Arts & Culture
Schlesinger exhibit turns spotlight on largely invisible past

Denison House Chinese girls basketball team, 1931.

O.H. Steir

Sy Boles

Harvard Staff Writer

May 6, 2025 4 min read

Students, archivists collaborate to tell deeper story of Asian American women’s history

Among the artifacts on display in a new exhibition at the Schlesinger Library are photos of Ainu and Visayan women who were displayed as “living exhibits” at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

The women’s names are not known. Their images have survived because they were included in the archives of Jessie Tarbox Beals, one of America’s first female photojournalists. But their stories are now being revisited as part of “Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories Through the Archives.”

“Asian American history is oftentimes invisible, given the population and the history,” said Victor Betts, the curator for collections on ethnicity and migration at the Schlesinger Library. “It’s pushed to the margins. That’s also reflected in the archives.”

Ainu woman and child at the 1904 World’s Fair.

Jessie Tarbox Beals, Courtesy Schlesinger Library

Visayan girls at the 1904 World’s Fair.

Jessie Tarbox Beals, Courtesy Schlesinger Library

The exhibition, on display through January, presents materials spanning 150 years and asks viewers to examine their own assumptions about Asian and Asian American women’s roles in history.

The show was created in conjunction with a spring undergraduate course called “Asian American Women’s History in the Schlesinger Library,” which Betts co-taught with Erika Lee, Bae Family Professor of History and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Schlesinger Library.

“It’s a model of co-teaching and co-creation, of research and learning, that we hope will serve as a model for other classes,” Lee said.

Students used the archival material to consider the ways Asian and Asian American women have been forgotten, made hypervisible, or both, as were the women displayed at the World’s Fair.

“We had a whole week on erasure,” Lee said, laughing. “Like, where are they?”

Christian D. Topinio ’27 researched Beals’ photos for his final project.

“[The women] were objects to study, potentially objects of cultural curiosity,” Topinio said. “There’s a really interesting idea in these photos where you’re ascribing colonial hierarchies among these people, buttressing colonial hierarchies abroad.”

Betts said that in more contemporary collections, Asian American women tell their own stories on their own terms, like the donated archives of famous chefs and cookbook authors Grace Zia Chu and Madhur Jaffrey.

“Other women, earlier in history, in the 19th and 20th centuries, didn’t have that luxury,” he said. So he and the students went looking.

Sophia Wang ’25 researched the 1874 court case of Ah Fong, a Chinese woman who was detained at the Port of San Francisco. She and about 20 other detained women and girls, age about 17 to 28, filed writs of habeas corpus on their own behalf.

Their legal action also contributed to the 1875 Supreme Court case Chy Lung v. Freeman, in which the court ruled that only Congress, not states, had the power to regulate immigration.

“As someone who’s Chinese American and whose parents immigrated to the United States, when I read her case, I was in tears,” Wang said. “They were legal pioneers, although their stories still remain untold.”

Although there was little concerted effort to collect and preserve Asian American women’s stories at the time, archivists found Asian American women’s stories throughout local history and Harvard’s history.

Siok-An Chiu Wu, Wai Tsu New Kuo, and Manik Kosambi appear in Radcliffe College yearbooks in 1919 and 1922.

Manik Kosambi was the first South Asian woman to graduate from Radcliffe.

The exhibit places Asian American women’s photos, political posters, comic books, and zines in the context of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese American incarceration, the Civil Rights era, and anti-Asian violence in the years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Betts wanted to play with the exhibit’s title, “Illuminate,” as part of the display. He commissioned artwork by Greater Boston Taiwanese-American artist Shaina Lu to accompany the archival material. Her translucent illustrations, placed over the windows, allow sunlight to filter into the gallery.

“In so much of Boston Chinatown’s organizing history, Asian American women lead the charge for justice,” said local artist Shaina Lu.

Betts is working to expand Schlesinger’s collections of Asian and Asian American women’s materials. But for now, he said, what’s missing is part of the point. It’s an opportunity to ask why Asian American women’s stories have been marginalized in the first place, and how our understanding of American history would change if they weren’t.

“Asian American history is American history,” Betts said, “and so it should have the same level of seriousness and value that we understand U.S. history, collectively, to have.”

“Illuminate: Contextualizing Asian American Women’s Stories through the Archives” is on display through Jan. 23 in the Lia and William Poorvu Gallery of Schlesinger Library.