Lora Jo Foo: Activist and Advocate for Immigrant Women Workers in the USA, 1951-2003

Abstract

Asian American historians started to integrate the stories of people of Asian descent into the fabric of American history since the 1970s. Through recovering, documenting, and celebrating the suffering and achievement of Asian Americans, they sought identity and also protested against inequality and inequity. This scholarship on Asian Americans significantly reinterpreted U.S. history and contributed to the emerging fields of social, gender, and labor histories. This thesis, based on the foundation of this important scholarship, examines Asian American women's activism in the second half of the twentieth century. The central figure of the thesis is Lora Jo Foo, labor organizer and attorney, movement leader, and author of two books. Born and raised in the San Francisco's Chinatown in 1951 and having come of age in a time of turbulence, Foo worked as a garment worker since age eleven, where she obtained first hand experience in the garment industry. Foo discovered her lifelong goal of advocating for immigrant women workers and completed her politicization as a Marxist feminist in San Francisco State College in the early 1970s. Her childhood and adolescent experience laid a solid foundation for her activism, which guided her to spend over four decades working in class struggle and fighting for economic rights for immigrant women workers since 1970s, who suffered triple oppressions and struggled for a living. This thesis, however, is not only a story of a successful Chinese American woman but also a story of a woman warrior whose strategies of advocating for immigrant women workers evolved through years in the decline of the labor movement and the period of conservative backlash. It was in this arena that Lora Jo Foo made an impact. Looking at Foo's experience of advocating for immigrant women workers and examining the evolving process of her strategies provides a way of understanding what challenges immigrants and women of color had been through during that period and how did they react. It also offers a way of seeing the role Foo played in this process. Foo's evolving strategies were based on her belief that "only when immigrant women and women of color engage in class struggle and fight for their economic rights will their oppression end." This belief, stemmed from her family background and experiences, was influenced by her participation in Third World activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and--as it turned out--would mirror the later theoretical concept of "intersectionality". Therefore, her story contributes to the historiography of the American labor movement and Asian American women's activism.