Asian Women

In the winter of 1971, a group of students attending UC Berkeley’s Asian Studies 170 began to meet inside and outside the classroom to critically discuss the history and roles of Asian and Asian American women. As they explain, “We faced a dilemma. We were not satisfied with the traditional Asian roles, the white middle-class standards, nor the typical Asian women stereotypes in America. We wanted our own identity.” Discovering that other Asian American women around the country were meeting to discuss these ideas, the group decided to create a vehicle for their discussions by publishing a journal written for and by Asian American women. Asian Women’s 144-pages include scholarly articles, poems, literary pieces, photos, and art written and created by professors, students, and national figures including Grace Lee Boggs, as well as international women’s groups such as the newsletter Onna from Japan. It covered a variety of topics such as Asian American history, immigrant family life, religion and interracial love, as typified in the first issue’s section titles “Herstory,” “Reflections,” “Third World Woman,” and “Politics of Womanhood.” Similar to another UCLA-published anthology, Roots: An Asian American Reader, the compilers performed minor editing to better preserve each contributor’s voice and offer a more holistic representation of the diversity of the Asian and Asian American female experience. Asian Women was a stinging self-reflection and declaration of Asian womanhood whose anecdotes about identity and autonomy still ring true almost 50 years later.