Writing and Rewriting Women of Color

Linda Gordon. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. xv + 416 pp. ISBN 0-674-36041-9 (cl).

Chana Kai Lee. For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xvi + 255 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-252-02151-7 (cl).

George Anthony Peffer. If They Don't Bring Their Women Here: Chinese Female Immigration Before Exclusion. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xiii + 164 pp. ISBN 0-252-02469-9 (cl); 0-252-06777-0 (pb).

Emma Pérez. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xix + 181 pp. ISBN 0-253-33504-3 (cl); 0-253-21283-9 (pb).

Let me confess at the outset of this review that I have not focused on women's history in my own work. Rather, in my field of ethnic studies, the centrality of race and the process of racial formation have mostly informed our work, while we all take gender, race, nation, and increasingly so, sexuality, as equally serious constructions that intersect with each other in particular and unique ways to yield deep and nuanced meanings. I read books, such as the four under review, to discover what's new in women's history, and to be better informed, enlightened, and even entertained.

When women's history first emerged in the academy more than thirty years ago, the reasons given for its existence were simple, straightforward, and commonsensical. They included, to name a few: filling in gaping holes that had rendered women largely silent and invisible; rescuing and restoring the forgotten names to the official record; and correcting egregious errors of fact or interpretation. As scholars became wiser and more sophisticated from experience and practice, they realized they were doing more than correcting sins of omission and commission. They began to identify, research, and write about new topics that had eluded previous historians' scrutiny, or to re-examine old subjects anew. A new generation of historians became aware that the questions of perspective and positionality of both the subject under study as well as the person conducting the study are critical to how history is constructed, narrated, and apprehended. Scholars began to beg the inevitable questions of feminist epistemologies and corresponding methods of inquiry. The concurrent rise of ethnic studies, followed by cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and queer studies, established the intersectionality of gender with race, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion, and sexuality. In so doing, they introduced such new social contexts as diasporas and transnationalism, and such new social constructions as postmodernity and hybridity. In many ways, these four newly published works--on four distinct topics joined together by the common attention to the relationships women of color have to each other, men in their community, white women and the dominant European American state and society--demonstrate all these developments and trends in women's history. Three of them, Gordon, Lee, Peffer, present fine examples of what we might call "best practices" honed during three decades of doing women's history, while the fourth, Pérez, attempts a new breakthrough, with mixed results. Together, they illustrate the extent to which women's history has evolved, and how women's history continues to influence an ongoing feminist project of constructing a new grand narrative. Above all, they demonstrate the ways in which scholars of women's history identify, articulate, frame, and approach themes and subjects that have obviously eluded the attention of the pre-feminist era.

George Anthony Peffer has produced a close study of the l875 Page Law that severely limited the immigration of Chinese women in the late nineteenth century. For too long, this law remained obscure as the law it prefigured, the Chinese Exclusion Act of l882, became notorious and oft-cited, but its implications for Chinese American history can no longer be ignored. Peffer forcefully reminds us that before the race-based general Chinese exclusion in l882, gender-based immigration...