The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Against Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown

Siler (Lost Kingdom) vividly recounts a shocking episode from America’s past in this gripping history. In the latter half of the 19th century, criminal syndicates in China purchased girls and young women from poor families and brought them to California, forcing them to work as domestic servants or prostitutes. From the 1870s through the early decades of the 1900s, white American women organized through their Protestant churches to stop it. They “rescued” Chinese female slaves in San Francisco, offering them shelter, education, job training, and Christian conversion. It wasn’t easy work; Siler chillingly describes a city riven by anti-immigrant sentiment and racism (even upstanding Protestant ladies referred to Chinese women as “depraved” or “barbarians”) and plagued with political corruption. The criminal syndicates, meanwhile, used lawsuits and violence to retrieve their “property.” Still, some of the rescued women found respectable occupations and even married. Donaldina “Dolly” Cameron, who began working at the Presbyterian Mission Home in 1895, sits at the heart of the story. Empathetic and indomitable, Cameron pulled her institution through the 1906 earthquake and expanded its services to provide community child care. Siler narrowly avoids an overfocus on the contributions of white women by weaving in those of women such as Cameron’s assistant Tien Fuh Wu. This strong story will fascinate readers interested in the history of women, immigration, and racism. Illus. (May)