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Arts & Culture
Schlesinger showcase illuminates a predominantly overlooked history
Denison House Chinese girls basketball squad, 1931.
O.H. Steir
Students and archivists unite to unveil richer narratives of Asian American women’s history
Included in the artifacts showcased in a new exhibition at the Schlesinger Library are images of Ainu and Visayan women who were presented as “living exhibits” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.
The identities of these women remain unknown. Their photographs endure because they were archived by Jessie Tarbox Beals, one of the pioneers of American female photojournalism. However, their narratives are being revisited as part of “Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories Through the Archives.”
“Asian American history often remains concealed, given the demographic and the historical context,” remarked Victor Betts, the curator responsible for collections on ethnicity and migration at the Schlesinger Library. “It tends to be marginalized. This is also indicative in the archives.”
Ainu woman and child at the 1904 World’s Fair.
Jessie Tarbox Beals, Courtesy Schlesinger Library
Visayan girls at the 1904 World’s Fair.
Jessie Tarbox Beals, Courtesy Schlesinger Library
The exhibition, running through January, showcases materials spanning a century and a half and encourages attendees to reassess their own beliefs about the roles of Asian and Asian American women in historical contexts.
This presentation was developed alongside a spring undergraduate course entitled “Asian American Women’s History in the Schlesinger Library,” which Betts co-instructed with Erika Lee, Bae Family Professor of History and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library.
“It exemplifies a model of co-instruction and co-creation, encouraging research and education, which we aspire will serve as a blueprint for other classes,” Lee stated.
Students utilized the archival resources to explore how Asian and Asian American women have been overlooked, sensationalized, or both, similar to the women displayed at the World’s Fair.
“We dedicated an entire week to the subject of obscurity,” Lee chuckled. “Like, where are they?”
Christian D. Topinio ’27 delved into Beals’ photographs for his capstone project.
“[The women] were subjected to examination, potentially as objects of cultural intrigue,” Topinio noted. “There’s a fascinating concept in these images where you’re imposing colonial hierarchies on these individuals, reinforcing colonial structures overseas.”
Betts remarked that in more modern collections, Asian American women narrate their own experiences on their own terms, such as the contributed archives of renowned chefs and authors Grace Zia Chu and Madhur Jaffrey.
“Other women from earlier eras, in the 19th and 20th centuries, lacked that privilege,” he pointed out. So he and the students embarked on a search.
Sophia Wang ’25 investigated the 1874 legal case of Ah Fong, a Chinese woman who was held at the Port of San Francisco. She, along with approximately 20 other detained women and girls aged 17 to 28, filed writs of habeas corpus independently.
This legal action also played a role in the 1875 Supreme Court case Chy Lung v. Freeman, in which the court concluded that only Congress, not states, had the authority to regulate immigration.
“As someone who’s Chinese American and whose parents immigrated to the United States, when I encountered her case, I was moved to tears,” Wang recounted. “They were legal trailblazers, even though their narratives remain largely untold.”
While there was minimal coordinated effort to gather and safeguard Asian American women’s narratives at that time, archivists discovered these stories woven throughout local history and Harvard’s legacy.
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Siok-An Chiu Wu, Wai Tsu New Kuo, and Manik Kosambi feature in Radcliffe College yearbooks from 1919 and 1922.
Manik Kosambi was the initial South Asian woman to earn a degree from Radcliffe.
The exhibition situates images of Asian American women, political posters, comic books, and zines against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese American internment, the Civil Rights movement, and the acts of anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 crisis.
Betts sought to creatively engage with the exhibit’s title, “Illuminate,” as part of the showcase. He commissioned artwork by Greater Boston Taiwanese-American artist Shaina Lu to complement the archival pieces. Her sheer illustrations, positioned over the windows, enable sunlight to stream into the gallery.
Betts is striving to enhance Schlesinger’s collections concerning Asian and Asian American women’s materials. However, for now, he noted that what is absent underscores a key issue. It prompts an inquiry into why the narratives of Asian American women have been sidelined historically and how perceptions of American history might shift if they were acknowledged.
“Asian American history is integral to American history,” Betts stated, “and it should be regarded with the same degree of seriousness and importance that we attribute to U.S. history as a whole.”
“Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories through the Archives” is on display until Jan. 23 at the Lia and William Poorvu Gallery of Schlesinger Library.
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