Chinese Women and Habeas Corpus Hearings in California, 1857–1882

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines how Chinese women and men used habeas corpus proceedings in California to contest transpacific relations of gender, commerce, law, and power. The first section looks at habeas hearings about runaway or allegedly kidnapped Chinese women already in the United States. The second chronicles how these hearings correlated with and diverged from the habeas proceedings involving the detention of Chinese women immigrants upon arrival. The California judges' approach to these cases mirrored Congress's concern over "the enormous diversity of domestic arrangements" in slavery by the end of the Civil War, when lawmakers introduced monogamous marriage and dependency on a male head of household as the most acceptable conditions for a nonwhite woman's freedom. The habeas proceedings concerning Chinese women thus revealed a Pacific, subnational practice of governance that was consonant with the national trend of reconstructing nonwhite women's sociolegal status in the Civil War era.