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Asian American Women

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Asian American Women
Introduction
Through out history, Asian American women have required "the armor of warriors" in order to survive. For a period of 150 years, Asian women have labored and raised families in the United States, overcoming exploitation and racism from their earliest days as prostitutes, domestic servants and farm workers. In the present day, Asian American women have a representation in the most prestigious professional and managerial jobs. Today, Asians are looked at as a "model minority" whose growing mobility stands as an illustration for other racial-ethnic groups (Amott & Matthaei, 1996).
The first Asian immigrants arrived in the United States from China, with the first huge wave coming in the mid-19th century. As with other cultural minorities, the Chinese and later the Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, Koreans, and a host of other groups immigrated to the United States to serve mainly as a source of cheap labor. These migration trends were related to bigger worldwide transformations started by Euro-American colonialism and industrial capitalism. By the start of the Great Depression, these groups formed the prevalent Asian populations in the United States. According to United States census data and other available reports, there were close to 56,000 Filipinos, 140,000 Japanese, 75,000 Chinese several thousand Koreans and Asian Indians and living in America in 1930, most living on the West Coast (Amott & Matthaei, 1996).
The Asian populace in the United States numbered over 6.5 million in 1988. That is about three percent of the entire U.S. population. It includes people whose cultural roots are in Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Laos, China, Cambodia, the Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Bangladesh etc. A large number of the first Asian women to come to the United States in the mid-1800s were underprivileged Chinese women,

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