Usage
Since the 1930s, when "Dragon Lady" became fixed in the English language, the term has been applied countless times to powerful Asian women, such as Soong May-ling, also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu of Vietnam, Devika Rani of India, and to any number of racially Asian film actresses. That stereotype—as is the case with other racial caricatures—has generated a large quantity of sociological literature.
Today, "Dragon Lady" is often applied anachronistically to refer to persons who lived before the term became part of American slang in the 1930s. For example, one finds the term in recent works about the "Dragon Lady" Empress Dowager Cixi (Chinese: 慈禧太后; pinyin: Cíxī Tàihòu; Wade–Giles: Tz'u-Hsi T'ai-hou), who was alive at the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century, or references to Chinese-American actress Anna May Wong as having started her career in the 1920s and early 1930s in "Dragon Lady" roles. In both these cases, however, articles written in the early 1900s about the Empress Dowager or reviews of Wong’s early films such as The Thief of Bagdad (1924) or Daughter of the Dragon (1931)—reviews written when the films appeared—make no use of the term "Dragon Lady". (One writer, however, did refer to the Empress Dowager as "a little lady Bismarck.") Today’s anachronistic use of "Dragon Lady" in such cases may lead the modern reader to assume that the term was in earlier use than appears to be the case.
The term was recently used in the episode "Margin of Error" of the acclaimed HBO series, The Wire. In the episode, Namond, an aspiring drug dealer, watches as his mother, De'Londa Brice, fiercely berates Namond's boss Bodie over her son's employment on his corner. After Bodie concedes he exclaims, "Your mom, that's what niggas call a Dragon Lady." Bodie's usage of the term in this sense is an example of the stereotype not being limited to just Asian-American women but African-American women as well.
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