The Only Girl in Amoy: Gender and American Patriotism in a Nineteenth‐Century Treaty Port

Abstract

In 1861, twenty-year-old Ruth Bradford accompanied her father to the Chinese treaty port of Amoy where he was to serve as American consul. Bradford recorded this trip in a diary kept from her departure from New York until her 1863 return. Drawing upon her diary, this paper explores how Bradford, as the only American woman in Amoy, refined her sense-of-self through interracial and cross-cultural encounters with the settlement's Chinese and British inhabitants. The paper argues that through critical comparison with these communities, Bradford, like other nineteenth-century American women in China, consolidated and articulated her gendered, racial and burgeoning patriotic national identity.Everybody that calls looks so hard at me, as if they wanted to make up their minds just at once as to what I was like, whether they should like me or no, and whether I would 'pass muster'. I am the only American lady here and the only young girl, so I suppose I am an object of some curiosity. Nearly all here are English. Ruth Bradford, 1 May 1862 1 They make as much of me here as if I was the only girl in the world, instead of the only one in Amoy.