Women's Invisibility and the Psychology of the Common Enemy
Ruminations on the case of a 'lewd' Chinese woman, 1876
Last week, I wrote about the case of Chy Lung, a young Chinese woman who was held in custody for 18 months from 1874 to 1876 so the Supreme Court would have jurisdiction to invalidate a California statute that regulated immigration.
The case of Chy Lung v. Freeman wasn’t about immigration, as I concluded last week. It was about putting another nail in the coffin of the Confederacy. Despite the Court’s strongly anti-racist rhetoric in the case, they gave no concern to Chy Lung herself, who had been legally entitled to her liberty since September 1874.
Perhaps the parties who filed the petition merely lied and said Chy Lung was in custody when she was not. But they must have known that the Supreme Court had for several years refused to decide another petition by a convict who had escaped. Those seeking to attack the California immigration law would likely have felt the need to keep pretty close tabs on Chy Lung’s whereabouts.
I’ve already started digging in to find out more about the fate of Chy Lung herself. More to come on that, I hope, if any records have survived.
But this case had me thinking a lot this week, and honestly, I’ve been stopped dead in my tracks in my work on the biography of an Ohio farm boy who became a key State Department bureaucrat during the first era of immigration restrictions.
I’ll share a couple of ideas this week that I’ve been ruminating about.
Immigration Law Isn’t Really About Immigration – So What Is It About?
One of my themes, as I wander through the 1870s and 1880s with Wilbur J. Carr, is that immigration law isn’t really about immigration.
Certainly, they faced mass migration, as we do today. (In 1880, migration was bigger, as a percentage of the U.S. population, than it is today.) But we’ve had national policies of encouraging or at least accepting immigration, namely from 1776 to 1882 and from 1965 to 1996.
So when do immigration restrictions get enacted, and why?
In the case of Chy Lung, immigration law was really about the meaning of Union victory. If the states could prohibit certain classes of people from entering their territories, why shouldn’t they be able to, say, prevent Black citizens from voting? If the latter was unacceptable, as it certainly was to Radical Republicans, then the former must be stamped out in no uncertain terms. Once the politics changed, post-Reconstruction, so did immigration law.
The Psychology of the Common Enemy
Last week, I offered some initial thoughts about what immigration law is about today.
Then I read about how Trump has doubled down on his comments from last fall saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of America – language that repeats the popular early 20th century pseudoscience of eugenics, which fueled the first wave of immigration restrictions in the U.S. and the Holocaust in Europe.
Once you can establish a common enemy, “your reader will stop seeing you as a salesperson and start seeing you as a friend – someone who shares the same perspective as he does.”
Trump’s vicious rhetoric about migrants (which I won’t deign to repeat here; click the link above if you want to read it) isn’t supported by the evidence, but it doesn’t matter. Trump never appeals to reason; he appeals to emotion.
Like any good copywriter.
I read about the craft of writing all the time. This week, I happened across this tutorial from copywriting coach Will Newman:
If you want to write winning promotions, there’s one thing you absolutely have to do: establish intimacy with your prospect.
There are several ways to do this. But one of the most effective (if done correctly) is by establishing a common enemy – one that both you and your prospect share.
The enemy, Newman explains, is someone who your target audience feels (at least subconsciously) is standing in the way of them getting what they want.
For example, if your target is a well-to-do man of retirement age, the enemy might be the IRS or lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits. If the target is a blue-collar worker struggling to get by, the enemy is the privileged rich folks who have everything handed to them and control the means of advancement.
Here’s the important part: According to Newman, once you establish a common enemy, “your reader will stop seeing you as a salesperson and start seeing you as a friend – someone who shares the same perspective as he does.”
Trump’s Common Enemy Problem
Trump actually has a problem: The United States has exercised global dominance for nearly half a century. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been no sustained overt threat to U.S. power.
But Trump knows that people view politicians as salespeople, and we don’t unite around salespeople. We unite around those we identify with.
That’s where immigrants come in. As Newman tells copywriters, you can transform yourself from salesman to friend by creating a common enemy.
The common enemy serves multiple functions for the ambitious politician. Psychologists studies have illustrated many valuable cognitive functions served by the idea of the common enemy.
For example, those who think hardship is simply random often report feeling powerless. When psychologists describe a particular enemy at work behind the challenges or threats respondents face, they often report feeling more focused and empowered.
So if you’re a politician? Finding a common enemy not only makes voters see you as someone on their team who has answers. It also creates a motivated voter, a voter perhaps willing to support you all the way up to and beyond insurrection.
The politician’s true goals may have little to do with the common enemy. Trump’s goals may be largely ego-driven; the goals of many who support him are far more instrumental, like dismantling federal agencies, or reinforcing cultural norms (like public Christian worship) of the traditionally dominant group. A common enemy helps to advance all the author’s agendas.
The Status of Women on the Eve of Immigration Restriction
The case of Chy Lung also has me thinking about the status of women in the first era of restricting immigration. I’ve focused keenly on the relationship between the status of freed slaves and immigration law, because most of the historical debates lead you directly there. But what about the rights of women?
After all, scholars often mark the Page Act of 1875 as the first federal immigration law. The Page Act prohibited the entry of immigrants from Asia under contracts for “lewd or immoral purposes” or “without their free and voluntary consent.” For good measure, it also prohibited the importation of prostitutes. In practice, the U.S. consulate in China enforced the law by grilling women and gathering intelligence about the purposes of their travel.
This law passed without debate even while the Burlingame Treaty with China forbade either country from prohibiting immigration. As scholar Kerry Abrams has written, “Targeting women whose sexual behavior and familial structure fell outside an acceptable standard simply did not appear to be a restriction of immigration.”
Though I’m writing a story about how the law intertwines with one relatively ordinary person’s life, my deepest questions have to do with our individual responsibility (or culpability) for the law. To answer those questions, I need to understand the cultural norms and forces that shaped how my biographical subject saw immigrants and immigration.
One of those norms I’ve most scratched my head over is the status of women.
As I read the Highland County newspapers of the 1870s and 1880s, particularly the local news items, women appear, but rarely by their own names. In 1881, Carr’s mother suffered an illness severe enough to be mentioned in a letter to the newspaper about township events, but the writer refers to her only as “Mrs. Ed Carr.” Even in death, women were not always given their own names. In 1883, a correspondent reported that “the wife of John Mahains died suddenly last Saturday and was buried Sunday in the Sonner cemetery.”
Violence against women also appears in the papers, but the women themselves do not. In Wilbur’s township, for example, a local merchant named M.F. Funk had been known to take the daughter of another merchant, Miss Ridings – her first name is not given – out in his buggy. Later, Miss Ridings sued Funk “for bastardry.” Funk was released on recognizance for $400, a practice that equated to an early form of parole. A week later, Miss Ridings sued Funk for “causing an abortion.” No other details were given of this astonishing charge. Funk was again released on recognizance, this time for $300.
Another incident of gender violence roiled Carr’s township in 1879. The local shoemaker shot the township doctor after accusing him of sexually assaulting the shoemaker’s wife during a medical examination. This incident interests me because it undoubtedly would have influenced Carr’s childhood. The incident and the related legal proceedings made news for months; the shoemaker even stopped at the house of Carr’s next-door neighbor when first bonded out from jail in the county seat on his way to confronting the doctor again.
It also interests me because the woman herself appears “on stage” only briefly – crying at her husband’s trial, and later living with another family while her husband is incarcerated. Her given name is never mentioned.
I’ve puzzled about what to do with this incident in telling Carr’s story. You can’t describe everything. In congressional debates, the status of women, unlike the status of freedmen, does not expressly influence the creation of restrictive immigration laws. I had begun to think this scene should be left on the cutting room floor.
Reading Chy Lung’s case carefully gives me pause, though. The federalists who brought Chy Lung’s case before the Supreme Court seemed to think little of keeping a young girl in custody despite her legal right to go. In that case, the facelessness of women in public life seemed not only helpful but critical to the cause of moving the immigration law power to Congress once and for all.
Her legal invisibility may have related to her race and nationality rather than her gender. But the descriptions of her and the other women’s vocal reaction at their trial to the injustice they faced reveal strongly gendered and intersectional attitudes.
If Chy Lung had had a legal existence, the Supreme Court itself might have questioned her continued detention and dismissed the case as moot. She did not, and they did not.
Does the public facelessness and namelessness of women during Carr’s childhood influence his views on the exclusion of other mostly faceless and nameless people – foreign immigrants? Or is this a detour without legal significance for immigration? If you have thoughts on that, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.
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