Wendy Rouse

• Ph.D. History
• Professor (Associate) at San Jose State University

At the turn of the twentieth century, women famously organized to demand greater social and political freedoms like gaining the right to vote. However, few realize that the Progressive Era also witnessed the birth of the women’s self-defense movement. https://nyupress.org/books/9781479828531/ It is nearly impossible in today’s day and age to imag...

Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. Wendy Rouse challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particula...

When African Americans, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Chinese immigrants migrated to American cities in large numbers in the early twentieth century they encountered a xenophobic and often violent reception born out of a culture of fear. White, predominately Anglo, Protestant Americans, were anxious and afraid of the new arrivals. Their racis...

The emergence of Japan as a major world power in the early twentieth century generated anxiety over America’s place in the world. Fears of race suicide combined with a fear of the feminizing effects of over-civilization further exacerbated these tensions. Japanese jiu-jitsu came to symbolize these debates. As a physical example of the yellow peril,...

This article explores the construction of Chinese American identities through fashion. Although Chinese clothing styles served as a symbol of Chinese identity, American-born Chinese youth often preferred Western styles as a means of disassociating themselves from Chinatown and refashioning their identities as Americans. Yet these youth soon discove...

Restores queer suffragists to their rightful place in the history of the struggle for women’s right to vote The women’s suffrage movement, much like many other civil rights movements, has an important and often unrecognized queer history. In Public Faces, Secret Lives Wendy L. Rouse reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the suffrage movement i...

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural an...

The traditional narrative of the women’s suffrage movement has presented a “respectable” version of suffrage history primarily focused on the prominent role of elite, cisgender, heterosexual white women in fighting for the vote. Scholars are currently challenging that narrative. The story of California suffragists Gail Laughlin and Dr. Mary Austin...

In Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century, Andrew Urban examines how brokers commodified the labor of black, Chinese, and Irish domestic servants in the United States between 1850 and 1924. Existing on the boundaries of free and unfree labor, household servants exercised a limited degree...

Chinese children who immigrated to the United States during the era of Chinese Exclusion moved knowledge across national borders, linguistic and cultural boundaries and familial and generational lines. Chinese immigrant children preserved and conveyed important knowledge about their experiences and their family histories - both real and paper – not...

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https://academic.oup.com/whq/article-abstract/49/2/221/4816966?redirectedFrom=fulltext

Breakout EDU games are live-action, problem-solving activities for the classroom inspired by the escape-room concept. Students are prompted to solve a series of progressively challenging puzzles that will help them “breakout” by opening the Breakout EDU box. With a focus on teaching content standards and historical thinking skills, the breakout con...

Victorian notions of the passionless female allowed for a wide latitude of socially acceptable relationships between girls in the nineteenth century that included crushes, romantic friendships, and, for women, Boston marriages. However, textual depictions of female sexuality were rapidly shifting in the early twentieth century. As sexologists' writ...

First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not...

This book begins by showing how scholars of Chinese American history have focused primarily on the story of male Chinese immigrants. Only within the last two decades have significant studies examining the stories of Chinese American females emerged. The book challenges prevailing scholarly notions of early Chinatown by positioning Chinese children...

This chapter shows that the vast majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century came from the Guangdong province in southeastern China. In the mid-nineteenth century, this region of China experienced the ravages of the Opium Wars, internal rebellions, and natural calamities such as droughts, floods, typhoons, and crop...

This chapter describes how children growing up in Chinatown and desiring an American education chose between attendance at one of the private schools or at the segregated Chinese Public School. There is an apparent curricular emphasis of both the public and the mission schools in attempting to inculcate foreign-born schoolchildren with patriotic Am...

This chapter presents cases that help illuminate the dark side of Chinatown in order to reveal aspects of the Chinese American experience that prove otherwise elusive. In some of these stories, Chinese and white adults fought for custody of Chinese children. The children thus became articles of contention in the much larger political and economic d...

This chapter examines the contributions and explores the lives of Chinese child laborers in nineteenth-century San Francisco. As a segment of the larger labor force, these children played a small but significant role in promoting California's economy. More importantly, Chinese child workers found themselves in the middle of the national conflict ov...

This chapter argues that, as white Americans increasingly agitated against Chinese immigration in the 1870s and 1880s, Chinese families found themselves the object of greater scrutiny. They became important players in the overall debate over the future of the Chinese in America. By the mid-nineteenth century, the image of the two-parent family was...

This chapter argues that the Chinese American community had a vested interest in promoting a new image of Chinatown that countered the picture of disease and vice heralded in the press. This chapter examines how images of childhood proved essential to improving the reputation of Chinatown and encouraging tourism. At the same time, the children them...

Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. This book challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families—and particularly...

Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain examines the construction of race, ethnicity, community, and gender in the Japanese American beauty pageants of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Honolulu. Employing a unique combination of archival research, personal interviews, and participant-observation fieldwork, the author explores the shifting boundaries o...

Revealing the untold stories of a pioneer generation of young Chinese Americans, this book places the children and families of early Chinatown in the middle of efforts to combat American policies of exclusion and segregation. Wendy Jorae challenges long-held notions of early Chinatown as a bachelor community by showing that families--and particular...