Most that came to the city had already read what they thought they needed to know about the area. To the Chinese people that lived there, Chinatown was a place of security; it was a self reliant village (Hidden Cities). They had their own doctors, grocery stores and places of entertainment. However when tourists came to visit, these were not the places that sparked their interest. It was the places of vice and filth that they sought after; white tourists wanted to satisfy their odd craving to confirm the rumors and half-truths about Chinatown.
Becoming a tour guide was suddenly a new area for young entrepreneurs. White men, police officers, and local Chinese men were among the guides that were available for hire. Barbara Berglund writes about a young girl that traveled to San Francisco, identified only as E.G.H.. The girl writes that she was “fairly infatuated with the place [Chinatown]” but that she would “not be satisfied until she had been to the opium dens” (95,96). E.G.H.’s original guide,a local Chinese man, refused to show or take them to these places, as he insisted they were “too large”. Berglund writes, “Perhaps taking some control of the touring process away from the police allowed Chinese guides to disrupt, rather than reinforce, the racial stereotypes at the heart of tourists’ expectations”(102). The Chinese people that lived in Chinatown knew of the spectacle that tourism labeled their culture and home as. However when they had the opportunity, the Chinese people would try to change this narrative ; Chin Jun, E.G.H.’s first guide, tried to do this, by showing her tourist group actual Chinese life and not feeding their hunger for the stereotypical.
Eventually E.G.H. hired a new guide who would show them the places they oh so desired to see, the places of vice. The only problem with white people visiting these areas, was that it would be the only area of focus in their writings and experiences with Chinatown and Chinese people. When E.G.H. finally visited the opium den she begged the question, “What is to be done with these Chinese is certainly a serious question” (97). Her writing of this only furthered the discrimination against Chinese immigrants. E.G.H.’s writing, other white tourists’ writings and photographs shaped the idea of what the world thought “Chinese” meant in San Francisco.
Tourism became the main reason non-Chinese people came to visit Chinatown. Many came to see what they had read about in papers, articles and letters; the stereotypical Chinese lifestyle that included opium dens, traditional dress and culture. The Orient lifestyle written about by other white tourists that came before, became a spectacle and it became easy to reinforce their superiority to the Chinese. “Tourist literature’s representations radicalized the Chinese in terms of their unassimability, their proclivity toward vice, the risks they posed to public health and the threat they presented free white labor”(97). These stereotypes helped further the hatred of the Chinese population and contributed to the later discrimination they faced, including the birth of the Chinese Exclusion Act.
1. From the end of January to early July in 1894, San Francisco held The California Midwinter International Exposition. The fair was created by Michael de Young and was modeled after the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. San Francisco was in an economic depression along with the rest of the country and the fair aimed to be a way to bring in funds and potential visitors to the city. Barbara Berglund wrote that the fair gave “San Francisco elites with an opportunity to present an image of the city to local, national, and international audiences” (172). Exhibitions from the Chicago fair were sent to San Francisco and new ones were created and designed by local elites. To hold all of these spectacular exhibitions, Sunset City was built, which today is known as Golden Gate Park. The new exhibitions built materialized the local progress in agriculture, manufacturing, technology and industry and “captured one component of what the arrival of civilization meant in California”(172) while also showcasing the cities temperate weather during the winter months. While these displays showed physical progress and San Francisco modernism, the discrimination faced by many minorities, race,gender and class wise, was danced around as though it never happened.
Four aspects of the Midwinter Fair shed particular light on the connections between the social hierarchies this extravaganza represented and the vision of social order it promoted: the symbolic significance of its Orientalist architecture, the version of history articulated in its ‘49 Mining Camp exhibit, the gender politics of women at the fair as workers and as spectacle in the context of commercialized leisure, and the economic tensions disclosed at an event promoted as a balm for healing (173,174).
During the construction of the fair, the architecture was mainly Orientalist. Since they did not want the Midwinter Fair to be too similar to the fair in Chicago, they modeled the buildings after the Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Moorish, and old Mission buildings. However, Berglund, in lamest terms, explains that the architects of the fair curated the style of the buildings through a Eurocentric lens. It was a mix-match of cultures and they hand-picked which parts of each culture the architecture of the fair would appropriate.
The attitude surrounding the ‘49 Mining Camp was the superiority complex of the white race. The creators of this display, a group of journalists and entertainment entrepreneurs, “ transformed the history of the disordered gold rush years into a nostalgic fantasy of a radically and economically simpler past” (185). The exhibition was the largest single concession at the fair. A song was written for the display and was chanted around the concession. The narrator of the song sang about the social changes coming unto the nation that threatened his place as a white man. In the final verse he sang about times when people of color had no rights and when the country was only white men. The ‘49 Mining Camp was meant to make money by using amusing elements. However, it spread fantasy ideas about the past instead and romanticized San Francisco’s “wild-west”, disorderly past.
The new gender ideology at this time excluded women. Having a rugged masculinity was now the more sought after identity and having one meant you possessed a solid character. Berglund explains that “ women workers constituted a significant part of the overall spectacle presented at the Midwinter Fair. Many women were facing unemployment, especially because of the great financial crisis and women were running around the city looking for work. Women found jobs working at the fair; as s gum girl, expo cash girls, at booth stands and behind the scenes in the fair’s management system. These women working at the fair broke barriers; many people started to question a woman's place in the public eye. However, these jobs seemed a bit degrading as they were forced to wear outfits that showed their body.
The Midwinter Fair was a great success for the people invested and creators. It made more money that anticipated and more than two million visitors came to see the spectacle. While the fair did well in some aspects, it also spread many falsehoods about cultures while at the same time displaying the new modern and more advanced San Francisco.