The Moral Architecture of Chinese Exclusion: Antislavery, Sexuality, and the Page Act of 1875

Abstract

This thesis argues that the Page Act of 1875 was not merely a prelude to the Chinese Exclusion Act, but a foundational moment in the rise of federal immigration control. Framed through the language of antislavery and sexual morality, the Page Act marked the federal government’s first effort to regulate immigration nationally. In targeting Chinese women suspected of prostitution, it fused immigration policy with white, middle-class ideals of gender, race, and virtue and transformed the rhetoric of emancipation into a tool for exclusion. The project traces how post-Civil War debates over labor, morality, and citizenship converged in the figure of the Chinese woman, who came to symbolize a threat to national purity. Drawing on congressional speeches, missionary records, and anti-Chinese literature, and based on archival research at the National Archives, Bancroft Library, and Stanford Special Collections, the thesis examines how the Page Act institutionalized the regulation of sexuality at the border as an open-ended function of state power. Chapter 1 examines how Eastern reform movements and free labor ideology framed female sexuality as a political problem. Chapter 2 turns to California, where economic and racial anxieties constructed Chinese women as morally corrupt. Chapter 3 traces how California lawmakers nationalized this rhetoric, reframing exclusion as a moral imperative. By offering a unified analytical framework that links the Page Act to antislavery discourse, gendered moral reform, and the expansion of discretionary federal authority, this thesis challenges interpretations that treat the Act as marginal. It shows instead that the Page Act inaugurated a new regime of immigration governance grounded in the surveillance of sexuality, the containment of racialized femininity, and the transformation of freedom into an exclusionary national ideal.