Victorian San Francisco Stories (15 page)

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Authors: M. Louisa Locke

The Misses Moffet Mend a Marriage

This story about the two elderly women living in Annie Fuller’s boarding house let me exa
mine, albeit briefly, the occupation held by countless nineteenth-century women—dressmaking. Sewing was one of the universal skills that women of all classes were supposed to have. Even women coming from families of some wealth, as did the Misses Moffet, would be taught to sew at an early age. The plain sewing of simple garments, while requiring skill, was something that so many women could do (and that was easily replaced by the sewing machine once it was introduced) that it was not compensated well. However, even after the sewing machine and factory-made ready-to-wear clothing began to be available, tailors, who could design and cut out men’s suits, and dressmakers, who could do the same for women, had skills that were valuable.

With the expansion of the urban middle class during the end of the nineteenth century, the demand for dresses in the latest elaborate fashion (styles that changed yearly) increased dramat
ically. This meant that skilled dressmakers like Minnie and Millie Moffet, who could design, cut-out, and hand sew these fashionable outfits, could actually make enough to support themselves and remain independent. The opening essay by Joan Jensen in
A Needle, A Bobbin, A Strike
pr
ovides an excellent introduction to this transitional period in the garment trades.

While some women used these skills to set up dressmaking shops (as tailors had done for centuries), many followed the old pattern, as did the Moffets, of coming to the homes of their female customers for “fittings.” In the case of one of their customers, Mrs. Roberts, that home was the Palace Hotel. I mention this edifice (advertised as the largest hotel west of the Mississi
ppi) in all of my novels because you simply couldn’t travel anywhere near Market Street after it was completed in 1875 and not notice it. It was seven stories tall, built around a center court, and it had 755 rooms, each with an attached bath. In this short story, I am able to take the reader into the hotel and into one of the suites that acted as the permanent home for many wealthier San Franciscans. I have already written about the Palace Hotel at my website, but for those of you who would like to see full descriptions of the hotel and its origins, with accompanying pictures and illustrations, I heartily recommend you check out Bruce C. Cooper’s
Brief Illustrated History of the Palace Hotel
.

Mr. Wong Rights a Wrong

The main reason I created the character of Mr. Wong in
Maids of Misfortune
was that my research showed that in San Francisco when a woman was a servant in a household with another servant that servant was male and––most likely—Chinese. Having Annie Fuller work with Wong when she went undercover as a servant also provided a way to touch on the topic of anti-Chinese attitudes within the city. The 1870s were a time of great economic difficulty for the working classes of all ethnicities in the city, and many workers, like the Irish, believed their problems could be solved by ending immigration from China. This belief, which echoes some of current-day anti-immigrant attitudes, helped fuel a series of riots and violence against Chinese immigrants in western cities and the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Ironically, the Irish in San Francisco were using many of the same arguments against the Chinese that had been used by Nativists against Irish immigrants thirty years earlier in cities like Boston and New York.

And, just as the Irish had been the target of reform in Northeastern cities in the antebellum period, the Chinese in San Francisco became the focus of several reform organizations in the 1870s. In each case, Protestant female reformers were particularly concerned at the rise of prost
itution among the poor (and often non-Protestant women) living in their cities. Reformers of both eras combined their efforts to convert prostitutes with attempts to provide them a place to live and skills so they could find a different occupation. The most famous institution of this kind in San Francisco was the Presbyterian Occidental Mission, but I decided to feature a lesser-known mission, the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Domestic Chinese Mission and its Female Refuge.

My research found that five percent of the young single women working in San Francisco, Portland, and Los Angeles in 1880 were listed as prostitutes in the 1880 census—and this was no doubt an under-count. Three-quarters of the prostitutes in San Francisco were foreign-born (compared to three-quarters of the Portland prostitutes who were native-born) and over half of the foreign-born prostitutes in San Francisco were Chinese. To a large degree, the reason for this was that Chinese females in San Francisco had been imported for this particular purpose and were virtual slaves, whereas for many non-Chinese prostitutes, prostitution was an occupation that simply paid better than any other job an uneducated woman could find in that period. I found Sucheng Chan’s
Asian Americans: An Interpretive History
and Judy Yung’s
Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco
very informative for those of you who wish to explore these topics in greater depth.

Once I chose the Methodist mission, I was delighted to find pictures and detailed descriptions of the building that housed the mission and refuge in 1880, as well as a thorough history of the organization and its activities in rescuing Chinese women from prostitution and abusive masters. The Greenstocks in the story (who ran the mission and refuge) were my own creations, but they were modeled on the women who dedicated their lives to this cause. See Jeffrey Staley’s “‘
Gum Moon’: The First Fifty Years of Methodist Women in San Francisco Chinatown, 1870-1920
”
The Argonaut (2005).

About the Author

M. Louisa Locke, a retired professor of U.S. and Women’s history at San Diego Mesa College, has taken her historical story telling in a new direction with her best-selling
Victorian San Francisco Mystery series
, which features women's occupations in the late nineteenth-century and is based on Dr. Locke's doctoral research. In
Maids of Misfortune
,
the first in this series, Annie Fuller, the reluctant clairvoyant, goes under cover as a domestic servant to solve a crime.
Uneasy Spirits
,
the sequel, explores women and 19th Spiritualism, and in her third book,
Bloody Lessons
, Locke focuses on teachers working in the San Francisco public schools in 1880. Locke currently wor
king on
Deadly Proof
, the fourth novel in her series, which involves women in the printing industry in San Francisco.