Julia Flynn Siler

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Who Should California Honor?

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Father Junipero Serra. Christopher Columbus. Sir Francis Drake. Even Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the national anthem.

What do most of the statues being toppled across California have in common?

Mariposa Villaluna at Coit Tower after a crew from the city dismantled a statue of Christopher Columbus during the night. Photo: Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

They’re figures from history who supported white supremacy. And they’re all men.

So here’s a timely proposal. Why don’t we replace them with monuments memorializing the heroic women who’ve helped shape our state? The current protests have given us an opportunity for a deep cultural reckoning about how we want to see ourselves as people. The monuments that any society erects reflect its values. So let’s use this opportunity to address an unjust imbalance. Let’s honor more women, especially women of color.

There are shamefully few statues or monuments honoring California women so far, perhaps because out state’s statue-erectors have historically focused on early conquerors and explorers.

How many of the state’s monuments are dedicated to men versus women? In a list of California’s public statues on Wikipedia, only four out of forty-one are women — or about 10%. Out of the state’s current population of 39 million, just over 50% identify as females.

In San Francisco, widely considered to be one of the most progressive cities in the nation, out of 87 public statues, just two represent real women. The city passed a law about three years ago aimed at increasing the percentage of women honored in this way, but, perhaps predictably, nothing much changed.

A much-anticipated competition to honor the writer Maya Angelou with a piece of public art stalled with a disagreement at City Hall over which representation to pick. One of the competing artists, Lava Thomas, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “Artists deserve better, women deserve better, and Black women deserve better.”

Lava Thomas envisioned this modern design for a Maya Angelou sculpture, but a supervisor wants a traditional approach. Photo by Lava Thomas.

Yes, they do.

At the same time, the few statues of women that do exist are often chosen, not to honor the contribution that those women made as individuals, but because of their physical beauty or their relationships with powerful men.

One of those monuments is a 26-foot-high sculpture of Marilyn Monroe, capturing the moment from the Billy Wilder film, “The Seven Year Itch,” when a blast of air from a subway grate lifts her dress.

Titled Forever Marilyn and created by the artist Seward Johnson, is now in negotiations to be on permanent display in Palm Springs, provoking some discussion of objectification of the actress whose life ended in tragedy.

Likewise, the figure atop a pedestal in San Francisco’s Union Square was meant to represent Nike, the Goddess of Victory, but was modeled on a young Alma de Bretteville, considered a great beauty in her day. Not long after, she became the mistress and eventual wife of the wealthy sugar king Adolph Spreckels.

Photograph courtesy of Russel Ray

Instead of sexy movie stars and the paramours of wealthy men, perhaps we should start honoring California women who directed films, worked for social justice, and led a civil rights movement.

I can suggest a few possibilities. Bridget “Biddy” Mason, an African American woman born into slavery, she bought her freedom, became a successful investor, and helped found Los Angeles’s First African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Or Julia Morgan, the first woman to become a licensed architect in the state who helped erect some of California’s greatest architectural treasures.

Perhaps we should consider Tien Fuh Wu, a child servant at a brothel who’d been sold by her father, she eventually became a pioneering social worker in San Francisco who worked tirelessly for decades to help vulnerable girls and women in Chinatown.

We might even consider a living woman — Dolores Huerta – the 90-year-old civil rights worker and activist who, helped found the organization that would become the United Farmworkers and organize the Delano grape strike in 1965.

Tye Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

For more inspiring choices, you may want to join an online event June 30th co-hosted by the California Historical Society, Cal Humanities, and KQED, for a viewing and discussion of three short documentaries on women who changed California’s history.

One of the women I wrote about in The White Devil’s Daughters, Tye Leung Schulze, is the subject of one of the documentaries. She was an early advocate for trafficked women. I’m interviewed in the documentary about her life, as is  her grandson, Ted Schulze.

The other two women highlighted in the documentary shorts are Lois Weber, the first woman to direct a feature-length film, and Charlotta Spears Bass, a newspaper editor, Civil Rights crusader, and the first African American woman to be nominated for Vice President.

It’s about time we start looking for other heroes to look up to. And they shouldn’t all be  men. As Huerta might say, Si, se puede!

 

Unladylike2020

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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.

Tye Leung Schulze, artwork by Amelie Chabannes

 

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 Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

 

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.

 

 

“Auntie” Tye and one degree of separation….

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One of the unexpected pleasures of my book tour has been meeting readers whose own life stories overlap with the characters I write about in The White Devil’s Daughters.

After a recent talk I gave at the San Francisco Theological Seminary , a  retired Chinese American woman named May Lynne Lim came up to introduce herself to me. We chatted briefly and she handed me a sealed envelope with my name inked onto it in careful handwritten script.

Tye Leung Schulze, courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library

I waited until the next morning to open the envelope and read what was inside. There were three pages of a typed, single-spaced story about Mrs. Lim’s own history with Cameron House, the setting of my book, as well as a handwritten note with her address and telephone number, inviting me to contact her about seeing some family photographs.

I read about her father’s first wife, Rose (Fung Ho) Lee Young, and Rose’s sister, Tye Leung Schulze, whose extraordinary story I tell in the book. A short-statured woman whose nickname was “Tiny,” Tye Leung Schulze was a pioneering staffer at the Angel Island immigration station and the first Chinese American woman to cast a vote in a U.S. presidential election.

Tye Leung Schulze was one of the sixty or so girls and women who fled from the Presbyterian Mission Home on the morning of April 18, 1906, to safety after the earthquake and subsequent firestorms that destroyed Chinatown and much of San Francisco.

Mrs. Lim’s family believes that Rose also “must have been one of Miss Cameron’s girls….but we were never able to find any records of her having been there.” In 1906, Rose was not yet married to Mrs. Lim’s father (Mrs. Lim’s own mother, a “picture bride” married her father in 1930, after Rose’s death two years earlier. In turn, after Rose’s death, Tye and her sister Alice took May Lynne’s mother under their wings and called her “Little Sister” in Chinese. Alice and Tye, in turn, became May Lynne’s informal “aunties.”)

Rose, Tye, and Alice (photo courtesy of May Lynne Lim)

The remembrance that Mrs. Lim shared was especially moving in its detail of all the ways she and her husband remained connected with Cameron House for many years afterwards, first through the youth programs and later as an alumnae.

Mrs. Lim’s late husband Roger also grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown and participated in Cameron House’s youth programs. May Lynne and Roger were married at the Chinese Presbyterian Church sixty-three years ago, in 1956 – a time in which the namesake of the home, Donaldina (Dolly) Cameron, was still alive.

By the mid-1950s, Miss Cameron’s successor, Lorna Logan, lived upstairs at 920 Sacramento Street, while Dolly and her longtime aide and friend, Tien Fuh Wu, had moved in their retirement from the home to Palo Alto. When Dolly died in 1968, the city of Palo Alto named a small park in her honor. Both Cameron and Wu were pioneers in the fight against what we now call human trafficking.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Lim told me that her family now numbers around 200 people. Each year, more than a hundred relatives  gather for her family’s annual Chinese New Year’s celebration!

The typed remembrance and hand-written note that Mrs. Lim gave me.