Trafficked and Rescued: Travails of the Chinese “Slave Girl” in Progressive Era California

ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural and intellectual history of the Chinese “slave girl” in Progressive Era California. Joining a rich literature on how the movement of women across Europe and the Americas stoked cultural anxieties around sex work, gender norms, and “trafficking,” this article uses missionary documents and newspaper accounts to explore how slavery discourse collapsed variations in Chinese women and girls' experiences of freedom and unfreedom in America. I show how, in contrast to her non‐Chinese counterparts, the Chinese “slave girl” was positioned as a racialized object of rescue within the borders of the American nation‐state, where missionaries could wield violent state power in the name of religious and reformist zeal. This article concludes by re‐reading and deconstructing “rescue” narratives through a reparative lens.