Meanings of maternity and medicine for Japanese and Filipino women on Hawai'i's sugar plantations, 1919-1946: Culture, economics, and generation

Women's labor was essential to Hawai'i's sugar industry, but it has remained understudied. This work focuses on the role of Japanese and Filipino women in literally reproducing the sugar plantation labor force. Using life histories and medical and domestic science reports about them, it analyzes how Japanese and Filipino women's beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, childbirth, and infant feeding were challenged, for better and for worse, by plantation and public health programs that were part of an international campaign to lower infant and maternal mortality. In particular, it examines the ways in which this involved a negotiation of culture, economics, and generation, within a U.S. territory. This study re-organizes the periodization of Japanese and Filipino settlement in Hawai'i from the standpoint of the women and welfare capitalist investment in their reproductive labor. It shifts analysis of sugar plantation policy in Hawai'i from organized labor, which was male dominated, to reproductive labor, which was primarily women's responsibility, whether or not they engaged in wage labor that systematically paid women less than men. It argues that Japanese and Filipina mothers assisted by certified Japanese midwives, recruited Filipina nurses, and white female social welfare reformers, had to negotiate the authority of leading industrial and medical science men who were united in accepting and investing in women's reproductive labor, both paid and unpaid, but only if this was profitable for industry in the long run, advanced their reputation, and maintained white patriarchal authority. This study's analysis of white medical professionals' conception of poor nonwhites and their culture as representing ignorance, superstition, and regression, challenges the idea, which they also espoused, of Hawai'i being an exceptional place in the Pacific and the U.S., where peoples of diverse racial backgrounds are able to maintain their distinct ethnic customs and habits. Overall, it sets in historical context debates about the value of women's reproductive and wage labor, and illuminates current discussions about the relationship between wage and family labor among immigrant workers. It adds another dimension to histories of women, labor, culture, colonialism, medicine, and Asian and Pacific America.