Women’s lives have long been overlooked by historians, especially the lives of women of color. But a new PBS project, UnladyLike2020, is producing 26 documentary shorts of unsung women heroes of American history.
Part of PBS’s American Masters series honoring the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, just aired a film about Tye Leung Schulze. She was the first Chinese American woman to work for the U.S. Federal Government and an advocate for trafficked women. You can watch the film here.
UnladyLike2020 is led by the prize-winning filmmaker Charlotte Mangin. Charlotte interviewed me for the film, along with Tye’s grandson, Ted Schulze, and Judge Toko Serita, a New York State Acting Supreme Court Justice who presides over the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court. It’s a moving film about a woman who worked for social justice
I got to know Tye because she was one of the thousands of girls and young women who took refuge at the Presbyterian Mission Home in San Francisco’s Chinatown at the turn of the 20th century. Tye is one of the young women I write about in my latest book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown..
The youngest daughter of impoverished Chinese immigrants, Tye fled to the home to escape an arranged marriage at twelve. There, she gained an education and became an invaluable aide to the home’s longtime superintendent, Donaldina (Dolly) Cameron, who affectionately called her “Tiny” because of her short stature (Tye was just 4’4″ tall.)
Dolly was so impressed with Tye’s gift for languages and her good judgment that she recommended her for a job in 1910 at the newly opened Angel Island Immigration Station, a detention center in the middle of the San Francisco Bay designed to control the flow of Asian immigrants into the U.S.
Tye took the job, commuting each day to the island by boat to work as an assistant matron and interpreter. There she met a fellow immigration officer named Charles Frederick Schulze, a white man. They fell in love. Defying both their parents’ wishes and the state of California’s anti-miscegenation laws, they traveled to Washington state to marry.
Not long after to returning to work at Angel Island, they both lost their jobs. But Tye soon rose to prominence again. In 1912, one year after California granted women the right to vote, Tye became the first Chinese American woman to vote in a U.S primary election.
She left a rich written record of her life, including a first-person oral history that the historian Judy Yung kindly shared with me. I highly recommend Judy’s groundbreaking book, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. There is also a new box of materials from the Leung-Schulze family at the University of California’s Ethnic Studies Library, which I pored through for clues about Tye’s story.
Charlotte and her team at Unladylike2020 are illuminating the remarkable lives of Tye and twenty-five other “hidden figures” from American history. On July 1, the series will release a short documentary about Hawaii’s Queen Lili’uokalani. More on that soon! Here the PBS American Masters site.