Kate Bagnall - Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia

This ground-breaking edited collection draws together Australian historical scholarship on Chinese women, their gendered migrations, and their mobile lives between China and Australia. It considers different aspects of womens lives, both as individuals and as the wives and daughters of immigrant men. While the number of Chinese women in Australia before 1950 was relatively small, their presence was significant and often subject to public scrutiny.

Moving beyond traditional representations of women as hidden and silent, this book demonstrates that Chinese Australian women in the twentieth century expressed themselves in the public eye, whether through writings, in photographs, or in political and cultural life. Their remarkable stories are often inspiring and sometimes tragic and serve to demonstrate the complexities of navigating female lives in the face of racial politics and imposed categories of gender, culture, and class.

Historians of transnational Chinese migration have come to recognize Australia as a crucial site within the Cantonese Pacific, and this collection provides a new layer of gendered comparison, connecting womens experiences in Australia with those in Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.

Kate Bagnall is a historian at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. She has published on various aspects of Chinese Australian history, particularly on women and family life.

Julia T. Martnez is an associate professor of history at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She has published on the history of northern Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific.

Locating Chinese Women is a path-breaking book. By exploring the experiences of Chinese Australian women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors have opened new and compelling avenues of inquiry about the history of Chinese Australian women. In this landmark work, they have brilliantly recast the history of Chinese Australia.

Joy Damousi, Australian Catholic University

Locating Chinese Women breaks new ground in Australian and transnational Chinese womens history by making the lives of remarkable Chinese Australian women visible. Photographs, testimonies, Chinese-language newspapers, and digitized archives help document the womens agency and activities as they navigate public lives between and within Australia and China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Shirley Hune, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Washington

Crossing Seas

Editors: Henry Yu (University of British Columbia) and Elizabeth Sinn (University of Hong Kong)

The Crossing Seas series brings together books that investigate Chinese migration from the migrants perspective. As migrants travelled from one destination to another throughout their lifetimes, they created and maintained layers of different networks. Along the way these migrants also dispersed, recreated, and adapted their cultural practices. To study these different networks, the series publishes books in disciplines such as history, womens studies, geography, cultural anthropology, and archaeology, and prominently features publications informed by interdisciplinary approaches that focus on multiple aspects of the migration processes.

Books in the series:

Chinese Diaspora Charity and the Cantonese Pacific, 18501949

Edited by John Fitzgerald and Hon-ming Yip

Locating Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia

Edited by Kate Bagnall and Julia T. Martnez

Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers around the Pacific, 1849 to 1949

Michael Williams