New Acquisition: Gum Moon Women’s Residence
The University of Oregon Special Collections is extremely pleased to announce the acquisition of the records of the Gum Moon Women’s Residence. The collection consists of resident files, diaries, photographs, and publications from 1870-2007.
Gum Moon was established in 1868 with the goal of providing shelter, education, and vocational training for Chinese girls rescued from human trafficking. The Methodist Mission, also known as the Oriental Home and School, at 916 Washington Street in San Francisco’s Chinatown was established by Otis T. Gibson to provide shelter, education and vocational training for Chinese girls rescued from human trafficking. The dedicated group of women running the home formalized their efforts by becoming the Women’s Missionary Society of the Pacific Coast.
In the 1880’s, the Chinese Exclusion Act was signed into law by President Chester Arthur, suspending Chinese immigration to the United States; as a result, the Oriental Home and School formed a kindergarten for Chinese children that could not attend public schools. The Oriental Home and School was destroyed by the tragic 1906 San Francisco earthquake and was rebuilt at 940 Washington Street in 1912, with Julia Morgan as the architect for the building.
In the 1940’s, the Oriental Home was renamed to Gum Moon, or “Golden Door”, and served as a dormitory for young Chinese women who were employed or in school. Gum Moon expanded its services by starting the Asian Women’s Resource Center and initial services included ESL classes and Employment and Referral programs. Gum Moon began its first Parent-Child development Program with just 10 children using a seed grant from United Methodist Women in 1990 and has expanded its programming to meet the changing needs of the community.
This acquisition adds to an already expanding collection. Since the 1960’s, we have amassed one the nation’s largest archival collections of women missionaries to China. Among these are the papers of women who were teachers, physicians, or social workers. In addition to a desire to help Chinese women and girls attain better health, education, and living conditions, they also found missionary work a path towards their own independence by taking on a profession that was acceptable to American society when opportunities in general were very limiting to women who were usually steered directly to marriage as a career path. The missionary collections also provide a valuable source for the historical, political, and cultural events in the countries they served. The women wrote numerous letters home, kept diaries, and issued newsletters that reflected their work and lives. The Chinese Missionary collection is used so extensively that we decided to recently contract with Gale/Cengage Publishing Company to digitize and make the collections more accessible online.
In the last three decades, we have been especially purposeful in collecting archives that reflect the topics of women’s rights, gender, sexuality, and feminism. Of special interest in social welfare are the papers of Kate Burton Lake and Margaret Lake Garton who aided Chinese and Japanese girls and young women through their work in the Methodist Episcopal Church’s Oriental Home in San Francisco from ca. 1896-1903. More recently, we acquired the papers of Norma Hotaling, who was the founder of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), a non-profit focused on ending commercial sexual exploitation, headquartered in San Francisco. This collection contains SAGE’s organizational records, photographs, biographical material, awards and artifacts, and publications.
We have built an historical repository focused on some of the most important social movements in the American West. Our collections on issues related to the history of women in the American West is one of the richest in the country. Thus, I am extremely grateful to Dr. Jeffrey Staley, Gum Moon Historian, Gum Moon’s Executive Director, Gloria Tan, and to Gum Moon’s Board of Directors for their generosity in donating their organization’s archive to the University of Oregon. We believe that archives are repositories of social memory and as such we are committed to preserving and making accessible this vital collection, which adds so much to the history of women in the American West.
— David de Lorenzo, Giustina Director, SCUA
