“Japanese Laborers in the Guise of Wives”: Gender, Labor, and the Anti-Japanese Movement
This paper examines how the specter of Japanese women’s reproductive and productive labor became a source of deep anxiety for anti-Japanese exclusionists in the early 20thcentury United States. I examine popular and political discourse of the era to reveal how a racialized fear of Japanese women’s labor capacities led to a gender panicthat incited the anti-Japanese movement and ultimately led to exclusion.