The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila

2021 The League of Nations, Prostitution, and the Deportation of Chinese Women from Interwar Manila

Julia T. Martínez

The 1933 League of Nations report on the traffic in women and children across Asia included a passing mention of the deportation of nine hundred Chinese women from the American Philippines. In the League’s decades-long campaign aimed at the abolition of state-registered brothels, Manila, with its red-light district shut down since 1918, was regarded as a model for the suppression of the sex industry. This article considers the extent to which the criminalization and deportation of Chinese women was encouraged by the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking campaign and whether the authorities and women’s organizations in Manila shared the League’s agenda. It highlights American discourse on prostitution as a police matter and suggests that abolition policies, combined with the targeting of Chinese women, undermined the aims of liberal feminist internationalists.

In 1934, a young Chinese woman, Ay Kim, testified before the Philippines Supreme Court that the Manila migration agent Tan Ping Co had arranged for her to travel from Amoy (Xiamen) to Manila. In order to evade the restrictions of the Chinese Registration Act of 1903, she had taken the name Tan Kim on arrival, claiming to be Tan Ping Co’s daughter. She testified that she had been sold to Yap Ah Huan in China in 1931 and forced to sell sex. She did not say who had sold her, but given that her father was deceased, it is most likely that her mother, living in Shanghai, had been unable to provide for her.1 Shanghai was well known at the time for its licensed and unlicensed brothels.2 Once in Manila, Ay Kim was forced to work in Yap Ah Huan’s brothel on Gotamco Street, Pasay, while Tan Ping Co collected a fee of 750 pesos (US$375) from her earnings. Ay Kim’s testimony led to her deportation along with the brothel owner and two other girls.3 Tan Ping Co, although a resident of Manila, was also deported in 1935.4

Ay Kim spent eight months in the custody of the collector of customs after escaping from the brothel and applying to the Chinese consul for protection. A board of special inquiry ordered her deportation under Section 19 of the US Immigration Act of 1917, which was in force in the Philippines and applied to any alien who was “an inmate of or connected with the management of a house of prostitution or practicing prostitution . . . or who shall receive, share in, or derive benefit from any part of the earnings

© 2021 Journal of Women’s History, Vol. 33 No. 4, 67–91.

of any prostitute.”5 Most women departed voluntarily at this point, but Ay Kim’s case went to the Philippines Supreme Court because Tan Ping Co tried to prevent her deportation.

In court, Ay Kim pointed Tan Ping Co out “without fear nor doubt,” telling Justice J. C. Vickers that “she was willing to go to jail for what she had done if it deserved punishment, provided that she be deported after her imprisonment.”6 This rare surviving testimony by a Chinese woman suggests that while she welcomed deportation as her only means of escape from her exploiter and state custody, she doubted that she deserved imprisonment. Her words echoed an ethical concern posed by the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking campaign, which by opposing state-regulated brothels appeared to sanction the incarceration and deportation of women. There had been more than a thousand deportations of Chinese women from Manila in the decade prior to 1934; their numbers reflecting the increased rate of immigration from China. Ay Kim had traveled from Amoy along with six hundred other Chinese passengers on the SS Anking in March 1933, the ship’s arrival announced in the Tribune (Manila) under the inflammatory caption “Chinese Influx Here Unabated.”7 Six months later the authorities arrested and deported some two hundred Chinese women.8 Ay Kim’s story thus exemplifies the immigration experience of hundreds of women who traveled from China to Manila. While her escape may have drawn attention to her own circumstances, this pattern of migration, debt, arrest, and deportation was common.

In Southeast Asia, Chinese women had been, as Eric Tagliacozzo phrased it, “tolerated and encouraged” to work in the brothels of British, Dutch, and French colonies, but from 1913 onwards the Dutch, then the British, and finally the French abolished licenced brothels.9 This history, including that of the Philippines, was documented in the 1933 League of Nations Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East. The commission met from December 5 to December 10, 1932, to discuss the results of this study of Asia undertaken from 1930 to 1931 by a traveling commission.10 The study reported on “Victims of International Traffic,” a phrase referring broadly to female immigrants selling sex, including consenting adult women.11 The number of Chinese women referred to as prostitutes was summarized as: “Indo-China, about 50; Siam, about 1,000; Philippine Islands, a few; Dutch East Indies, a number not estimated; British Malaya 5,000 to 6,000.”12 The report did not provide more precise figures for the Dutch East Indies or the Philippines because in both locations the registration of women in state-regulated brothels had already been abolished.

In this article I draw together the history of the Philippines’ sex industry with that of the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking campaign. I consider the extent to which American and Filipino officials and women’s groups

aligned with the League’s agenda, considering that abolition in Manila predated the League of Nations. The Philippines had been influenced by the US White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910 (Mann Act) and the abolition campaigns of the American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA) since 1914.13 I also consider the Chinese women at the heart of this campaign in the context of broader immigration restriction. Liberal feminist internationalists connected to the League of Nations, according to David Petruccelli, gave “the fate of women as individuals . . . precedence over the interest of the state,” at least until the early 1930s.14 Whether this concern extended to Chinese women is unclear. Chinese women were caught within a paradox, being documented by the League of Nations as passive victims, while in Manila newspapers they were depicted as leading an “immoral” life. Historian Liat Kozma observed the racialization of prostitution in imperial contexts during the interwar period, with European women who sold sex being granted more freedom than colonized women, who were still obliged to be regularly examined for venereal disease.15 This study of Chinese women contributes to this interwar analysis, recognizing that while not colonized, Chinese women were racialized in profound ways. The League of Nations avoided reporting on Filipina women selling sex in Manila, limiting the scope of their research to international traffic and the largely unchallenged nationalist targeting of Chinese women. The deportation cases of three Chinese women described below help to provide some sense of how deportation policies affected individual women.16 The historiography of trafficking, thus far mostly shaped by studies of white women or colonized women, needs to account for Chinese women’s particular experiences and representations in the context of the League of Nations literature and beyond.

Colonial Narratives of Chinese Prostitution

The focus on Chinese women in the 1930s followed some sixty years of colonial discourse that conceived of Chinese women as enslaved and trafficked. While this study is concerned with women selling sex, the historiography on slavery includes girls in domestic service, whose pathway into the sex industry provides necessary context. Mui tsai (translated as “slave girls” by abolitionists) were Chinese girls aged from about seven to thirteen contracted, often overseas, as domestic servants. The mui tsai controversy started in Hong Kong in 1870, when Chief Justice Sir John Smale heard a case involving a mui tsai sold to a brothel.17 Historians have traced this practice up to the late 1930s, with Maria Jaschok citing a deed of sale of a ten-year-old girl from China in 1927. She concluded that once mui tsai were resold into brothels, “or kept by women, who lived off their earnings, it was difficult for these girls to escape that life.”18 James Warren’s study on

Singapore similarly noted the use of kongchu (literally, “princess”) to refer to “a sold prostitute with no rights over the disposal of her own person.”19

A number of historians have problematized these narratives of Chinese women’s slavery. British abolitionists, according to Sarah Paddle, sought to promote an image of Chinese womanhood as childlike, silenced, and passive.20 Rachel Leow suggested that Smale was “casting Chinese custom against a universal morality.”21 The “maternal imperialism” of British abolitionist women, such as Clara Haslewood, whose protests in 1919 Hong Kong galvanized the abolitionist movement, is raised by Susan Pedersen.22 Despite the Hong Kong ban enacted in the Female Domestic Service Ordinance of 1923, the practice continued and was taken up by the League of Nations Slavery Committee. According to Magaly Rodríguez García, however, the League of Nations judged the mui tsai phenomenon to be a separate issue from the “traffic in women and children” for prostitution.23 Gail Hershatter reflected on Chinese women’s work in brothels compared with other forms of women’s labor. She observed that in 1930s China “roughly twice as many women worked in Tianjin brothels as in the city’s cotton mills.” She concluded that girls from “desperately poor rural villages” might end up in brothels or in mills depending on the decisions made by their relatives or traffickers.24 However, women who went to Southeast Asia, with its male-dominated Chinese population, were more likely to end up in domestic or sexual service roles.

Much of the literature on Chinese women in the sex industry across Southeast Asia concerns the British colonies of Singapore and Malaya as described by Philippa Levine, Lenore Manderson, Raelene Frances, and others.25 Levine cautioned that authorities might have “over-estimated the proportion of Chinese women” working in the sex industry, which the high figures cited in the 1933 report suggest.26 The League of Nations’ campaign, as discussed below, had a strong impact on Singapore, which in 1927 banned the disembarking of Chinese women suspected of immigrating for prostitution and shut down regulated brothels. In 1929 the Colonial Office introduced the Suppression of Brothels Bill in Malaya, and licenced brothels shut down over the next two years. This timetable prepared these colonies for the arrival of the League of Nations’ traveling commission in 1931. Hong Kong belatedly announced plans to close brothels and stop the registration of women in December 1931. 27 In French Indochina authorities sought to prevent trafficking, but they retained regulated brothels until the end of the colonial period in the 1950s, with one 1942 report describing Chinese women who sold sex as “recalcitrants” for not following colonial regulations.28

The American Philippines has been almost entirely absent from the literature on Chinese women in colonial Southeast Asia, most likely because

it has been understood that Chinese women did not immigrate in large numbers until 1937, when they were allowed entry in significant numbers, as part of the seven thousand Chinese who entered as war refugees.29

Prostitution in the Philippines Before 1918

In her study of prostitution in the late nineteenth century, Maria Luisa Camagay describes Chinese men in the Philippines as clients and brothel keepers, but she found no Chinese women labeled as prostitutes or brothel keepers (amas) although women were encouraged to work as brothel keepers in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.30 Jely Agamao Galang reviewed some five thousand arrest cases from 1831 to 1898 and found none involving Chinese women.31 For the period 1885 to 1887 Andrew Jimenez Abalahin noted that more than half of the 126 arrests of women took place in Binondo (Chinatown), but he found only a small number of mestiza sangley (daughters of Chinese men and Indigenous women) among those arrested, the majority being Indigenous women.32 There were just 196 Chinese women in Manila at the time, 52 of whom were minors.33

A law resembling the British Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s was implemented by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1888 to regulate the casas de prostitución (houses of prostitution), obliging women to undergo regular medical examinations for venereal disease. In the 1890s, legal brothels spread out beyond Binondo, employing women of various ethnicities but apparently no Chinese, if we can judge by a surviving 1893 report listing 31 brothel keepers and 103 brothel workers.34 The 1893 report also makes no mention of Japanese women, but Motoe Terami-Wada explained that the Japanese consulate in Manila was closed from 1893 to 1896, and when it reopened just two Japanese women were recorded in Manila.35 Clearly, the official records are incomplete, and historians of prostitution have often found or suspected such gaps in the archives.

At the turn of the century, Spanish colonial rule ended in the Philippines and the United States waged a bloody colonial war to suppress Filipino resistance. Vicente Rafael observes that American colonialism remained “rhetorically driven” by the moral imperative of “benevolent assimilation.”36 From 1898, Americans expressed opposition to what Major Owen Sweet termed the “social evil” of prostitution. In Jolo, in the southern Philippines, Sweet was concerned for his troops when he implemented “regulation, restriction and control” over “immoral women and their keepers,” targeting Chinese women in particular.37

The American military government also introduced prostitution regulations in Manila. In 1900, Major Ira C. Brown proposed setting aside a district of central Manila for brothels, but this provoked so many complaints that

American administrators were forced to expel women who were selling sex.38 In 1901, Sampaloc—further north and more isolated—was nominated to be a red-light district and would remain as one until 1918. There were an estimated 200 licensed brothels employing about 600 women selling sex. A report by William B. Johnson of the American League claimed that while many of these women declared themselves to be Americans, the authorities suspected that some were Europeans.39

Anti-imperialist women in the United States criticized the tolerance of brothels in the Philippines. As Kristin Hoganson explained, Women’s Christian Temperance Union members challenged the “civilizing mission” that condoned “licensing prostitutes who had dealings with U.S. troops.” The National American Woman Suffrage Association protested that their Association’s “sense of transcendent sisterhood” made them concerned that “Filipinas were being degraded, turned into sexual objects to gratify male desires.”40

With the shift to civilian government, the 1902 Philippines Commission Act No. 519 criminalized prostitution under vagrancy laws directed at “every lewd or dissolute person who lives in and about houses of ill fame; every common prostitute.”41 The term vagrant referred to “any person who keeps a house of prostitution; or acts as pimp or procurer; or who is a common gambler or prostitute.”42 By this time the Chinese female population had slightly increased; the 1903 census recorded 40,518 Chinese males and 517 Chinese females in the Philippines, compared with 475 Japanese males and 446 Japanese females. Notably, only the Japanese women were described as being “in the main composed of prostitutes.”43 The census commentary emphasised “foreign” women as the problem, applauding the “chastity of the Filipinos.”44 In 1908, the United States signed the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic of 1904 on behalf of the Philippines. Manila authorities continued to allow brothels to operate discreetly under the name “lodging houses.”45 In fact, the number of Japanese women recorded as working in prostitution rose in 1910 to 432 across the Philippines.46

In Manila, the red-light district of Gardenia was shut down in 1918. In that year there were 902 female Japanese and 3,098 female Chinese in the Philippines.47 As Laura Briggs explains, the US colonial policy of segregated and regulated prostitution, which had applied to the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, was replaced in 1918 by the US domestic policy of “suppression and incarceration.”48 In the United States, domestic programs were implemented with the approval of Bascom Johnson, a member of the ASHA and then director of the Army Sanitary Corps.49

In the Philippines, Governor General Francis Burton Harrison reluctantly passed on the order from President Woodrow Wilson to close down

red-light districts within ten miles of an army post. There were some 200 Filipina and 122 Japanese women in licensed brothels at the time.50 Mayor Justo Lukban controversially deported 178 Filipinas to Davao, in the south. He was apparently encouraged by Josefa Abiertas, the first female Filipina law graduate from the University of the Philippines, although she regretted his actions against the women involved.51 The Manila Council tried to revert to licensed prostitution in 1924, but this was opposed by local women’s associations and the clergy.52 The Japanese government responded by repatriating Japanese women, and by 1928 there were no Japanese women officially recorded as selling sex in the Philippines.53

The criminalization of prostitution was an active policy from 1918 onwards. The police reported 170 arrests made for violation of the law on prostitution in 1921, according to historian Alfred McCoy.54 Discreet regulation was permitted, but only under the guise of dance halls that served the US Army and Navy as covers for selling sex.55 As Paul Kramer remarks, the US troops had sufficient wages to be frequent customers at these clandestine Manila brothels.56

The League of Nations’ Anti-Trafficking Campaign, 1921–1933

The signing of the Covenant of the League of Nations in 1919 had brought a renewed commitment to international cooperation to suppress the “traffic in women and children.”57 The 1921 International Convention for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children aimed to suppress trafficking and forced prostitution, although as Daniel Gorman pointed out, it did not target consenting prostitution or brothel keeping. Signatories to the 1921 convention were expected to submit annual reports on their actions to suppress the traffic. The Social Section of the League of Nations Secretariat, headed by London-born Dame Rachel Crowdy from 1919 to 1931, compiled summary reports for the Advisory Commission for the Protection and Welfare of Children and Young People—Traffic in Women and Children Committee (henceforth Advisory Committee).58 The Advisory Committee under Crowdy had five assessors from voluntary associations, such as the abolitionist International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children (International Bureau) and the feminist International Women’s Organizations.59

According to Jessica R. Pliley, the Advisory Committee debated three distinct positions: the continued regulation of prostitution; a paternalist abolition opposing all forms of prostitution even to the point of restricting women’s mobility; and the feminist abolitionist position, which opposed “laws specifically targeting women.”60 The “prohibition of the employment of foreign women in licensed houses” was first raised in 1922 by a Polish

delegate to the Fifth Committee of the Assembly who was concerned about Polish women in South America. The French representative opposed the proposal, describing it as an attack on the “liberty of women who chose to prostitute themselves” and discriminatory toward foreign women.61 Stephanie Limoncelli suggested that unlike the more liberal International Abolitionist Federation, the International Bureau saw prostitution as a “moral failing” of women and girls.62 Speaking at the April 1932 meeting of the Traffic Committee on behalf of Women’s International Associations, feminist abolitionist Avril de Sainte-Croix argued against deportation, as “the great majority of women’s international associations had declared themselves opposed to the expulsion of foreign prostitutes” and to licensed brothels.63 Carol Miller also alludes to tensions on the Advisory Committee between the French, supporting state-regulated brothels, and British representative, S. W. Harris, advocating for the suppression of brothel prostitution.64 The British lobby built on the work of Josephine Butler and the Ladies’ National Association (LNA), which fought until 1886 against the Contagious Diseases Acts and forced medical examination of women selling sex. The LNA became the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene after 1915 and continued advocating against regulation in the colonies.65

The United States did not sign the 1921 convention, having rejected membership in the League of Nations, but Bascom Johnson provided answers to the League’s 1921 questionnaire on behalf of the United States.66 A report on the Philippines appeared in the 1924 League of Nations “Prostitution and the Traffic in Women and Children in Various Asiatic Countries and Colonies,” recording women selling sex as “Native 600, European and American 30, Japanese 30,” but omitting Chinese women.67 The League questionnaire also asked for the number, age, and nationality of women deported as “foreign prostitutes.”68 The Philippines officials started recording the number of deportations because the League of Nations required it.

The League of Nations published its first regional study of trafficking in 1927, investigating prostitution in Europe, the Americas, and North Africa, based on the research that had begun in 1924. The 1927 and 1933 traffic reports had many similarities; most notably, both were funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bureau of Social Hygiene and overseen by Bascom Johnson. Dr. William Snow, head of the ASHA, presided over the original committee, and he appointed Bascom Johnson to lead the research. Johnson was again requested for the Asia study, after Grace Abbott, the US representative on the Advisory Committee, helped secure funding of US$125,000 from the Rockefeller Foundation.69 Both reports began with compiled data provided by local officials, police, and interviews with organizations involved in rescue activities. The 1927 investigation was

thought by some to be more rigorous because it also employed undercover investigators who made contact with underworld informants and women in brothels. Paul Knepper suggests that this direct approach did not lead to a more nuanced reading of the situation. For example, investigators merely cited the Argentine authorities who blamed trafficking on immigrants, and on Jewish women in particular—a trend also seen in Europe. Jean-Michel Chaumont similarly noted that ASHA undercover investigator George Worthington blamed immigrant Chinese in America for the trafficking in young Chinese women.70

Rachel Crowdy, speaking on the 1927 report, cited its finding that as many as 70 percent of women in international traffic had previously worked in prostitution in their own countries. At the same time, women testified that “had they known the conditions to which they were going . . . they would never have gone.”71 Crowdy was already planning for the next study of Asia. Japanese delegates had come to her with a proposal for the abolition of regulated brothels in Japan by 1933.72 In 1926, the British Social Hygiene Council had also commissioned the Bostock Hill’s Report on Singapore, which highlighted the conditions experienced by Chinese women and advocated against renewed regulation of brothels.73

The 1933 Commission of Enquiry collected an array of data, although the published 500-page report was brief considering its geographical range. The unpublished preliminary report on the Philippines was longer, breaking down deportation figures for Chinese women across the years 1925–1930, with a peak of 200 in 1929, reducing to 135 in 1930.74 Initially, the Advisory Committee had been unsure whether to include the Philippines in the itinerary of the 1930–1931 traveling commission. As Michael Salman notes, the assumption was that the American Philippines would be exemplary and thus there would be no need for League intervention.75 The members of the traveling commission met with the Committee of Enquiry in August 1930, with French representative Eugène Regnault serving as chair. Grace Abbott reported that Spain’s Don Picente Palmarali y Reboulet claimed that “there was no traffic in the Philippines, moral conditions were on a very high level.” The Japanese representative Ito, however, cited reports of Chinese trafficking into the Philippines. Abbott explained that it was generally agreed that “owing to our immigration laws and the Mann Act the Philippines was at least for an oriental country in an excellent condition.” She concluded that the Philippines should be visited if only because it would provide “a very interesting and valuable contrast to conditions in other parts of the Orient.”76 Thus from the outset Abbott cast Chinese immigration as the problem and indicated her support for the restrictive Mann Act as the solution.

In addition to Bascom Johnson, the traveling commission included Karol Pindor, a Polish diplomat with experience in Asia, and Dr. Alma Sundquist, a Swedish expert in venereal disease. They spent just two weeks in Manila, from January 24 to February 10, 1931. During this time, they were received by Governor General Dwight F. Davis and interviewed forty others. While historians have pointed to the reduction in voluntary organizations on the Advisory Committee in the 1930s, there is no question that the traveling commission sought information from a wide range of interested parties. They interviewed chief medical officers of the army and the navy, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Trained Nurses Association. The French, Chinese, and Japanese consuls gave testimonies. The commission spoke to representatives from nongovernmental organizations, including the Women’s Temperance Union, the Public Welfare Commission, the Associated Charities, the Manila Bulletin, and the Episcopal Church. They also visited the Mary Johnson Hospital, Bilibid Prison, cabarets and dance halls, and the Children’s Welfare Village. If they spoke to Chinese women in person, this was not recorded. The traveling commission also attended the Board of Special Enquiry deportation hearings of three fifteen-year-old Chinese girls.77

A report titled “A List of Foreign Prostitutes Deported from the Philippine Islands” included twenty-eight women categorized as European who were deported from 1928 to 1930; aged nineteen to forty-three, they were mostly French, but there were a few American and Russian women. European women who sold sex reportedly arrived as tourists or dressmakers, while Chinese women, because of immigration restrictions, entered Manila as the wives and minor children of Chinese residents.78 Most of the Chinese women were listed as voluntary deportations. No mention was made of the fact that deported Chinese women were not necessarily convicted of prostitution; any woman not related by birth or marriage to a Philippines resident was liable to deportation. The Immigration Department in Manila appeared proud of its restrictive measures, showing no regard for women’s well-being: “Prostitutes or not prostitutes—they must go through that investigation; every woman who comes, especially Chinese. . . . If she makes contradictions in her testimony we reject her, denying her admittance.”79

The Manila Girl’s Training School gave the traveling commission information about two Chinese girls in their care. One was a sixteen-year old, brought to Manila in 1923 at age ten. She had been bought for $150 from her former master, who returned to China. She was arrested in 1929 for vagrancy at the New Chicago Hotel, Manila, where she was taken by a Chinese procurer for the purpose of selling sex.80 According to the Tribune newspaper, the manager of the New Chicago Hotel was a Cantonese man, Yap Tack Wing.81 The second girl was a seventeen-year-old who had arrived

in Manila in 1925 when she was fourteen, and sold to a Chinese man. She was arrested in 1928 for vagrancy and deported.82 It was not surprising that these cases of underage prostitution appeared in the report; women under the age of twenty-one were the primary concern of the 1921 convention. The League of Nations decided, however, to expand its campaign, introducing the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age in 1933. This convention made it an offense to procure or entice, “even with her consent, a woman or girl of full age for immoral purposes in another country.”83

The Chinese consul, K. L. Kwong, who was cited at length, claimed not to have been notified of the deportations of Chinese women; this was not surprising given that as consul from 1930 to 1934, he had been a recent arrival in 1931. In an apparent attempt to deflect the blame onto the Japanese, Kwong speculated that the women might have been arriving from Formosa (Taiwan), then under Japanese rule. He told the traveling commission that he opposed the mui tsai system, but he acknowledged that it continued and could lead to prostitution when the girls came of age.84 Historian Christian Henriot pointed out that the Chinese government, wishing to prevent the tarnishing of their image abroad in the League’s report, requested that maps depicting the “yellow slave trade” be removed from the final report.85 China, it should be noted, had been a League of Nations member since 1920 and had ratified the 1921 convention in 1926.

Grace Abbott reviewed the preliminary report on the Philippines and made no comment on the treatment of Chinese women. Since she was unable to attend the Geneva meeting in December 1932, Bascom Johnson sent her his draft report and encouraged her to provide him with feedback. Her only request was that one statement relating to traffic in Filipina women be removed “unless there is a good deal of evidence to back it up.”86 Katherine F. Lenroot, also of the US Children’s Bureau, went to Geneva in Abbott’s stead. The Traffic Commission meeting, with Johnson as rapporteur, acknowledged that clandestine prostitution in the Philippines, which had no licensed houses, had been reduced thanks to the vigilance of local authorities. The Traffic Commission’s only criticism was that the commissioner general of immigration in Washington, DC, should be charged with coordinating deportations and should liaise with a local representative in the Philippines. The Immigration Department in Manila was also advised to consult with the Chinese consul before deporting women, noting that no arrangements had been made for the women’s “reception by relatives, friends, or charitable agencies on arrival.”87 Wellington Koo, Chinese delegate to the League of Nations Council, later requested that a Chinese representative be added to the Advisory Committee to enable China “to participate fully in the discussion.”88

Policing of Prostitution in Manila after 1930

After the red-light district was closed, new Manila brothels opened in La Loma to the north and in Pasay and Culiculi to the south. These were unofficial brothels, associated with gambling and gangsters, who paid police and local officials to allow them to operate. According to Alfred McCoy, the police campaigns of 1925 and 1931 failed to “break this nexus among the vice syndicates, crooked police, and local politics.”89 The 1931 push on policing was likely galvanized by the visit of the traveling commission, as it was soon afterwards that the Philippines Vice Commission was established “to make a survey of the existence of prostitution and traffic in women in the Philippines, with a view to the adoption of measures for its control and eradication.”90 In 1931 there were 207 arrests of young women. Not all cases led to deportation, as some lawyers successfully petitioned for a writ of habeas corpus to claim unlawful detention on the grounds of insufficient evidence or improper hearing proceedings. The police complained to the traveling commission that without a detention station, the women had to be released on bond, which gave them “every opportunity to prepare themselves when their cases are presented before the Board of Special Enquiry.”91

The case of Sia Pag is an example. Sia Pag arrived in Manila on September 22, 1930, from Amoy, traveling as the minor daughter of resident merchant Sia Hoat Lian. On December 17, authorities received complaints that Sia Pag was engaged in prostitution. She was arrested and sent before a board of special inquiry, where she was represented by attorney Ernesto Zaragoza. The board concluded: “There is no proof that the girl had ever plied this disgraceful trade.” They disregarded the testimony of agents Lazcanotegui and Tan Heng that she lived in the New Chicago Hotel with a Chinese man. Instead, the court found her guilty of having fraudulently obtained her certificate of residence and recommended that she be deported. Jose Fernandez Uy Tana instituted habeas corpus proceedings on behalf of Sia Pag, then just fifteen years old, to overturn the deportation order. Her attorney, Zaragoza, successfully argued that she “was not granted a full, complete, and impartial hearing.”92

In 1930, Judge Anacleto Díaz led revisions of the Spanish colonial codes with provisions against trafficking in women and concubinage.93 The Revised Penal Code of 1930 (Act No. 3815) criminalized prostitution in article 202, Vagrants and Prostitutes, which defined prostitutes as “women who, for money or profit, habitually indulge in sexual intercourse or lascivious conduct.” Punishment was arresto menor (minor arrest) with one to thirty days in prison or a fine not exceeding two hundred pesos. Other related offenses included corruption of minors (article 340), relating to underage prostitution, with a punishment of six to twelve years in prison, and white slave trade (article 341).94

In 1932, Insular Customs began to construct a new immigration detention station to accommodate more than one thousand immigrants on Engineer Island, at the mouth of the Pasig River, close to central Manila.95 The detention station opened in July 1933, in time for the arrival of the SS Anking and the arrests of Chinese women in September. 96 The insular collector of customs, Vicente Aldanese, ordered authorities “to conduct rigid investigations of Chinese women arriving here with a view to keeping out Chinese girls of questionable character.”97 A large group aged sixteen to twenty-one waived their right to a hearing and left voluntarily for China.98 Lillian Kwong, the Chinese consul’s wife, herself an active social worker, visited the Engineer Island detention station, where Ay Kim was being held in 1934, and declared that she was satisfied with the conditions there.99

In 1935, the Manila tabloid magazine Scandal claimed that Chinese girls were still being imported for clandestine brothels: “All around Binondo, on Gandara, T.Pinpin, Ongpin, Teodara Alonso, Nueva and other surroundings streets, they can be had through the right approach.”100 Scandal acknowledged that the “Chinese consulate and the respectable portion of the Chinese community have consistently campaigned for the eradication of these vicious elements and spared no efforts to cause their deportation.” Nevertheless, there was “a fresh supply of young slaves [aged fourteen to twenty] coming in from China almost every month; ” the cost was thirty to fifty pesos “for the young and beautiful ones.”101

The Manila Tribune’s Woman’s Forum in 1934 published the views of magistrate Anna M. Kross, of the Women’s Court in New York City, who offered a critique of the criminalization of prostitution. She preferred “to take cases of prostitution out of criminal courts and handle them socially before a commission.”102 Her views were not necessarily shared by the leading women of Manila, who, if anything, were calling for stronger police action. In November 1932, the elite Woman’s Club of Manila held a public forum to discuss the problem of trafficking. President (and founder in 1925) Sofia R. de Veyra and Pilar H. Lim, president of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs, explained their plan to present bills to the legislature.103 These were items “they deemed essential to curb the iniquitous traffic in women and girls.” Lim spoke of controlling the so-called “Employment Agencies” in Manila. Acting Secretary Reyes of the Department of Justice had proposed a bill “to curb immorality” after consulting with leading women. Club women spoke at the forum on their knowledge of “commercialized vice.”104 Prostitution was again on the agenda at the National Federation of Women’s Clubs convention in 1933, concerning Filipina women rather than Chinese. Asunción A. Perez, executive secretary of the Associated Charities, provided “facts and figures on the corruption of minors, especially through the agency of dance halls and cabarets.”105

Encouragement for the prosecution of women also appears in the landmark book by Encarnación Alzona, The Filipino Woman: Her Social, Economic and Political Status, 1565–1933. The first female historian of the Philippines, Alzona had a degree in history from the University of the Philippines, a master’s degree from Radcliffe College, and a PhD in 1923 from Columbia University.106 In 1932 a Barbour Scholarship for Oriental Women at the University of Michigan allowed her to finish her book. Alzona was a feminist and a nationalist.107 In her book she discusses the closing of Manila’s red-light district: “Prostitutes are now free to live anywhere and they are scattered in the city, the suburbs, and the provinces, thus making their apprehension difficult. Moreover, the present law is defective, for it permits prosecution only in cases of vagrancy, and many of these unfortunates have some kind of part-time employment, either as waitresses, laundry women, or professional dancers.”108 Alzona argued for the arrest of both men and women. She noted that both the Philippines Medical Association and the women’s clubs had opposed the reopening of the red-light district “in order to stop the traffic in women.”109

President Quezon, the League of Nations, and the YWCA

Manuel L. Quezon was elected president of the new Philippines Commonwealth in September 1935, having been president of the Philippines Senate since 1916 and leader of the Nacionalista Party.110 Quezon did not engage in the ongoing League of Nations trafficking campaign. He declined to send a representative to the 1937 League of Nations Traffic in Women and Children Conference in Bandung, Java, on the grounds that the traffic in women and children was already prohibited and penalized by Philippine law. He described trafficking as “more of a police problem than it is social” and added: “Foreign women who several years ago had been dedicating themselves to prostitution were deported. Since then we have had little or no trouble with notorious women.”111 His framing of women as “notorious” was at odds with the League of Nations’ understanding of women as the victims of traffickers.

Planning for the 1937 traffic conference had begun in 1935, when Ruth F. Woodsmall, general secretary of the World YWCA in New York, wrote to Erik Ekstrand, Crowdy’s replacement in the Social Section. Woodsmall had been in Washington, DC, to discuss holding the conference in Manila. Mary Anderson, director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, and Katherine F. Lenroot, director of the Children’s Bureau, made Woodsmall aware that with the transition to the Philippines Commonwealth, Manila was an unlikely venue. Both women assured her of their “deep and continued interest in the problem.”112 Katharine F. Lenroot, who replaced Grace Abbott

as chief of the US Children’s Bureau in 1934, was on the League’s Advisory Committee until 1939.113 Lenroot arranged for Anne Guthrie, of the Manila YWCA, to attend the conference as the unofficial American observer.114

The fate of Chinese women was a concern for Lenroot, who wrote to Guthrie, in Java, suggesting that she discuss the welfare of deportees returning to China: “I realize that the problems of these girls are very difficult to work out and that it may not be possible to develop satisfactory methods of exchange of information which will ensure some measure of protection being given to the girls.”115 Guthrie also spoke at the conference on the appointment in 1936 of a woman judge in Manila to oversee cases involving women and children.116 These mid-1930s events suggest that there remained a strong cohort of feminist internationalists working on behalf of the League of Nations, following in the footsteps of Crowdy and Abbott.

The deportation case in 1936 of Lee Ha, a twenty-five-year-old woman who arrived from Hong Kong, provides one example of why Lenroot’s notion of protecting “girls” did not necessarily suit deported women. Lee Ha’s photograph was published on the front page of the Manila Tribune. Her serious gaze and businesslike suit jacket gave her the look of a sophisticated university student. Lee Ha had traveled from Hong Kong as the alleged wife of A. Mendoza in order to gain entry into Manila. She was immediately arrested by Agent Lazcanotegui, of the Customs Secret Service, who recognized her as the “same girl” he had placed on the SS President Lincoln for deportation eight months prior. She had been “charged with leading an immoral life” and had failed in her appeal to the Supreme Court. On her second arrival in Manila, she was deported that afternoon. The Tribune published an interview with Lee Ha in which she “confided that she felt more at home in Manila than in China and that the call of the city’s atmosphere was too strong for her to resist.”117 It seems unlikely that Lee Ha would have welcomed YWCA support on her return journey.

Conclusions

The deportation of Chinese women from Manila from 1925 to 1936 followed the American-led policy of brothel suppression implemented in 1918, which was taken up and expanded with the support of Filipino leaders. The rise in the number of deportations during this decade was in part a response to the increased immigration of Chinese women and a growing antagonism toward Chinese immigration. The notable silence in the Manila Tribune after 1936 on the subject of the traffic in women most likely reflected the waning influence of the League of Nations in the Philippines. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the resulting wave of Chinese refugees fleeing from violence would soon shift those attitudes toward Chinese immigration.

The influence of the League of Nations anti-trafficking campaign on Manila was seen in the formal recording of policing and deportation activities after 1924. Because the American Bascom Johnson took a leading role in the League’s investigations, Manila viewed the campaign as a largely American-driven one. As imperial rule in the Philippines drew to a close, the United States still sought to promote itself as a benevolent imperialist, bringing the rule of law to the “Orient.” In this respect the League of Nations anti-trafficking campaign, by reasserting the need for social reform in Asia, had reinscribed racialized and orientalist understandings of Chinese women and promoted a regressive form of imperialist internationalism.

In Manila, the anti-trafficking campaign, while supposedly aimed at the protection of women, provided no evidence that local feminist abolitionists or the Chinese consul sought to protect Chinese women from police intervention. While some representatives on the League of Nations’ Advisory Committee may have protested against the deportation of “foreign prostitutes,” their advice was not taken up by the League of Nations Council. The only support offered to Chinese women in Manila was to encourage the government to develop more structured deportation processes. But by requesting that Chinese deportees be reunited with friends or family or voluntary organizations in China, feminist internationalists risked renewing the maternalist interventions from earlier British imperial campaigns. Grace Abbott, who had imagined Manila to be a showcase for social policy, was apparently unaware that the suppression of trafficking came at a cost to Chinese women. As successor to Grace Abbott, Katharine Lenroot was a strong advocate for feminist action, but her acknowledgment that there was no easy solution to the individual problems faced by Chinese women was rightly hesitant.

Notes

I wish to thank Julia Laite, Philippa Hetherington, Frances Steel and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice. A special thanks to the archivists at the League of Nations Archives, Geneva. This research was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, FT120100127, and a US Studies Centre grant from the University of Sydney. 1Case of Tan Kim, G.R. No. 41391, Sept. 6, 1934, Republic of the Philippines, Supreme Court, accessed July 1, 2017, http://www.lawphil.net; Antonio S. Tan, “The Emergence of Philippine Chinese National and Political Awakening,” in More Tsinoy Than We Admit, Chinese-Filipino Interactions over the Centuries, ed. Richard T. Chu (Quezon City: Vibal Foundation, 2015), 301–366, 320. 2See, e.g., Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Christian

Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949, trans. Noël Castelino (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Henriot, “Courtship, Sex and Money: The Economics of Courtesan Houses in Nineteenth- and TwentiethCentury Shanghai,” Women’s History Review, 8, no. 3 (1999): 443–467. 3“2 Agents Face Court Action,” Tribune (Manila), Feb. 2, 1934, 3. 4“Chinese deported,” Tribune, May 12, 1935, 12. 5Case of Tan Kim, Sept. 6, 1934; An Act to Regulate the Immigration of Aliens to, and the Residence of Aliens in, the United States, Pub. L. No. 64-301, 39 Stat. 874 (1917), On the United States, see Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,” in Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 94-146; 132.

6Case of Tan Kim, Sept. 6, 1934. 7“Chinese Influx Here Unabated,” Tribune, Mar. 16, 1933, 2.

8“Arrest of 200 Chinese Girls in City Ordered,” Tribune, Oct. 4, 1933, 2.

9Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 231. 10League of Nations, Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East: Report to Council (Geneva, 1933); Barbara Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime during the Inter-War Years: The League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children,” in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950, ed. Keith Grant, Philippa Levine, and Frank Trentmann (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 54–79, 72. 11Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime,” 66. 12League of Nations, Commission of Enquiry into Traffic, 37.

13See Jessica R. Pliley, Policing Sexuality: The Mann Act and the Making of the FBI (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 14David Petruccelli, “The Crisis of Liberal Internationalism: The Legacies of the League of Nations Reconsidered,” Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020): 111–136, 127.

15Liat Kozma, “Women’s Migration for Prostitution in the Interwar Middle East and North Africa,” Journal of Women’s History 28, no. 3 (Fall 2016): 93–113, 100. 16For a nuanced discussion relating to individuals as method, see Julia Laite, “The Emmet’s Inch: Small History in a Digital Age,” Journal of Social History 53, no. 4 (Summer 2020): 1–27. 17Tamara Cooper, “British Women Missionaries, Chinese Women, and the Protestant Rescue Project in Hong Kong and China, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., University of Wollongong, 2020), chap. 6.

18Maria Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants, The Social History of a Chinese Custom (London: Zed Books, 1988), 146, 108. 19James Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–1940 (Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1993), 52. 20Sarah Paddle, “The Limits of Sympathy: International Feminists and the Chinese ‘Slave Girl’ Campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4, no. 3 (2003): 1-22; 1. See also Karen Yuen, “Theorizing the Chinese: The Mui Tsai Controversy and Constructions of Transnational Chineseness in Hong Kong and British Malaya,” New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 6, no. 2 (2004): 95–110. 21Rachel Leow, “‘Do you Own Non-Chinese Mui Tsai?’ Re-examining Race and Female Servitude in Malaya and Hong Kong, 1919–1939,” Modern Asian Studies 46, no. 6 (Nov. 2012): 1736–1763, 1739. 22Susan Pedersen, “The Maternalist Moment in British Colonial Policy: The Controversy over ‘Child Slavery’ in Hong Kong, 1917–1941,” Past and Present, no. 171 (May 2001): 161–202, 163. Antoinette Burton described Josephine Butler’s campaign in India as “maternal imperialism”; see Antoinette M. Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the ‘Indian Woman,’ 1865–1915,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 137-157; 144. 23Magaly Rodríguez García, “Child Slavery, Sex Trafficking or Domestic Work? The League of Nations and Its Analysis of the Mui Tsai System,” in Towards a Global History of Domestic and Caregiving Workers, ed. Dirk Hoerder, Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk, and Silke Neunsinger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 428–450, 435. See also Suzanne Miers, “Mui Tsai Through the Eyes of the Victim: Janet Lim’s Story of Bondage and Escape,” in Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity, eds. Pun Ngai and Yee Lai-Man (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2003), 433–452. 24Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasure; Gail Hershatter, “Appreciating Judith Walkowitz, Then and Now,” Journal of Women’s History 29, no. 4 (Winter 2017): 160–163, 160. See also Sue Gronewold, Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860–1936 (New York: Haworth, 1982). 25Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race, and Politics: Policing Venereal Disease in the British Empire (New York: Routledge, 2003); Lenore Manderson, Sickness and the State: Health and Illness in Colonial Malaya, 1870–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Raelene Frances, “Prostitution: The Age of Empires,” in A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Age of Empire, ed. Chiara Beccalossi and Ivan Crozier (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 145-170. 26Philippa Levine, “Modernity, Medicine and Colonialism: The Contagious Diseases Ordinances in Hong Kong and the Straits Settlements,” in Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, ed. Antoinette Burton (New York: Routledge, 1999), 35-48; 37. 27Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 175; Vicki Crinis, “Sex Trafficking to the Federated Malay States, 1920–1940: From Migration for Prostitution to Victim or Criminal?” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 48, no. 2 (2019): 1–23, 11; “Brothels to Go,” Singapore Free Press, Dec. 16, 1931, 8.

28Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “Prostitution in Colonial Hanoi (1885–1954),” in Selling Sex in the City: A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s–2000s, ed. Magaly Rodríguez García, Lex Heerma van Voss, and Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 538–566, 565; Julia Martínez, “La Traite des Jaunes: Trafficking in Women and Children across the China Sea,” in , Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 204–221; Trude Jacobsen, Sex Trafficking in Southeast Asia, A History of Desire, Duty, and Debt (London: Routledge, 2017), esp. 112; Isabelle Tracol-Huynh, “The Shadow Theater of Prostitution in French Colonial Tonkin: Faceless Prostitutes under the Colonial Gaze,” trans. Kareem James AbuZeid, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 7, no. 1 (2012): 10–51, 36. 29Theresa C. Cariño, “Chinese women in Manila, Changing Roles and Perceptions,” in Chu, More Tsinoy Than We Admit, 462–478, 463. 30Maria Luisa Camagay, “Prostitution in Nineteenth Century Manila,” Philippine Studies 36 (1988): 241–255; Elizabeth Sinn, “Women at Work: Chinese Brothel Keepers in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Journal of Women’s History 19, no. 3 (2007): 87–111, 92; Manderson, Sickness and the State, 175; Warren, Ah Ku and Karayuki-san, 39. 31Jely Agamao Galang, “Vagrants and Outcasts: Chinese Labouring Classes, Criminality, and the State in the Philippines, 1831–1898” (PhD diss., Murdoch University, 2019), 191. 32Andrew Jimenez Abalahin, “Prostitution Policy and the Project of Modernity: A Comparative Study of Colonial Indonesia and the Philippines, 1850–1940” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2003), 161; Raquel A. G. Reyes, Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement, 1882–1892 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), 18. 33Galang, “Vagrants and Outcasts,” 192. 34Jimenez Abalahin, “Prostitution Policy and the Project of Modernity,” 158–159. See also Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society and the State in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, Manila (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996), 41–44. 35Motoe Terami-Wada, “Karayuki-san of Manila: 1880-1920,” Philippine Studies 34 (1986): 287–316, 289. 36Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 21. See also Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 37Paul A. Kramer, “The Military-Sexual Complex: Prostitution, Disease and the Boundaries of Empire during the Philippine-American War,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, issue 30, no. 2 (2011): 1–35, 1, 10. See also Tessa Ong Winkelmann, “Rethinking the Sexual Geography of American Empire in the Philippines: Interracial Intimacies in Mindanao and the Cordilleras, 1898–1921,” in Gendering the Trans-Pacific World, ed. Catherine Ceniza Choy and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 39–76.

38Jimenez Abalahin, “Prostitution Policy and the Project of Modernity,” 300–301.

39William B. Johnson, “The Crowning Infamy of Imperialism,” New Voice and the Chicago Lever (Chicago: American League, 1901), in American Social Hygiene Association Papers, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 6, https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/11/resources/6144. 40Kristin L. Hoganson, “‘As Badly Off as the Filipinos’: U.S. Women’s Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 13, no. 2 (2001): 9–33, 15. See also Pamela Jean Maddock, “Venereal Disease Control in the Progressive Era US Army: Managing Gendered Labour and Leisure in Militarised Space, 1870–1920” (PhD diss., University of Sydney, 2019), chap. 2. 41Victor Román Mendoza, Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899–1913 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 45–46. 42Ordinances of the City of Manila, Section 822, Annex IV, in League of Nations, “Traffic in Women and Children, Extension of the Enquiry on Traffic in Women and Children in the East, Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 1932, Second Inquiry of the Special Body of Experts, Preliminary Reports, Philippine Islands, File 38291, LON Archives (hereafter League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippines Islands”). 43US Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands, 1903, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC, 1905), 55. 44US Bureau of the Census, Census of the Philippine Islands, 1903, 2:117. Henry Willis mentioned only Russian, Japanese, and American women. Henry Parker Willis, Our Philippine Problem: A Study of American Colonial Policy (New York: Henry Holt, 1905), 257. 45Terami-Wada, “Karayuki-San of Manila,” 309; Luis Camara Dery, A History of the Inarticulate: Local History, Prostitution and Other Views from the Bottom (Quezon City: New Day, 2001), 150. 46Terami-Wada, “Karayuki-san of Manila,” 300. 47Annex II, Philippines Islands, Population by Nationality and Sex, League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippines Islands.” 48Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 32, 46. 49Major Bascom Johnson, “Eliminating Vice from Camp Cities,” Annals of the American Academy, 1918, 64.

50Dery, History of the Inarticulate, 144; League of Nations, “Particulars concerning Prostitution and the Traffic in Women and Children in Various Asiatic Countries and Colonies,” 82, 1924, S171, no. 1, 26, LON Archives, Geneva.

51Bessie Dwyer, “The House Set on a Hill—The Abiertas House of Friendship,” Tribune, Feb. 1, 1935, 5. 52League of Nations, “Particulars concerning Prostitution,” 82. 53Hiroshi Hashiya, “The Pattern of Japanese Economic Penetration of the Prewar Philippines,” in The Japanese in Colonial Southeast Asia, ed. Saya Shiraishi and Takashi Shiraishi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1993), 113–138, 135; Bill Mihalopoulos, Sex in Japan’s Globalization, 1870–1930: Prostitutes, Emigration and Nation-Building (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 69. 54Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009). 55Report of the Secretary of the Interior to the Governor-General, 1921, 19, 90, Box 9, Folder 12, Hayden Papers, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 56Paul Kramer, “The Darkness That Enters the Home: The Politics of Prostitution during the Philippine-American War,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 366–404; D. J. Pivar, “The Military, Prostitution, and Colonial Peoples: India and the Philippines, 1885–1917,” Journal of Sex Research 17, no. 3 (1981): 256–269. 57“The Covenant of the League of Nations,” American Journal of International Law 15, no. 1 (1921): 12. 58The title Advisory Commission for the Protection and Welfare of Chinese and Young People – Traffic in Women and Children Committee was used from 1925 to 1936. The Swede Erik Einan Ekstrand replaced Crowdy as director from 1931 to 1946. See Magaly Rodríguez García, “The League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” International Review of Social History 57 (2012): 97–128, 99n8. 59Daniel Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism, and the Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children in the 1920s,” Twentieth Century British History 19, no. 2 (2008): 198–199; Stephen Legg, Prostitution and the Ends of Empire, Scale, Governmentalities, and Interwar India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 181. 60Jessica R. Pliley, “Claims to Protection: The Rise and Fall of Feminist Abolitionism in the League of Nations’ Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936,” Journal of Women’s History 22, no. 4 (2010): 90–113, 97. 61Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime,” 63–64. 62Stephanie A. Limoncelli, The Politics of Trafficking: The First International Movement to Combat the Sexual Exploitation of Women (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 63–64. See also Rachael Attwood, “Stopping the Traffic: The National Vigilance Association and the International Fight against the ‘White Slave’ Trade (1899–c. 1909),” Women’s History Review 24, no. 3 (2015): 325–350. 63League of Nations, Traffic in Women and Children Committee, Report on the Work of the Eleventh Session, Geneva, Apr. 4–9, 1932, C.390 M.220. 1932 IV EN, 4, LON Archives.

64Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism,” 186–216, 198–199; Carol Miller, “The Social Section and Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations,” in International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939, ed. Paul Weindling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154–175, 155–157; Alain Corbin, Women for Hire, Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 334. 65The society was renamed the Josephine Butler Society in 1960. Julia Laite, Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizen: Commercial Sex in London, 1885–1960 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 123; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 93, 99; Nancy M. Wingfield, The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 174. 66Paul Knepper, International Crime in the 20th Century: The League of Nations Era, 1919–1939 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 91; See https://treaties.un.org for details of ratifications. 67League of Nations, “Particulars concerning Prostitution,” 82. 68Advisory Committee on Traffic in Women and Children, report on the work of the third session, Apr. 11, 1924, 9, C.184. M.73. 1924 IV, LON Archives. 69Metzger, “Towards an International Human Rights Regime,” 71; Paul Knepper, “The Investigation into the Traffic in Women by the League of Nations: Sociological Jurisprudence as an International Social Project,” Law and History Review 34, no. 1 (Feb. 2016): 45–73, 71. On the Bureau of Social Hygiene, see Gretchen Soderlund, Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 70Knepper, International Crime in the 20th Century, 109; Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight against White Slavery, 1880–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); Keely Stauter-Halsted, The Devil’s Chain: Prostitution and Social Control in Partitioned Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015); David Petruccelli, “Pimps, Prostitutes and Policewomen: The Polish Women Police and the International Campaign against the Traffic in Women and Children between the World Wars,” Contemporary European History 24, no. 3 (2015): 333–350, 345; JeanMichel Chaumont, Le mythe de la traite des blanches: Enquête sur la fabrication d’un fléau (Paris: Le Découverte, 2009), 172. 71Rachel Crowdy, “The Humanitarian Activities of the League of Nations,” Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs 6, no. 3 (1927): 153–169, 158; League of Nations, Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children: Part 1 (Geneva, 1927). 72Crowdy, “Humanitarian Activities of the League of Nations,” 160. 73Gorman, “Empire, Internationalism,” 205. 74League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippines Islands,” Annex VII. François-Xavier Bonnet wondered how many of the nine hundred women were prostitutes in “From Oripun to the Yapayuki-San: An Historical Outline of Prostitution in the Philippines,” Moussons 29 (2017): 41–64, 47.

75Michael Salman, The Embarrassment of Slavery: Controversies over Bondage and Nationalism in the American Colonial Philippines (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 263. 76Memo to US State Department from Grace Abbott, Sept. 26, 1930, RG 350, Bureau of Insular Affairs, Box 455, Entry 5, National Archives and Records Administration College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA). 77League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippines Islands,” 1–2, 41. 78League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippines Islands,” 38. 79League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 37. 80League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 39. 81“Five Cantonese Firms Will Run Grand Hotel,” Tribune, Mar. 23, 1935, 4. 82League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 40. 83Rodríguez García, “League of Nations and the Moral Recruitment of Women,” 117. See https://treaties.un.org for the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women of Full Age, Geneva, Oct. 11, 1933. 84League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 42–44. 85Henriot, Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai, 318.

86Memo to Mr. Field, US State Department, from Grace Abbott, Nov. 14, 1932, RG 59, Department of State, Box 2575, NARA. 87Prentiss B. Gilbert, American Consul, Geneva, to Secretary of State, Washington, DC, May 15, 1933, RG 59, Department of State, Box 2575, NARA. 88Minutes, 70th Session of the Council, Feb. 1, 1933, Traffic in Women and Children, Special Body of Experts, 2nd Enquiry in the East, 11B, 926, LON Archives. Koo was not unsympathetic to the Americans, having earned a PhD from Columbia University. 89McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 357. 90Official Gazette (Philippines), no. 36 (Mar. 24, 1931). 91League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 37. 92Jose Fernandez Uy Tana v. The Insular Collector of Customs, G.R. No. L-35129, Aug. 15, 1931, Republic of the Philippines, Supreme Court, accessed July 1, 2017 http://www.lawphil.net/judjuris/juri1931/aug1931/gr_l-35129_1931.html. 93Annual Report of the Governor General, Philippine Islands, for the Calendar Year 1933 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1935); League of Nations, “Report Concerning the Philippine Islands,” 7. 94See “Act. No. 3815, December 8, 1930,” Supreme Court E-Library, http:// elibrary.judiciary.gov.ph/thebookshelf/showdocs/28/20426.

95Engineer Island became Baseco Compound. “Immigrants Will Lose Old Rights,” Tribune, Jan. 9, 1932, 6.

96“New Immigrant Station to Open,” Tribune, July 20, 1933, 8; “Girl Slaves Will All Be Rounded Up, Office of Governor General Informed of Illicit Entry of Chinese Victims,” Tribune, Sept. 30, 1933, 14. 97“Arrest of 200 Chinese Girls in City Ordered,” Tribune, Oct. 4, 1933, 2. 98“Bureau Deports 3 Chinese Girls,” Tribune, Oct. 12, 1933, 3; “Man Wants to Be Deported to China,” Tribune, Dec. 13, 1933, 8; “Nine Chinese Are Deported to Amoy,” Tribune, Dec. 23, 1933, 8.

99“Mrs. Kwong Heads Party of Visitors to Immigration Detention Station,” Tribune, Feb. 27, 1934, 6.

100“The Local Chinese White Slave Traffic,” Scandal: The Combative Weekly, Mar. 2, 1935, 7. 101“Local Chinese White Slave Traffic.” 102“The Woman’s Forum: Waifs and Strays,” Tribune, Feb. 18, 1934, 25. 103Sofia Reyes de Veyra was born in Iloilo City in 1876. She married Jaime Carlos de Veyra and in 1917 moved to Washington, DC. Titchie CarangdangTongson, “Biographical Sketch of Sofia Reyes de Veyra, Biographical Database of NAWSA Suffragists, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1009656501. Pilar Hidalgo-Lim, born in 1893, had a bachelor of arts degree from the University of the Philippines, worked as a math instructor, and married Brigadier General Vicente Lim (son of a Chinese immigrant father and a Chinese mestiza mother). On Chinese mestizo elites, see Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 23. 104“Members of Woman’s Club of Manila Champion Reform of Extant Evils,” Tribune, Nov. 11, 1932, 5. 105“Opening of the National Federation of Women’s Clubs Proves Auspicious,” Tribune, Feb. 3, 1933, 5. 106Deirdre Clemente, “‘Prettier than they used to be’: Femininity, Fashion, and the Recasting of Radcliffe’s Reputation, 1900–1950,” New England Quarterly 82, no. 4 (Dec. 2009): 637–666, 639. 107Xiaojian Zhao and Edward J. W. Park, eds., Asian Americans: An Encyclopedia of Social, Cultural, Economic, and Political History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2014), 426. 108Encarnación Alzona, The Filipino Woman: Her Social, Economic and Political Status, 1565–1933 (Manila: University of the Philippines Press, 1934), 72. The 1932 Revised Penal Code addressed the vagrancy issue. 109Alzona, Filipino Woman.

110The Tydings-McDuffie Act (Philippine Commonwealth and Independence Act, 1934) provided for Philippines autonomy leading to independence on July 4, 1946. See Dean Kotlowski, “Independence or Not? Paul V. McNutt, Manuel L. Quezon, and the Re-examination of Philippine Independence, 1937–9,” International History Review 32, no. 3 (2010): 501–531, 504–506. 111Manuel Quezon, quoted in War Department, Washington, DC, to Secretary of State, Jan. 27, 1936, RG 350, Box 455, NARA. 112Ruth F. Woodsmall, YWCA, New York, to E. Ekstrand, Aug. 14, 1935, Conférence en Extrême-Orient (Far East Conference), 1937, File 15411, LON Archives. 113Biographical Note, Katharine F. Lenroot Papers, 1909–1974, accessed Sept. 4, 2019, http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079022. 114League of Nations, Conference of Central Authorities in Eastern Countries, Traffic in Women and Children, Bandoeng (Java), February 3, 1937, File 26240, 11B, LON Archives. YWCA attendees included Woodsmall, Augustine Leonore Fransz (Netherlands Indies), Jeanne Bayley Perkins (Shanghai), and Carolina Gunning. 115Katharine Lenroot to Anne Guthrie, c/o American Consulate, Java, May 1937, RG 350, Box 455, Entry 5, NARA. 116League of Nations, Conference of Central Authorities in Eastern Countries, Traffic in Women and Children, Bandoeng (Java), February 2–13, 1937, 67, File 29125, 11B, LON Archives. 117“Plot to Smuggle Chinese Girl Foiled,” Tribune, Apr. 23, 1936, 1.