Inscribing New Familial Relationships Through Care: The Power of San Francisco Religious Mission Homes in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Presbyterian and Methodist Mission Homes in San Francisco were established by women seeking to rescue and Christianize Chinese “slave girls”—girls and young women they understood to have been sold into household labor or prostitution or trapped in other unfree relationships. This fit a pattern in which reform women in the United States, in the name of care and aided by changing laws, could challenge the fitness of biological families to provide appropriate environments for the young, wresting control and custody of children from “unfit” families. False assertions of biological family ties were also interrogated since they frequently masked abusive and coercive arrangements involving a number of Chinese females. Mission Home leaders used legal and sometimes extra-legal means to gain control over young Chinese females, relying on state institutions, organizations that wielded some coercive powers, lawyers, diplomatic officials, and other well-placed professionals to legitimate their rescue actions and achieve their ends. Legal and political reforms in this era tended to move in directions that advanced the Mission Home women’s agendas, and women’s reform efforts helped expand what was considered state work. Care was offered to Chinese-American females willing to conform to bourgeois Protestant morals, customs, and gender expectations, and the Mission Home helped many of these girls begin new lives in the United States. Reformers’ interventions in San Francisco’s Chinatown constructed new non-biological family relationships, and care involved both state and less formal coercion of poor family members and of some girls consigned to their care.