Motives of Husbands
In the late 19th century Japanese and Korean men traveled to Hawaii as cheap labor to work on the plantations. Some continued on to work on the mainland. These men had originally planned to leave plantation work and go back home after a few years or a contract was up. Between the years of 1886 and 1924, 199,564 Japanese entered Hawaii and 113,362 returned to Japan. However, many men did not make enough money to go back home. Also, in 1907 the Gentlemen’s Agreement prohibited immigration from Hawaii to the United States for laborers. Because now these men were put in situations with limited mobility, they had to make Hawaii or the United States their home, and part of that was getting married. In Hawaii, the plantation owners also wanted to see the laborers get married. Though they had originally preferred single men, when the contract labor system was abolished, the owners thought that wives would make the men more likely to settle down and stay. Also, the plantation owners hoped that wives would limit the amount of gambling and opium smoking the workers did, and act as a morale booster for the men.
Read more about this topic: Picture Bride
Famous quotes containing the words motives of, motives and/or husbands:
“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)
“We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“To name oneself is the first act of both the poet and the revolutionary. When we take away the right to an individual name, we symbolically take away the right to be an individual. Immigration officials did this to refugees; husbands routinely do it to wives.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)